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A world where people pay for software

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Re: A world where people pay for software

#261

Post by chromoblob »

cscheid wrote: post #230
chromoblob wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The choice is between letting hardware be not finalized and letting that force software to be non-finalizable, and letting software be finalizable and forcing the hardware to be finalized too. I like latter more. Finalized hardware is better by itself as well.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#262

Post by swiftcoder »

paulddraper wrote: post #165
causi wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

otherwise it'll become obsolete within couple of years. At the very least it must be patched up with newly discovered security threats. Only if it talks to the internet. I have plenty of software I downloaded over a decade ago that has no internet access and runs perfectly fine on Windows 11. Much of it is even older than that. Just stop trying to cram social media integration into your label-making program and it ge…

> only if it talks to the internet So.... Most software. Agreed

It may be an unpopular opinion, but most of that software should just live in the browser if it's actually reliant on the cloud.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#263

Post by stronglikedan »

chadash wrote: post #28

The link doesn’t talk about the SAAS model, which is probably the most profitable (and ubiquitous) one these days. I know people like to rail against it, but I actually like the SAAS model. It keeps incentives aligned. It used to be that I might shell out $200 for a piece of productivity software. Now, I might pay $10 a month instead. The thing is that under the old model, a company was incentivized by make a sale bu…

I avoid saas precisely because of the subscription model. Occasionally, I need to make a flowchart, but I don't need to make flowcharts every month. I used to be able to pay for a flowchart software once, and then use it occasionally. Now it seems that, to get quality flowchart software, I have to pay monthly for something I don't use monthly. So instead, I find some free flowchart software which may or may not be limited in some way that I just deal with, and no one gets my money. Or maybe I find something with a buy-me-a-coffee link, but they would still get more from me if I could just buy a perpetual license for a reasonable price.

Of course, the flowchart is just one example. The same can be said for a lot of utility software I only need occasionally.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#264

Post by scarface_74 »

JohnFen wrote: post #244
scarface_74 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> How do you pay developers to continuously fix bugs, provide security updates and update their software when the underlying hardware and operating system changes? Have we really strayed so far that everyone's forgotten how this is done? Security fixes and serious bug fixes should always be free (At least going back N-1. You price that work into the sale price to begin with), and you get ongoing revenue by selling ne…

And if the person is happy with the current version “n” that they were using, kept the same operating system while you released n+1 and n+2 to stay compatible with new operating systems then they decided to upgrade their hardware and find out that their old software doesn’t work?

They will still need to buy a new version or should that be free?

If the author of BBEdit never added a feature since 1991. You would have still had to pay for new versions to run on your PPC/Classic MacOS, OS X PPC, x86 Mac and now your ARM Mac.

Back in the “good old days” MS Office cost $595 for each version if you had a Mac and Windows PC.

Now it’s $99/year for five users and you can run on your Mac, Windows, iPad, iPhone, web, or Android device.

The same for Photoshop.

And you get continuous features added as the platform vendor and software vendor add more capabilities.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#265

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ndriscoll wrote: post #234
raisedbyninjas wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because someone speaks some English, doesn't mean that they wouldn't prefer to use software in their native language.

Try selling English-only software in Europe and you generally won't get very far.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#266

Post by pksebben »

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…

> because developers gotta develop.

You're touching on the real problem, here. Software isn't broken, it's just that the inherent issues in capital are starting to become painfully clear in this context.

I've been trying to find a term for "behavior focused on maintaining your job when the need wouldn't exist without such behavior". It's kinda tangential to artificial scarcity but broader in scope, and if we don't have a term for it, we need one badly. So much of our society's resources are committed to solving problems that don't exist, because the actual problem is "you need money to live and for whatever reason the thing you do in the place and time you are isn't necessary or desired".

Re: A world where people pay for software

#267

Post by dunham »

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…

> I'd say at the very most it needs security updates.

and then you move the bar a little (although I agree):

> Bugfixes only, please.

I would also add updating to work with the current OS / hardware. (I have unusable games that are a recompile away from being usable.)

But I agree with the rest of your points. Especially when, in addition to asking you to fund new features, the new features make the app worse for your use cases.

However I don't know if the root cause is more accurately described as "developers gotta develop" or "product managers gotta produce".

Re: A world where people pay for software

#268

Post by ysavir »

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…

Sure, but these aren't business model problems, they're business growth problems. The concern wasn't how to find 1B users in the world (and what do you have to do to get their money), it's whether scaling to 1B users inherently breaks the product, not just for individual users, but for all users.

If a company was only able to sell 2.6M copies of their digital software before running to expansion problems... good for them! That's a lot of sales and they probably made a great deal off of those sales. Sure, they can grow to 1B users, but they don't have to. There's no requirement for them to do that other than choosing to expand into those markets, and that's strictly optional. The business model is doing fine, there's no need to adopt a recurring payment system for ongoing maintenance.

And let's be honest, even if they do choose to expand into those other markets, the cost to convert the existing product to work in those markets is most likely less than the money they'll earn from selling in those markets, so... is there really a need for recurring payments to support maintenance? Will one-payment sale structures inherently fail to make the product profitable in a given market?

Re: A world where people pay for software

#269

Post by bob1029 »

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…

> In software the hard part is making an excellent product

I'd argue in all domains, the hard part is making an excellent product.

There are virtually zero real-world constraints you can leverage as excuses in the domain of software, other than the original idea was bad or you have really bad people around the idea. Most of the software ideas I have encountered in my career are fantastic. It's not hard to describe what a high quality product experience is like if you are a domain expert and have suffered the gauntlet for 30+ years. The part that always seems to go straight to hell is the implementation of the idea.

I suspect most software projects go bad because there are too many layers of separation between participants. In physical products, substantially more direct interaction is required to get things done. With software products, you can isolate everyone into different multiverses as long as they are pushing PRs to the same GitHub repo (and sometimes not even the repo is shared...). Over time, these silos ultimately ruin any sense of ownership and quality in the product.

It is quite tragic - while on one hand software is the most accessible form of human enterprise ever, it is also the easiest to do wrong. Having no constraints seems like win-win at first, but it is absolutely a double-edged sword. In my view, the best software company CTOs are the ones who intentionally add as many artificial constraints as they can to the technology and process. Do more with less. Force lateral thinking. Make the product people go back to the customer and say things like "we actually can't do that because of a technology policy" instead of pretending like an unlimited infinity of things is always possible.

Re: A world where people pay for software

#270

Post by gmerc »

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…

In an industry full of unchecked monopolists, piracy takes the role of providing the a reasonable price ceiling at which people switch away from bad but monopolized products
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