681–690 of 723 posts
This kind of announcement tends to ring all kinds of alarm bells for me. What kinds of changes should we expect to make those huge investments worthwhile for the investors? My 1Password installation is grandfathered from a time when it was just a standalone app, without subscription. Will it just stop working one day to bully me into subscribing? Can you even start using 1Password these days without buying a subscrip…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So clearly you want the service but feel it's too expensive... No, I don't. "Money for service" is fine as a principle. This particular service is something I don't want at all. Those can both be true at the same time. > But secondly, software doesn't exist in a time bubble! Security updates, maintenance and support all exist and these are people trying to make a living while handling all that. I'm happy to pay for…
> No, I don't. "Money for service" is fine as a principle My mistake for assuming you were talking about the thing being talked about > What's your definition of reasonable here? $20 a month is a great deal if that's the price of security! So $20 a month would be reasonable by that metric. But I think we can both agree that's too high. So how do we decide? And it can't just be that low dollar amounts are automaticall…
I said buying it is "fine". Even if that was directed specifically to this service, that doesn't mean I want it.
> there's also no one person who knows a definitive answer
Then don't be so insistent that the price is good.
> Like, software companies have gone with your reality, and before 10 years passes up and you feel like it's time to upgrade... they're gone!
I'm not saying they have to do it that way, I just think it's a reasonable way to calculate the price of the functionality.
If they want a steadier income that's fine, but wanting a full retail paycheck every single year is going too far.
> It's not just $3 for passwords, it's $3 so I have confidence I'm not relying on 1password having indefinite growth to have people work there.
On the other hand, worrying about whether companies will be around for the long term is a big reason I dislike subscriptions.
That $3 doesn't guarantee they'll still be around. And for a simple product like this, the more ambitious they get the more worried I get.
Also this company is an order of magnitude or two bigger than "sustainable". The only way they would stop selling a password manager is because of bad management or because they choose to pivot into a different market. They're not going to have insufficient money to pay the staff of their core product.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it was finished they'd close their doors and find a new way to make a living. Feature-complete, then. It needs updates but it doesn't need significant development work. > Great way to make my point. MS tried taking just 3 dollars a month for an entire OS, but because they were asking for money upfront they had to turn to a mixture advertising Candy Crush in the start menu and privacy abuse. They make most of the…
Again, software development companies have tried the "rely on people being willing to pay upfront for updates" and failed repeatedly Once you get there it doesn't matter if your goal was features or updates, you're talking about closing doors and laying people off. So I'd much rather 1password do exactly what they did and pivot off a failing model. > They made home windows into a loss-leader. That's great, and I'm su…
Windows is not a loss-leader. It makes them lots of money. They just threw away a single sales channel.
> pivot off a failing model
Microsoft hasn't pivoted off upfront sales for Windows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is also true for... Agreed, those are already risks, and ones that are a lot harder to mitigate (though I do try where I can). Does that mean I should add another one that I can easily avoid? There are risks in both local and cloud password managers. Maybe those risks seem equivalent to some folks, and the cloud features are useful enough for it to be a no brainer for them. For me, I don't at all mind manually…
Hey— whatever works for your setup. Especially for those who don't use a smart phone and have one machine, it's probably a minimal loss in functionality. > Does that mean I should add another one that I can easily avoid? All other things being equal? Avoid it, of course. I firmly oppose letting perfect be the enemy of good in the sense that more secure is better than less secure even if it's not perfectly secure. But…
Can we actually know this? We only know about the breaches that we're told about, or that are found and disclosed by researchers. I'm not familiar with KeeFarce, but presumably attackers need local access, in which case you're boned anyway.
> ... many users, even on this site, aren't sophisticated enough to engage in the sort of cost/benefit analysis that we are, and b) to them, this conversation is unintentional FUD
So this is the part that I worry about. I think we're in a bit of an age of innocence with everything moving to the cloud, where everyone still believes that all of these services are going to be well meaning, competent, capable stewards for your bits. I'd love to be proven wrong, but I imagine in 10 or 20 years we're going to have a very different attitude about these things, sorta like people who were using xray machines to size shoes before they learned about the effects.
Once any info gets to the cloud, its out of your control forever, and its in a place where it can be attacked by the current ~8 billion people on the planet, and all the new people coming along after that. Its an impossible task to defend against that. Not to mention as someone like lastpass grows, what could be a juicier target than that? Why try to pwn individual services when you can just get all of the legit credentials at once from one place?
If the options are only use the same 6 character dictionary word for every account, or use a cloud subscription password manager, I'd probably recommend the latter. But for someone not tech savvy, I'd probably recommend a pen and paper with memorable (long) pass phrases before I'd recommend a cloud solution.
In the past I've recommended a local password manager with generated passwords on your one machine that you do anything sensitive with. Back it up on a thumb drive once in a while. For your most used accounts (e.g. email) that you really want to use on multiple devices, use long memorable pass phrases and just enter them in. Some people might think this is primitive, but its not that hard and it should be plenty safe for most people. Its just not as convenient.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No, I don't. "Money for service" is fine as a principle My mistake for assuming you were talking about the thing being talked about > What's your definition of reasonable here? $20 a month is a great deal if that's the price of security! So $20 a month would be reasonable by that metric. But I think we can both agree that's too high. So how do we decide? And it can't just be that low dollar amounts are automaticall…
> My mistake for assuming you were talking about the thing being talked about I said buying it is "fine". Even if that was directed specifically to this service, that doesn't mean I want it. > there's also no one person who knows a definitive answer Then don't be so insistent that the price is good. > Like, software companies have gone with your reality, and before 10 years passes up and you feel like it's time to up…
You start by implying there's something wrong with insisting on the quality of a price then...
> If they want a steadier income that's fine, but wanting a full retail paycheck every single year is going too far.
Right. So you're now you're not just saying that the subscription model is bad, you're saying that you've decided what a full retail paycheck for their software is.
-
You say: > That $3 doesn't guarantee they'll still be around > for a simple product like this, the more ambitious they get the more worried I get. > Also this company is an order of magnitude or two bigger than "sustainable"
Yet it's all exactly the reason why this is true:
> They're not going to have insufficient money to pay the staff of their core product.
I mean how do you think 1Password reached the size where you're essentially calling them "too big to fail"?
They did the ramen noodle "sustainable" thing, and they'd be a footnote if they had stayed there. Instead they were ambitious, they scaled, they took people's money in a way that works for them, and now some internet person is simultaneously saying "They're so successful they'll never fail if they don't want to" and "Why are they doing what they did to reach that point???"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Again, software development companies have tried the "rely on people being willing to pay upfront for updates" and failed repeatedly Once you get there it doesn't matter if your goal was features or updates, you're talking about closing doors and laying people off. So I'd much rather 1password do exactly what they did and pivot off a failing model. > They made home windows into a loss-leader. That's great, and I'm su…
Retail home sales hadn't been a major revenue stream for microsoft in decades, if ever. Windows is not a loss-leader. It makes them lots of money. They just threw away a single sales channel. > pivot off a failing model Microsoft hasn't pivoted off upfront sales for Windows.
I just now realized you're the same person from the other thread and it all makes sense now, this was never about 1Password for you. My mistake taking the bait.
And of course, I vehemently agree with anything you say about 1Password, or Windows.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is? I thouht it was the proper word to use to describe software which has limited features in free version so they can sell commercial licenses.
“Limited” is better. “Crippled” has a negative connotation when it comes to software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty typical for people here to be zoomed-in on the b2c side of a business because that's what they use, and fail to see the b2b side, the underwater mass of the iceberg.
I think it's a little weird. I have used 1password at two jobs, and thought it was great, so I bought it for myself. They want money to sync my passwords between my Windows desktop and my iPhone. Seems reasonable to me. I program computers for a living and people pay me. I guess there was a free self-hosted type thing at one point in the past? That was before I ever heard of the product, so I'm not that upset that it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> My mistake for assuming you were talking about the thing being talked about I said buying it is "fine". Even if that was directed specifically to this service, that doesn't mean I want it. > there's also no one person who knows a definitive answer Then don't be so insistent that the price is good. > Like, software companies have gone with your reality, and before 10 years passes up and you feel like it's time to up…
You've thrown any sort of internal consistency so far out the window at this point, I don't think you even know what you're saying anymore. You start by implying there's something wrong with insisting on the quality of a price then... > If they want a steadier income that's fine, but wanting a full retail paycheck every single year is going too far. Right. So you're now you're not just saying that the subscription mo…
Did you forget that they used to sell it that way? And there are competitors with similar prices. We know what retail price is.
> "Why are they doing what they did to reach that point???"
I never asked that.
They raised their prices so they'd make more money, obviously.
When I say it's too expensive for me, that's not me being confused about why they charge that much.
I'd rather pay for a product plus some profits plus some scaling, and not pay for a product plus some profits plus extremely aggressive scaling.
They can both keep a company around for a long time, and the former might even be better for that.
Like you said a couple comments up, I want "confidence I'm not relying on 1password having indefinite growth to have people work there". The more they focus on very fast growth, the less I have of that confidence.
> I mean how do you think 1Password reached the size where you're essentially calling them "too big to fail"?
They reached a safe size before they switched to forcing subscriptions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Retail home sales hadn't been a major revenue stream for microsoft in decades, if ever. Windows is not a loss-leader. It makes them lots of money. They just threw away a single sales channel. > pivot off a failing model Microsoft hasn't pivoted off upfront sales for Windows.
So now we've gone from talking about 1Password to you correcting your own points about a diversion you brought up. I just now realized you're the same person from the other thread and it all makes sense now, this was never about 1Password for you. My mistake taking the bait. And of course, I vehemently agree with anything you say about 1Password, or Windows.
And if you don't like corrections then don't nitpick so much.