Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 329 posts

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

#251

Post by tarsinge »

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…

I don't think it's a separate trend, more of a consequence of the difference between native and web becoming blurry. Non-tech users see and use Facebook as they see and use Office: interfaces with data stored somewhere. They are fine with social media posts not being files on their computer, why would they bother for other apps? Especially if they mainly use tablets and not a desktop computer.

More broadly files in the traditional sense (OS desktop metaphor) are irrelevant in a SaaS context, even if some UX show "files" (like Google Doc) for convenience or familiarity it's not really files but entries in a database.

Personally (and as a huge fan of classic MacOS Spatial Finder) it pains me, but I'm not sure if I'm clinging to nostalgia or if we are heading the wrong way. Maybe we could have a middle ground where files don't exist anymore but it's very clear for the user where data is stored.

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

#252

Post by AlexandrB »

falcolas wrote: post #228
bestnameever wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy. I'd fully expect someone to provide this if there is a market for it.

The problem is that the money and safety (which investors love) provided by “recurring sources of revenue” are too strong to counter with market forces alone. Kinda like how the money and safety provided by monopolies can’t be corrected by market forces either.

> The problem is that the money and safety (which investors love) provided by “recurring sources of revenue” are too strong to counter with market forces alone.

There are two markets: the market of customers who might buy your product and the market of VCs who might want to fund your startup. Lately the latter has been making most of the decisions. It's nearly impossible for a bootstrapped startup to compete against products sold at a loss with VC backing.

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

#253

Post by drewcoo »

coldtea wrote: post #63
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…

> 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. Blame the victim? We din't get any impression, as we don't set the prices. The companies set those prices. For example Adobe customers never got or set any impression that "software should be free/low price". They paid 100s to 1000s of dollars for each update or package r…

I, mostly, don't want products. I want to be able to communicate or veg out with a movie or have CI run. I generally don't care about the how. I just want the results. And I want to not think about it much beyond that. I, like everyone else, assume that's what everyone wants.

My scribble on the HN wall that you're reading right now involved thinking about something more than I thought it deserved.

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

#254

Post by xborns »

I have to disagree. It all depends on the value I receive which some are a bit better than before.

For example for Office365 Home you get 5 licenses including 1TB of OneDrive all for $99/year.

If I had to pay for just one Office Suite License(word, ppt, excel) would be around $200(low end). If I needed 5 that would be $1000. Now divide that $1000 over how many years you would probably use before wanting upgrade which for me would be 3-5. At 5 years it is average $200/year for lesser product because it doesn’t even include the value of 1TB OneDrive.

Thus 99$/year is cheaper in my mind and I am happy to pay them instead of looking for for some pirated version. It just works and I get newest version whenever it is released.

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

#255

Post by willis936 »

warrenm wrote: post #250
willis936 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The example breaks-down (no pun intended) on cars, though: software is likely not usable after 3-5 years (the length of a normal car lease) Cars are typically usable for well over a decade :)

My Acrobat 9.0 is getting pretty long in the tooth. I still run it on occasion, but there are more issues with DPI scaling and new PDF features.

It looks like Adobe does sell one-time purchases of Acrobat Pro 2020 for $450. I'll cease my cloud-yelling.

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

#256

Post by AlexandrB »

pimterry wrote: post #40

I don't think this is fundamentally about subscriptions. They're a different business model, but there are positives too: for example they align what users pay far more closely with the value they get from a product. If you use a tool for one month, you pay a small amount, if you use it every month for years you pay more. In the old world, if you wanted to use purchase-once software just once, then you had to pay far…

> It aligns incentives too: developers are strongly incentivized to keep existing users happy, rather than ignoring them and constantly chasing the next new sale.

Alternately it incentivizes vendor lock-in. If you can't keep users happy, why not keep their data hostage instead?

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

#257

Post by bell-cot »

rakoo wrote: post #113

> What has the world come to, where technology has been appropriated and we are left paying rents every month and companies are increasingly becoming user-hostile and predatory and monopolistic! This is the expected outcome of Capitalism and was only a matter of time until it happened. If you let for-profit companies run wild, power will consolidate, allowing them to enact whatever policy has the best ROI at the cost…

This +10 (if I could). Modern Corporate / Wall Street capitalism will brutally optimize for whatever schemes squeeze the most money out of the victims. Oops, sorry! - I meant customers.

(Though I don't really agree with your second para. If users actually cared, at scale - vs. reacting like Pavlov's dogs to corporate marketing & such - then the nastier corporations would have to change or die. Note what happened to the "American" car companies, back when they were selling un-reliable gas guzzlers, and Americans decided that buying reliable Japanese econo-cars was the smart way to fight back.)

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

#258

Post by ryandrake »

warrenm wrote: post #250
willis936 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The example breaks-down (no pun intended) on cars, though: software is likely not usable after 3-5 years (the length of a normal car lease) Cars are typically usable for well over a decade :)

> software is likely not usable after 3-5 years

Whoa whoa wait! How did we get to this point? Maybe I’m living in the past, but software should work essentially forever. There are no moving parts. No wear/maintenance items. It doesn't distort like a photocopy when loaded to and from media.

The only thing that should cause working software to fail is some underlying change to its foundation: an incompatible OS or browser change or deprecated API, and so on, and we should hold platform vendors accountable for regressions and breakage. I wish platforms took backward compatibility seriously.

Apart from a cosmic ray flipping a bit somewhere, there is no physics reason software should “wear out.” How did this become a fringe point of view?

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

#259

Post by josephcsible »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #242
josephcsible wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat, Grafana, and Nextcloud all seem to be doing fine.

As usual, a couple of behemoths are presented as an example, completely ignoring everything else. Should I remind you what RH is a subscription service? What about all other, non-GPL software (and companies which developed it) which would be extinct, because "everyone moved to *GPL-like"?

> As usual, a couple of behemoths are presented as an example, completely ignoring everything else.

Are there any examples of going with AGPL having the opposite outcome?

> Should I remind you what RH is a subscription service?

If all subscription software were like Red Hat's, then a conversation wouldn't need to be had about it.

> What about all other, non-GPL software (and companies which developed it) which would be extinct, because "everyone moved to *GPL-like"?

It doesn't need to go extinct. It could be relicensed to GPL too.

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

#260

Post by throwawayvibes »

I'm happy to sell a perpetual licence of my niche desktop software for 300 euros, but nobody will lay for that. Anything less, and I cannot promise updates and development time. So it will be 5 euro a month licencing until the end of it's days.
Post reply on HN