A world where people pay for software • Hacker News Board

Re: A world where people pay for software

#231

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:51 PM UTC

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…

> The world is constantly changing and evolving, and software has to keep up otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years.

There's some truth to this, but I think this factor is usually dramatically overstated. At least, most of the software I use doesn't need to constantly change. The majority of software updates I see are unnecessary, and many of them are undesirable.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#232

Post by dcow » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

jkepler wrote: post #202

gnulinux wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The dirty secret is that you rarely need to invest in new, novel, software engineering techniques which is what you need actual software engineers for. In reality you can just get a few software developers to propose a design for a thing, have a software engineer consultant review the design and sign off, and then go on your merry way building the software. Kinda like how architecture/construction vs engineering works in meat space.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#233

Post by hinkley » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

cscheid wrote: post #132

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…

> Software has no marginal cost. Maybe you've never experienced the difference between writing software for 1000 people and writing software for 1M people, or (I imagine) 1B. The marginal per-person cost of software is not on shipping. It's on "what kind of weird shit will I now have to do because 1M is a lot of chances for my software to break weirdly, and people have paid for it" > You don't have to worry about qua…

Software has a somewhat inverse relationship to scale as manufacturing. For manufacturing the first one costs millions, and each one after costs hundreds for a time. As you get better you winnow away the equipment or maintenance costs and prices drop.

Software use cases experience combinatorics, and almost all useful algorithms have log(n) runtime. Even when Knuth says they are O(1), physics or EE say he’s wrong. There are no economies of scale. Racks don’t get cheaper when you run out of network ports. Cooling doesn’t get cheaper when you run out of roof. Things that failed one time in a million calls now happen every hour instead of twice a month, and actually have to be fixed.

It’s death by a million cuts.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#234

Post by ndriscoll » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #186

ysavir wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's applicable to websites, where you have to handle requests from all your users, and more users means more requests to handle. But if we're talking about plain old regular software, something that needs no server to operate, and functions perfectly fine offline, something like, say, Photoshop, how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users? Yes, havi…

Beyond bugs, scaling your MVP to 1B users will mean expanding your userbase beyond English speaking Americans. This requires upgrades to internationalization, accessibility, possibly compliance with international laws and 3rd party licensing changes per region. Multilingual support staff and international payments processing. With a userbase this large, expect to be sued by people around the world, so you'll need reg…

There are apparently 2B English speakers in the world, so you could in principle get away with no internationalization and have 1B users. The other things are more a cost of operating a multi-national business, and not a marginal cost of the software as such. You could also in principle scale to ~300M users (or ~100M households) without worrying about international issues by sticking to the US only.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#235

Post by minsc_and_boo » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

greatwave1 wrote: post #106

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!

I don't think that the incentive to "provide as little value as possible for as much money as possible" is in any way unique to the SAAS pricing model. Theoretically, every optimized pricing model will attempt to maximize revenue at a given value level. And in practice, what does "get you hooked, take your data hostage" mean? I can't think of many SAAS subscriptions in my personal life where this is a real issue.

Transition costs are prohibitive.

Some SaaS platforms bill just enough to stay under the cost of transitioning to a competitor (or building first party) to maximize revenue.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#236

Post by harpiaharpyja » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

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…

Software "maintenance" is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's not required to break the old in order to make something new, but unchecked scope creep results in what used to work not working anymore, and thus the artificial need for maintenance.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#237

Post by JohnFen » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

dcow wrote: post #205

ryandrake wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 back…

> In reality, a mature stable project can receive monthly updates

Software that gets frequent updates isn't "mature and stable" by definition. It's constantly changing.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#238

Post by chefandy » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

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…

But interface updates do meaningfully help many people.

Most people in engineering roles think the job is done when the engineering is done, and the maintenance is unnecessary unless it's necessary for stability or security. That's not limited to software, either. The fact is, to the vast majority of non-developer software users, an improved workflow, more intuitive, or yes, even more attractive interface makes more of a difference than moderate performance upgrades or minor stability improvements.

To a developer, interfaces are a way to interact with with software, like an API for humans. To everyone else, the interface is the software. Old interfaces are as or more usable to you because you have a sophisticated mental model of software and a high tolerance for logical complexity. These dreaded designers' profession is figuring out how people who don't have those things can most easily solve their problem with the tool you built.

Car controls would look a lot different if the engineers maintained control over the available controls without designer input. They might intuitively understand that the array of controls that change fuel injection parameters should only be used in certain instances, but they liked having them right there just in case. When told that they'd just confuse average drivers and should probably be hidden, they might argue, "I explained to my 6 year old nephew how more or less air can affect engine preformance." Multiply that by the dozen internal systems they want to control or get real time data from. A designer world recognize that this would confuse most drivers for little benefit and hide everything but the things most drivers need to find and parse instantly... And they would be met with the same heavy sighs and eyerolls that software designers regularly get from developers.

Designers are in the organization because they can do things that developers can't. They make developers work vastly more useful to the world because the way someone solves their problem is as or more important than it being optimally solved using the smallest amount of available resources with 5 9s of reliability instead of 3.

And that's why, in the overwhelming majority of cases, end-user-facing commercial software with professionally designed UIs and someone looking at UX on a whole will dominate FOSS alternatives while tools targeted at developers and other technical people do as well or better, and the commercial equivalents.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#239

Post by hinkley » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:55 PM UTC

raisedbyninjas wrote: post #186

ysavir wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's applicable to websites, where you have to handle requests from all your users, and more users means more requests to handle. But if we're talking about plain old regular software, something that needs no server to operate, and functions perfectly fine offline, something like, say, Photoshop, how different is the impact on the manufacturer when the software is used by 1k users, 1M users, and 1B users? Yes, havi…

Beyond bugs, scaling your MVP to 1B users will mean expanding your userbase beyond English speaking Americans. This requires upgrades to internationalization, accessibility, possibly compliance with international laws and 3rd party licensing changes per region. Multilingual support staff and international payments processing. With a userbase this large, expect to be sued by people around the world, so you'll need reg…

You can tell the people who have never run a business or have worked at one small enough that they see everything. Support staff are not free. Project managers and salespeople can’t keep up with meetings and start sprouting assistants and coworkers. Customers are expensive, especially upset customers. So then the developers have to spend a lot more time making sure customers don’t get upset.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#240

Post by ghaff » Wed, Jul 26, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

photonbeam wrote: post #181

mrlemke wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I pay my developers to do bug fixes if you've only paid me once? Bug fixes are the user's problem, so why should I have to pay for it?

Because you sold a defective product

The design of MOST non-trivial products is refined over time with no expectation that older versions will be upgraded to the latest and greatest. Yes, material esp. safety defects can lead to recalls but this is relatively rare in the physical world.