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Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

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Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#231

Post by warrenm »

skydhash wrote: post #213
rglullis wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they are such an irrelevant part of the market that they basically could disappear and no one would care, and the hobbyist/non-professional people who don't mind using years-old software could as well just use Free/Open alternatives? There is nothing stopping Joe-who-only-pays-full-licences to continue using his MS 2007 Office suite, is there?

Os support, especially in the Apple world.

It's not merely "especially in the Apple world" - very little in the way of older Windows/DOS software still works today (unless you're also running old/unsupported hardware (subject to its own foibles) and operating systems

Products get deprecated/go out of support all the bloody time - there is nothing wrong with that: should Ford have to "support" the Edsel or Model T today "for free"? Why?

Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#233

Post by warrenm »

tjoff wrote: post #90
toyg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's not really about free software; it's about paying salaries. Recurring expenses inevitably result in business models optimized for recurring revenues. That was always the case; it just so happened that the expansion of industrial production of goods was so vast for so long, that this was kinda hidden (and it was hard to justify - there are only so many widgets you can continuously supply to customers). Now…

Recurring expenses very often isn't necessary though. For software the initial costs are big, but after that it can be pretty low maintenance or at least costing much less to develop new features when the foundation is set. When you start to think about recurring expenses that's when you have to find a way to justify those expenses. And that is usually by adding bloat and unnecessary features that those that already…

>For software the initial costs are big, but after that it can be pretty low maintenance or at least costing much less to develop new features when the foundation is set.

Written by someone who - probably - doesn't understand how complex software is to write/update/expand/maintain

Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#234

Post by willis936 »

afarrell wrote: post #224
willis936 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them. People prefer free and second to that a one-time payment model. Maybe that payment only includes a year of patches, but people still prefer it. Companies prefer subscriptions because it maximizes revenue. It's as simple as that. Zero sum game between company and consumer.

> Nobody likes them. If that was true, financing wouldn't exist for consumer products. In practice, people pay extra to turn a one-time payment into a subscription.

Except with financing you own the product and one day the payments end. You're saying that home ownership is the same as renting if you don't buy upfront? That's simply not true.

Also, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in a home they own than burn money renting.

Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#235

Post by warrenm »

eaplmx wrote: post #111
azalemeth wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other model that works well is the open source one, with the maintainer having "another job"; e.g. academics doing scientific research (CERN!) or corporations who use the project internally. Unfortunately, the fact that the latter vastly outnumber the former means that the largest open-source projects are arguably corporate middleware or those of benefit to large corporations rather than users per se. People like…

A problem with open and free projects (to oversimplify the ideological differences) is the source of time and purpose. The production cost is subsidized as a Hobbie not as a profession, so it's hard to expect a 'consumer product'. When you put external money and corporate interest in your hobbies, something breaks. Not saying open products don't have to exist, we all love them. They cover different creative needs, an…

That's a FANTASTIC blog post!

Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#236

Post by discardedrefuse »

ryandrake wrote: post #38

A lot of comments are already addressing this horrible trend of moving from standalone native software to “SaaS” but this one is also terrible: > now trying to trick people to use One Drive more A lot of software are now deliberately blurring the line between local storage and cloud storage, not just Office. When I choose to save a file, I expect to save it locally to my hard disk, in a file that I can find and manip…

This has gotten so bad, even HP has jumped onboard with their printers. The HP Smart app, which most printers ask for on first connection, now requires an HP cloud account.

Enterprise printers still have traditional driver suites that you can download from HP's website. But if you don't know that, you end up with HP Smart and their document cloud.

Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#237

Post by willis936 »

warrenm wrote: post #230
willis936 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them. People prefer free and second to that a one-time payment model. Maybe that payment only includes a year of patches, but people still prefer it. Companies prefer subscriptions because it maximizes revenue. It's as simple as that. Zero sum game between company and consumer.

>Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them That's patently false I, for one, happen to like being able to push costs from capex to opex (and yes, that's true for my own personal use like it is for business use) *for most things) - a subscription price gives me a closer approximation of a given tool's/service's value proposition than does a one-off purchase (most of the time) Everything from car leases (albeit…

Leasing vs. ownership of cars is a great example of having a choice between ownership and a service. About 1/3 of cars are leased rather than owned.

I should say your choice to subscribe should not be taken away. I don't think my choice to own should be taken away.

Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#238

Post by warrenm »

Macha wrote: post #34
porcoda wrote: post #18

This sort of began when we all got the impression that software should be free, or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. Given that developers need to be paid, and resources cost money, there needs to be a way to rectify that gap between the consumer and maintainer. At one point we did so by paying for an initial version of software, and then paying for updates. Now that we don’t do that, but…

> or that we pay a low price once and get indefinite free upgrades. To take IntelliJ as an example, I can't think of an improvement since 2018 that I really would pay for. Largely enabling that is why they moved to the subscription process because people like me would use IntelliJ 18 for five or so years then update for OS support or whatever. €100/yr is way more than I used to pay for intelliJ, €240/yr is way more t…

This is more-or-less how Logos (a bible study tool suite) works: you buy this "version", and you get updates until/unless a new "version" comes out

You can keep running old version(s) as long as you want - but when a major rev releases, they have an upgrade option

The updates aren't "indefinite" - but they're pretty long-lasting

Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#239

Post by warrenm »

ericd wrote: post #204
fy20 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Photoshop CS2 in 2005 was $599 for the full version. Today that's the equivalent of $850. That would pay for 3.5 years with the current subscription model. So if you were upgrading every 2 years it's actually cheaper now, but of course if you wanted to keep the old version for 5 years it would be more expensive.

Right, and the old way let you choose your upgrade cycle, rather than letting the company choose how often they’d like to make you buy.

Outside of [possibly] amateur hobbyists, who isn't upgrading their software/hardware at least every ~3 years?

Re: Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

#240

Post by warrenm »

Sounds like OP doesn't understand the business-and-personal value of a subscription

Let's take a "traditional" sales model: you spend T amount of time (and money) to get a customer. They pay you M money. Once. You want to sell them something else? Gotta go through the whole song-and-dance circus all over again.

Now look at a subscription: you spend T amount of time (and money) to get a customer. They pay you S subscription fee (way lower than the M in the previous example (per unit time)), but includes the fact that they're already paying a [small] amount to have your thing. To keep* them, all you have to do is NOT SCREW UP. And if they do want to cancel, you can offer them a time-sensitive/-dependent/-limited "discount"; if they stay, you - basically - didn't lose anything (except a couple bucks for a few months); if they leave, then they're gone, and get no more updates, support, etc for whatever they were paying for.

It's why magazines have a newsstand price of, say, $7.99 an issue, but you can subscribe for a 12-issue yearly subscription for $12. The major cost of acquiring a customer is up-front. Once you have them, it's "cheap" to keep them.

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