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AI is going to kill app subscriptions

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Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#201

Post by tonyedgecombe »

barnabee wrote: post #144
benjiro wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Good riddance to software subscriptions. Counter argument ... at what point is software still profitable to be sold? I am running my Office 2007 still, and that thing is now almost 20 years old. That was a one time sale, with no other revenue for Microsoft. I am not condoning subscriptions but one time selling software only works good, if your a small team with low overhead. The more you sell, the more support beco…

I buy the support argument for companies. I also buy the argument that a lot of time people are actually paying for cloud storage. While I'd love to see a generic protocol for cloud or self-hosted storage that every app can sync to, I expect we'll continue to see subscription software persist by locking down and gatekeeping cloud storage and sync, too. But really I would be happy for that to go away. I don't use much…

>The ideal situation is for it to always be better to collaborate on open source software than to build in private and keep it to yourself.

This works for some software (developer tools is the prime example) but not so much for other things. Who is going to maintain the MTD software I used for my VAT returns without recompense. Who is going to update the PAYE payroll software I relied on.

Even with developer tools I feel we will lose something without companies like JetBrains. There would be no Kotlin without people paying for their software.

That's before you think about huge corporations leeching off of our free work or the AI companies vacuuming up open source only to regurgitate it for $200 a month.

Developers should consider that most people value things by how much they pay and if they aren't paying anything then you and your work can't have much value.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#202

Post by thn-gap »

kilroy123 wrote: post #35
CPLX wrote: post #9

I’ve been talking about this a lot with founder/coder types in my circle of friends with a wide variety of opinions. My theory as an old guy is that the standards will just go up. There’s a current business model where you can make a basic but useful tool that solves a specific business problem and make money. That’s going to end. We’ve seen this before. A good example would be when the mobile app stores launched and…

That's what I think will happen. Not just standards but taste and design as well. I think there's almost even more demand for good designers now than ever before. Why? VERY good design signals this is tasteful and quality. Not an AI-slop-vibe-mess.

Isn't such design something that is super easy to copy by AI anyways? Spend months working on it, and you'll just get lots of clones the next week.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#203

Post by tonyedgecombe »

jacobjjacob wrote: post #156

No one should be charging $10/month for a local PDF editor anyways… but I don’t think AI will solve that

I've got the PDF specification on my desk at the moment. 1200 pages of vague details on the format. I don't know why you expect to get a product that works with that for nothing.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#207

Post by CrzyLngPwd »

This whole thing of "AI makes it possible for everyone to do it" has led to shit books on Amazon, shit videos on YT, and now we're looking at shit apps on the app store.

As many have said, making stuff isn't the hard part. Making good stuff is the hard part.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#208

Post by cced »

wodenokoto wrote: post #206

So how is chatgpt going to get me free delivery on Amazon? Not to say, show me Netflix shows, or even more circular: let me chat with chatgpt for free? Those 3 are my top-of-the-head current app subscriptions I pay for.

Imo those web apps are all infrastructure services: logistic network, content library access, and hardware access.

Re: AI is going to kill app subscriptions

#209

Post by Kbelicius »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #186
qnleigh wrote: post #185

I suspect there's a bit of a chance to learn from history here. It was predicted that radiologists would get put out of the job by AI tools. But this didn't happen, largely because trust and liability matter just as much as the service itself. This isn't a counterargument to the idea that AI is going to kill a lot of app subscriptions, but it tells us about what kinds of apps will get killed, and what apps will have…

It's early days yet. You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology, if you were just starting out as a freshly-minted MD. And yes, this is going to be a problem, possibly a big one. See also: air traffic control.

> You'd have to be crazy to go into radiology

People were saying that a decade ago, if not more, with machine learning outperforming radiologists. Today we don't have enough radiologists. What has changed since those days that one can again say that so confidently?

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