Buying a product is no guarantee, companies should also release a patch when they stop running the license server e.g. certain adobe products can no longer be installed by the owner due to adobe neither running a license server nor released a patch.
Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
511–520 of 710 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#512The entire point of "everything being a subscription" is a marketing ploy. (Also revenue. "I forgot to cancel the subscription" pays the bills like no other, see Comcast's revenue.") Subscriptions have to be renewed, subscriptions send billing emails. All of these things create more "daily active impressions." And in the attention economy, the more daily active impressions you have, the more your net promoter score r…
I ended up abandoning my email inbox, I don't read it. It's a dumpster that I occasionally go fishing in when I need something specific.
Subscriptions are exhausting, I am slowly moving more and more stuff to self hosting. I bought an office desktop with 16G of ram for it. I don't mind paying for quality software, I a just feel done with subscriptions and how it results in the UI of the software constantly changing so that you have to relearn how to do basic things all the time.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#513I'm not tired of software subscriptions. I just avoid it 100%. I have principles.
For software I prefer open source. If I can't find what I need, I write it.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#514You will own nothing, and you will be happy.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The company always to prefers to pocket your dollars as profit. If you send them a check or something, that's what they'll do. And I'm free to stop subscribing if the service gets worse (or doesn't get better as fast as I'd like).
Unless you have data in the service in some proprietary format, say.
If I had data locked up in some software I would rather have an ongoing relationship rather than just hope that they decide to make a new version when an OS update or other critical need arises.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comic Sans is a pretty good font, it's only sin is having been the default in Microsoft Word for several years.
When has Comic Sans ever been the default in Microsoft Word?
I guess it never was...
Funny, I was so sure it was the default font in Word back when I went to school. But I can't find any references to it so I don't know where I got that idea from.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but buying a DVD isn't great either as it has a real destroying the earth cost for something that can be delivered to me using a negligible amount of energy digitally. I don't think there's a way of getting movies/tv shows reasonably in 2022, though I don't mind paying for, and do pay for subscription services such as Netflix, I just pirate the content anyway because it's a much better user experience. At least…
> Sure but buying a DVD isn't great either as it has a real destroying the earth cost for something that can be delivered to me using a negligible amount of energy digitally. I Then buy the streaming version. If it is available by DVD, then you can probably find it available to purchase digitally.
Really? Just as a litmus test, the last movie I pirated was a 10bit 4k rip of "The Matrix" which comes in at about 40gigs. This is about the level of quality I'm looking for in a file I buy, sorry if I was misleading w/ my mention of DVD. Practically speaking this is similar to having a *.flac of a song, as it enables me to transcode to lower quality versions for use on different devices from a high quality master. Is this something I can pay for?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure but buying a DVD isn't great either as it has a real destroying the earth cost for something that can be delivered to me using a negligible amount of energy digitally. I don't think there's a way of getting movies/tv shows reasonably in 2022, though I don't mind paying for, and do pay for subscription services such as Netflix, I just pirate the content anyway because it's a much better user experience. At least…
> Sure but buying a DVD isn't great either as it has a real destroying the earth cost for something that can be delivered to me using a negligible amount of energy digitally. I Then buy the streaming version. If it is available by DVD, then you can probably find it available to purchase digitally.
Please enlighten me where I can buy a streaming movie that can be watch without login, transferred to another service or transferred to another of my devices.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
Strongly disagree with the linked article. Individual customers, and corporate customers, are wildly different. The "buy it for life" business model works very well if you're trying to launch a mass market product to individuals. In your first year of a product, those users who'll pay upfront 3 years of subscriptions for a "lifetime pass" are an awe-inspiringly useful customer segment to identify. They're your way to…
Looks like short term thinking to me. Great for the next two years, but a problem after that, but hey can always have another job by then so it will be someone else problem.
Well, you gotta make sure only 10% of users purchase. Not 50%.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone tired of everything being a subscription now?
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the OP, but I have to disagree too. Creative Cloud, IntelliJ, Figma, Google Workspace, Postman, Spotify, Vercel, Adguard, Google storage space, Alltrails, 1password.. They're all subscriptions and getting better all the time. Meanwhile it's the old purchased software like Windows and Office that get worse with every version.
I haven't seen any improvement in Spotify in years. Still can't organise songs in any meaningful way, can't rate songs, playlists suck, shuffle is broken, and they keep pushing podcast content when I never listen to podcasts. 1Password also used to sync to Dropbox for free and even had an HTML version that could serve from Dropbox.
Shuffle is not broken. It is algorithmic and tries to feed you songs you might want to listen to but Spotify doesn’t need to pay for (that much).