There's tons of free software out and there's tons of paid software too.
Problem is with quality and adaptation.
A world where people pay for software
301–310 of 543 posts
Re: A world where people pay for software
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
In this context, stable means that it should not break, not that it will not be updated anymore. The term for what you are referring to is end-of-life.
Re: A world where people pay for software
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
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…
>But if we're talking about plain old regular software, something that needs no server to operate, and functions perfectly fine offline
The main product at work is a desktop application. That means that every OS version / hardware configuration of every platform that any user might install it on can have its own bugs. It means that we support multiple major versions rather than being able to just always deploy the latest version. It means that a user might want to have multiple versions of the software installed side-by-side on the same machine. It doesn't change the fact that more users means more use cases.
Re: A world where people pay for software
#304Earlier 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?
If you buy a car and the airbags randomly deploy, would you consider it reasonable for the manufacturer to respond "oh, yeah, that'll happen if you drive it on roads rougher than polished stainless steel. You should only be driving on polished roadways"?
Re: A world where people pay for software
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
>The subset of people who don't want things to change are running which OS exactly? All of them? Hell I hate it when things change in a way that forces me to give them attention now rather than when I have time. Nothing worse than doing an update and having to rework my flow, scripts, and code just to be productive again. Let me choose when I update my tools, don't force it on me just because your UI team found an ev…
The problem is that you generally can't support yourself by just selling to existing customers; you need to keep selling to new customers.
And the market keeps evolving, so you need to evolve with the market if you want to continue selling.
If you do it slowly enough, and cautiously, then existing customers can adapt.
But if you stop updating your app, it's eventually going to lose its appeal and will be forgotten.
Re: A world where people pay for software
#306Computers have an unprecedented ability to reproduce value for free. Programmers need a relatively fixed amount of resources to thrive. (The value of resources varies by location but we all need things like food, shelter, transportation, clothing, tools, etc etc)
If we can find a way to make sure every person has what they need to thrive regardless of their income, programmers can open source all of their software and we can enable the maximum value creation possible. Other engineers like those that design commodities like dishwashers and cars or important manufacturing or medical equipment can also open source their designs so that repair costs are low and innovative improvements are easy to apply. I genuinely believe this would result in a steeper and more rapid innovation curve as well as a better world for all, than a world where we try to monetize things which have zero marginal cost to reproduce.
Re: A world where people pay for software
#307People often no longer own commercial licenses, but rather rent their assets until the updated terms of their agreements become a liability.
Android -> Sales funnel for app store/services, and consumer profiling
MacOS -> Sales funnel for app store/services, and consumer profiling
Windows 11 -> Sales funnel for app store/services, and consumer profiling
Ubuntu -> Sales funnel for app store/services, and consumer profiling
Most people conflate information appliances with general purpose computing.
It is a shame 98% of the market went this route... You still pay, but are just unaware how you are being monetized. =)
Re: A world where people pay for software
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has not been my experience at all with SaaS. I find SaaS products, including ones I have paid for, disappear at a much greater rate than the rate at which the desktop tools they replaced stop working. There's also next to nothing I can do as an end user when they do disappear. If I'm very lucky, I get a limited window to be able to export a portion of my data. But we've eroded data formats to the point where eve…
SaaS from established firms seems to be more durable & maintained. The problem is all the flash in the pan ZIRP VC funded never-profit SaaS startups out there. Hopefully these get shaken out over the next couple years finally. For example, I've used Adobe products for a very long time, and they get a lot of flack. I was an extensive user of Photoshop (PS) and Lightroom (LR) for a long time. However, the old model was…
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Re: A world where people pay for software
#309The 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 li…
Some companies saw this issue by providing a read only client. The users can open files that they created but are not able to modify them without a subscription.
By the way, if you are on Apple ecosystem, I recently tried the newly included Apple tool, Freeform, and found it to be surprisingly capable.
Re: A world where people pay for software
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and you get ongoing revenue by selling new versions This works exactly up until the moment that your software is good enough that most of your userbase stops paying to upgrade. Then you are dead in the water, and the software becomes abandonned by design.
Obviously that's bad for businesses - but it's great for consumers! I think the question that's being asked is if there's some business model out there that delivers what customers want (the ability to just buy a finished product once and have it work decades down the line, like "pass it down to your kids" long) while also delivering profits to shareholders. There's a reason farmers want the ability to repair their o…
> if there's some business model out there that delivers what customers want ... while also delivering profits to shareholders.
Of course there is, but that's why software in a box cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per version, with minimal bug or security updates thereafter. The grass is always greener, yeah it's a pain in the ass having a ton of $10/mo subscriptions. But I'd much rather have that - as both a consumer and a developer - than have $800 single-sale purchases.