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A world where people pay for software

1sub.dev

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#221

Post by prepend »

pjc50 wrote: post #99
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…

The problem with software's non-physical nature is that it has runaway market dominance issues. Software, especially software that interacts with other software, tends to be either open-source maintained by a "community" or a thinly veiled world domination plan.

That’s a feature, not a bug, I think.

Low barrier to entry is really important for new software. So it’s this struggle with some orgs trying to increase lock-in (Microsoft, Oracle, etc) and a constant stream of new products taking off, dominating the world, and getting knocked off themselves.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#222

Post by TheMode »

charcircuit wrote: post #207
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.

There is intrinsic complexity involved in distributing physical goods. Software complexity is mostly made up.

Would billions solve software distribution & longevity? How?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#223

Post by robalni »

andruby wrote: post #199

I don't understand the "economic" model. If I'm a developer and get to chose what to charge, that means I can ask people for $0.01, and they would get access to everything from all developers of this "platform"? The example on [0] where a developer pays credits when they get a subscriber is confusing. Should Devs "top up" somehow? [0] https://1sub.dev/about/how-it-works

> If I'm a developer and get to chose what to charge, that means I can ask people for $0.01, and they would get access to everything from all developers of this "platform"?

You can do that but you will not make a lot of money that way. The number of subscriptions you can sell is limited so if you sell all of them for $0.01 you will probably wish you had asked for more and when you have sold out, only the more expensive subscriptions sold by other developers remain and they will make more money than you.

> The example on [0] where a developer pays credits when they get a subscriber is confusing. Should Devs "top up" somehow?

I don't know exactly what you mean by "top up" but the credits are turned into subscriptions when sold. This is how we make sure the developers can't sell infinite subscriptions. The plan is then that with time, the developers will get more credits so that they can sell more subscriptions. How fast they will get more could depend on the current value of their account, where the value could be calculated from the credits and the number of subscribers they have.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#225

Post by philistine »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #182
SoftTalker wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, the reality experienced by software companies is that adding features is profitable. Joel Spolsky talks about this in one of his old blog posts[1]: "I can tell you that nothing we have ever done at Fog Creek has increased our revenue more than releasing a new version with more features." It makes sense though, if software companies could make just as much money doing less work, they certainly would…

There's really nothing wrong with new features as long as you understand that there's a certain subset of users who don't want things to change. Maybe it's because people are already trained on the current version, or they don't want to have to upgrade machines just to run the new feature set, or any of a thousand reasons you may not have thought of. And then there are the "upgrades" that try to force you to pay more…

The subset of people who don't want things to change are running which OS exactly? User interface is just like any other artistic field: it has fashion trends. Look at something that's been around forever and is still developed: BBEdit. Yeah sure the app has not changed a *ton*, but its changed more than you think. Many fads in OS X design (like drawers) had to be implemented and later removed.

Any successful piece of software cannot realistically just stay still. It has to keep evolving with the trends of user interface. The difficult part is doing it well. BBEdit has managed it.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#227

Post by hinkley »

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…

This logic has always bothered me a little and I’ve never understood why, until recently.

The fact of marginal cost results in a lot of software being written that otherwise never would have been. After all, the difficulty of solving a problem for myself often doesn’t offset the trouble of making a reusable solution. It’s only through having other people use it or pay for it that it becomes worthwhile.

Randall Munroe’s chart is incomplete because it thinks too locally.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#228

Post by skydhash »

lawn wrote: post #64
nightski wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel it's the opposite. The incentive is to lock you in and provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible. Get you hooked, take your data hostage, and then jack up the price as much as possible while delivering little to no additional functionality. Bugs? who cares. Broken functionality? No big deal. You are locked in baby!

What exactly is the difference from paying up front? There there's even less incentives to fix bugs, fix broken functionality and god forbid new functionality.

You buy what is offered (and a support period in most cases). Not a promise. No one buys a consumer car and expects it to run on water the next month.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#229

Post by rightbyte »

vishnugupta wrote: post #112
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…

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…

If your software need security maintainance it mostly has a failed architecture from the get go.

Like 9/10 apps need no internet connectivity at all, unless they are spyware of course, which most commercial apps are nowadays.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#230

Post by cscheid »

chromoblob wrote: post #212
cscheid wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Spectre is a bug in the processor, not in the software. It's a bug in the processor that causes a bug in the software. It's not a bug in your idealized mathematical model, but try telling that to the people who paid you not to leak private keys. I see my job as an engineer to be to create a product that satisfies the user's expectations (which in this case are eminently reasonable). It matters not one bit that I ca…

The program must not show bugs when run on a hardware with unforeseeable bugs, you call this reasonable?

And yet that's what every good engineer did when Spectre came out. Same with the Pentium fdiv bugs, and same with a host of microcode bugs that come up all the time.

Not my business to decide what you think is reasonable. That's just what happens in the world, and what (in my view) good engineers sign up for.

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