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Write libraries instead of services, where possible

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Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#191

Post by jmchuster »

erfgh wrote: post #105
taeric wrote: post #65

I have a hard disagree here. Though, I suspect it is a matter of what your code is doing. First, my objection, though. Pushing this "to the users" is in no way easier to support. It is easier to abandon, but support is a different thing. You will have support contacts. And, due to the distributed nature of the deployment, you will have a much harder time isolating your code from the environment it is in. With a servi…

You have a disagreement. You don't have a disagree.

Sorry that we confuse you non-native speakers. Contemporary american english has much greater flexibility with deverbal nominalizations.

Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#192

Post by rikroots »

101008 wrote: post #2

I like the approach and it seems to be definitely better for everyone, but how you monetize a library?

Maybe if you code up a library that meets a specific set of requirements, but you do it in a way so that using the library seems simple on the surface but, the deeper the end-user-developer goes, the more illogical stuff becomes. At that point you have a developer too invested in the work they've already done to abandon it: a developer in the market for a "... The Good Parts" or "... Cookbook" book.

I was not thinking of Actionscript when I wrote this comment.

Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#193

Post by lamp987 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #122
lamp987 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Communism doesn't work.

Of course it "works", there's been multiple countries run on it and continue to run on it. What you mean to say is you don't like it.

Such as? In which countries did it work?

Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#195

Post by TeMPOraL »

whack wrote: post #131
kybernetikos wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. The fact that people can make outsize rewards from subscription services are the reason that even small single use tools are now 'services'. I have a piece of software that removes the background from my video feed. It's a subscription, and it regularly phones home. I have a piece of software that lets me visually combine, rotate and reorder pdfs. It's a subscription. Even the simplest things, like a 't…

> It's miserable fighting off a million people who want to help me for 'less than the daily price of your coffee'. Is it also miserable "fighting off" a million companies who want to sell you stuff for the daily price of a coffee? Stuff like T-Shirts, books, newspapers, candy, etc? You seem to have a patronizing attitude towards software products/services. You seem to think that they are so simple, that they should b…

Complaining that subscriptions are a bad deal for me as a user is a valid, if weak, market signalling mechanism.

And they are a bad deal, because with each subscription comes a business relationship you have to manage, which is annoying and prone to being forgotten (which is what many companies offering subscriptions, particularly the "less than coffee" types, are very much counting on).

> Is it also miserable "fighting off" a million companies who want to sell you stuff for the daily price of a coffee? Stuff like T-Shirts, books, newspapers, candy, etc?

Yes, it is. Advertising is cancer, and quality of life improvements can be measured in your ability to limit your exposure to it.

Also, like other commenter mentioned, that stuff isn't subscription-based. It's either consumables, or usable until it wears down - which is something I can control. And most importantly, none of these examples involve me having to manage relationships with any of the vendors.

(Technically I have a relationship with each of the vendors, but it's entirely mediated by consumer protection laws. I have nothing to actively manage here, except saving receipts - I only need to know which government agency to write to if the vendor fucks up and doesn't want to reimburse me for it.)

Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#196

Post by dgellow »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #141

Phoenix is practically built with this idea in mind. My startup is built out of a single phoenix monolith. Only external dependency is postgres. Despite this, I've managed to completely avoid all the typical scaling issues of a monolith. Need a service or background worker? I juts make a Genserver or Oban worker and mount it in the supervision tree. The Beam takes care of maintaining the process, pubsub to said servi…

> And all the advantages of microservices without the associated costs. (orchestration, management etc)

Really curious about this! What’s the deployment experience? What environment do you use for your production? How do you run/maintain the erlang VM and deploy your service?

Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#197

Post by mgkimsal »

deckard1 wrote: post #180
yabudemada wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MS Office is a great example of this because they squeeze money out of folks when it seems the features added are minimal. The only interesting aspect is cloud-collaboration, but that could be P2P instead. I'm willing to wager most folks still use the same subset of office functionality: page layouts and fonts and such have been around for a while; financial formulas rarely change; etc. But yet, they are charged an a…

MS Office is a good example, and like you mentioned Word is pretty much Word from 10 years ago. But you know who else does this? Book publishers. Specifically, textbook publishers. Every year there is a new edition of a calculus or algebra book. So this is a business model that has been around for awhile, and takes a variety of shapes. Such as planned obsolescence. Software has it easy today, though. They can just cr…

> They can just cry "security updates" and instantly have a solid case for the subscription model

or they can cry "changes in browser and OS!" stuff that worked 5 years ago may not work the same today, or at all. Having a business model around it to help keep up with changes that are largely outside the control of that vendor helps ensure the value still stands. Or... new value can be unlocked - want your useful service to be able to handle that new video format, or compression, or audio format? I seem to remember something as 'trivial' as Apple moving MacBooks to "retina" displays caused a lot of problems and non-trivial amount of work for a lot of tools and services to be able to work 'correctly' with the new formats.

Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#198

Post by TeMPOraL »

naveen_jain07 wrote: post #169
redkoala wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App stores should really prevent these type of no value add apps.

And after that you will say big giant tech companies controlling our businesses.

It's a tough problem. Unconstrained market is a cesspool. Somebody needs to set some limits - the question is, who and what.

Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#199

Post by acjohnson55 »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #141

Phoenix is practically built with this idea in mind. My startup is built out of a single phoenix monolith. Only external dependency is postgres. Despite this, I've managed to completely avoid all the typical scaling issues of a monolith. Need a service or background worker? I juts make a Genserver or Oban worker and mount it in the supervision tree. The Beam takes care of maintaining the process, pubsub to said servi…

In my experience, this is also a major benefit of running Akka on Scala or Java. I had the realization that it's basically a single-language Kubernetes, with some really nice abstractions built on top.

Re: Write libraries instead of services, where possible

#200

Post by yarcob »

OkGoDoIt wrote: post #133
whack wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's miserable fighting off a million people who want to help me for 'less than the daily price of your coffee'. Is it also miserable "fighting off" a million companies who want to sell you stuff for the daily price of a coffee? Stuff like T-Shirts, books, newspapers, candy, etc? You seem to have a patronizing attitude towards software products/services. You seem to think that they are so simple, that they should b…

It’s not hard to find a T-shirt I can wear over and over again without having to keep paying for it. Nowadays it’s nearly impossible to find software that lets you pay once at a reasonable price. So yeah, it is very frustrating to fight off subscriptions.

I think the problem is that people are overestimating the benefits of subscriptions.

Yes, subscriptions make recurring revenue. But so does pay-once software, as long as you don't stop getting new users. But your SaaS subscribers also churn, so you can't stop getting new customers there either.

Pay-once has the huge advantage that the barrier to entry is much lower. I'm pretty sure that it's much easier to sell a 50€ app than a 10€ subscription. And that 10€ subscription means you need to keep your customers for at least 5 months. If they don't need your app anymore for some reason before that, you would have made more with the pay once app.

I mean, if you have recurring costs per user, please go for a subscription. But folks shouldn't assume that pay once is unsustainable. You just get the full lifetime value of the customer up front and you don't have to worry about them churning!

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