A Critical Analysis of the Subscription Economy

Re:A Critical Analysis of the Subscription Economy by ladon86 on Friday July 14, 2017 @02:12PM (#14771942)

I kind of disagree about Sketch having a customer-friendly model, because files produced by a newer version can't be opened by an older version - regardless of whether any new features have been used in that file.

So you pay for a year of updates, but if anyone you collaborate with updates their software, you have to as well, because you can't open the files they produce or even edit and save.

Most of the time you're paying for updates so that you can open collaborator files, not because you want new features. It's effectively a subscription paid annually.

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Re:A Critical Analysis of the Subscription Economy by mortenjorck on Friday July 14, 2017 @03:24PM (#14772463)

While I still consider Sketch's model leagues more customer-friendly than Adobe's, I'm not happy that they appear to have given up any attempt at meaningfully versioning the file format. I can completely understand something like an overhaul to the way symbols are handled breaking compatibility with older versions of the app, but when an update is adding things like a new color picker and tweaking vector snapping, it seems like a stretch that the previous version can no longer open files created by the latest one.

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Re:A Critical Analysis of the Subscription Economy by ladon86 on Friday July 14, 2017 @04:41PM (#14772994)

Right - because their business model depends on you updating, they are strongly incentivized to break the file format with every new version.

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