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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#201

Post by cscheid »

ysavir wrote: post #198
cscheid wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users? _very different_, when the user's environment is different. And 1) you haven't seen shit if you think you can perfectly control the user's environment. 2) every new user is a chance for the environment to bite you. > Do they make the product unprofitable or unsuccessful in anyway? You do your engineer best…

> _very different_, when the user's environment is different. And 1) you haven't seen shit if you think you can perfectly control the user's environment. 2) every new user is a chance for the environment to bite you. Can you provide some examples of this? I'd like more info here, because off of the top of my head, I can think of the following counter-examples: 1. This isn't a new problem. User environment has been an…

> It surely has a marginal cost. But is that cost significant, is the question. In particular, significant enough to warrant a recurring payment business model.

I think you're assuming more of my answer than what I gave. That's fair given that this is the point of the article, but it's not mine. I'm very specifically only responding to "is there a per-user marginal cost on software?", and my answer is most definitely yes.

To warrant a recurring payment business model, I think the right question to ask is "Is there a per user-year marginal cost on software?", and now the answer is in my view, much more complicated and domain-specific. Worse yet, I think that there's perverse incentives at play here in recurring payments.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#202

Post by jkepler »

gnulinux wrote: post #197
gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

It's almost like we live in different world, I could not disagree more. * Software is extremely expensive. Software engineers are expensive, and for a good software project you need a tech lead, a manager and probably a few developers. These are all people you need to pay tons of money for. * Software is constantly changing, something that worked 2 years ago can be broken beyond repair today. You need a team that can…

> * Software needs maintenance. You can't just build an app an call it a day, you need to employ a team to maintain it continuously. You can build a massive, gargantuan bridge and maintain it maybe every few years/half a decade to keep it safe for 30+ years, you cannot do that in software.

> * Unlike what outsider think, software -- even "boring" CRUD/web software -- is still very much a research project. If you ask a civil engineer how to build a bridge, they'll tell you about all the techniques that were developed over the many many decades.

As a nonpracticing civil engineer, you're underestimating the ongoing maintence that goes into any large bridge.

Also, though the techniques may be more established, every bridge must still be designed to fit the specific characteristics of its local geology and geography. But come to think of it, fundamental computer science algorithms are pretty well established, like bridge-building techniques. Software engineering is simply fitting the code to each unique problem, as bridge design fits a bridge to each unique place.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#203

Post by scarface_74 »

gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

> still blows my mind how much easier it is to run a business that deals with bytes instead of atoms

That must be why most software startups succeed.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#204

Post by scarface_74 »

ryandrake wrote: post #125
vishnugupta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have been saying since 60s. However, since then we have come to learn a lot about software. The most important of which is that software, just like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with ne…

> At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. Too much software changes just to change. UI redesigns for the sake of redesign, cramming features that nobody wants so a product owner can get promoted, adding telemetry and analytics to chase metrics that no user cares about, adding annoying notifications and popups to juice "engagem…

> Another benefit of software that doesn't change every week is you can charge one time for it rather than these awful subscription pricing that most software are switching to.

How do you pay developers to continuously fix bugs, provide security updates and update their software when the underlying hardware and operating system changes?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#205

Post by dcow »

ryandrake wrote: post #125
vishnugupta wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, sure, this is what all the business books, MBAs have been saying since 60s. However, since then we have come to learn a lot about software. The most important of which is that software, just like physical products, needs maintenance. The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with ne…

> At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. I'd say at the very most it needs security updates. Too much software changes just to change. UI redesigns for the sake of redesign, cramming features that nobody wants so a product owner can get promoted, adding telemetry and analytics to chase metrics that no user cares about, adding annoying notifications and popups to juice "engagem…

> Old, unchanged software is not obsolete. It's mature. Bugfixes only, please.

This assumes a waterfall approach to development which implies multiple 6 month to year long development cycles.

In reality, a mature stable project can receive monthly updates, and an immature half-working project can be in maintenance mode. Furthermore this may work for software that should be seen and not heard doing its job in the background without much user interaction, but for software that users interact with regularly, the design needs to be periodically refreshed to match current trends or users will leave for the newer sexier product with fewer features. We've seen this time and again. I have absolutely experienced a mature product that was "finished" (abandoned) like 4 OS version ago that just doesn't run/work on the current OS version because the platform has added new security controls, APIs, and/or UX expectations, etc. No amount of security updates would fix that.

So while I understand where you're coming from opining for a world where we ship mature software and security updates only, I don't think it's remotely realistic given the way humans operate.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#207

Post by charcircuit »

TheMode wrote: post #140

Why do we insist on making software paid? Wouldn't it make more sense to work toward making software more stable so I could decide to make a calculator app during my free time, and have it somehow still used 200y later? Software is stupidly simple to distribute, but for some reason one of the hardest to keep. Obviously if we cannot use any software of the past, we are stuck with developers having to maintain old or n…

>Software is stupidly simple to distribute

Society is spending billions of dollars each year for working on complex hardware and software to make that distribution possible. Physical goods are the stupidly simply thing to distribute.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#208

Post by labcomputer »

icepat wrote: post #124
gizmo wrote: post #21

Software has no marginal cost. You can make something that's used by untold millions of people. Even if many people pirate enough people won't for you to recoup your development cost and then some. Software is easier to produce, sell, and distribute than any physical product. You don't have to worry about warehouses filled with unsold inventory. You don't have to worry about quality control and returns. It still blow…

> You don't have to worry about quality control I'm not sure exactly what you mean by this, as a large part of software development is QA testing, and validation. Which is a form of quality control.

When you manufacture the physical widget, manufacturing tolerances mean that not every widget is the same. There are variations in the as-produced widgets.

You need a QA/QC process to identify units which are too far out of tolerance and either remove them from the pipeline or remediate them. You also need to track trends in the measured tolerances to proactively fix your production equipment.

In the software world, that’s trivially easy. Your CI pipe publishes an artifact and then every user gets a bit-perfect copy of that artifact. Your entire QC is just: Users compare the artifact’s checksum to the expected checksum. It essentially always matches because we use things like TCP to copy the data.

The type of QA you’re talking about is also required for physical widgets.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#209

Post by duckmysick »

grishka wrote: post #101
steveBK123 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely incorrect. Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change. Dependencies break. Security updates. Etc. Engineering projects usually hand off maintenance to their owner. Your house/car need maintenance. Your cities roads/bridges/tunnels need maintenance. The difference with software is that maintenance is done by the producers as they own the code.

> Underlying hardware/OS/firmwares/JVM/etc change. OSes also can be "excellent products". They don't need yearly updates, there's nothing inherent to them that would prevent them from being made perfect, finished and never updated again. The only case when an otherwise perfect OS would truly need to update is when new hardware capabilities require OS-level changes to support. Sometimes it may be beneficial to expose…

I'd rather use an imperfect product that does a good-enough job instead of waiting for a perfect product.

The perfect OS doesn't exist yet. Right now, I'd rather use some OS than no OS.

Why a perfect OS doesn't exist? Good question. Maybe because the programming field is relatively immature so we're still figuring things out and we don't apply formal verification to everything. Compare that to say, architecture, where we can calculate how much weight a structure can withstand. Or the other way around: what do we need to do to support an X amount of load.

I guess the stakes are lower too. I wouldn't walk on a wobbly bridge, but I don't mind if a desktop app I use crashes occasionally under unusual circumstances. Critical software (say, aviation) is generally written with more care but it's still not perfect.

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