Shovels break, light bulbs burn out. Then you go buy another one, and there's a good chance it's better than the earlier one. The manufacturer keeps working to improve the quality, and people keep paying them for this. "Buy a software license once for all time" is not analogous to this.

Not in my experience. Almost always the new ones are improved only in one respect: profitability. Generally this means they have used cheaper components, lowered the cost a bit, and made an inferior product. Ok. End of tangent.

Call me cynical, but I think it's naive to make this claim.

Manufacturers don't optimize quality, they optimize profits. Even if there's sufficient competition, manufacturers don't race upwards to improve quality, they race downwards to reduce the cost and undercut the competition.

You can see this in kitchen appliances. People complain about how they don't last as long as they used to and are harder to repair. That's because when a customer sees a $30 blender and a $50 blender on the shelf, they will nearly always pick the $30 blender, even if the $50 blender is a higher quality. There was a race to the bottom on pricing, and corners had to be cut.

What you really want to read is reviews from 3 years in the future but you can’t. So you buy the $30 blender because it’s too hard to assess whether the $50 one is worth it.

I really liked the hn article the other day on assessing garment quality. The first step in stemming the tide of garbage is being informed.

In the software world SaaS tends to optimise for growth and customer retention, which is probably better aligned to meet people’s needs than optimising for first sale.

I didn’t see this at the time; if you remember the title or still have the link could you please post it?

So you are right in the short term, but consumers learn. This will bite cheaper brands in the long term.

Problem being, <shovel> makers are now prohibiting you from owning your <shovel>. From fixing your <shovel>. From changing your <shovel> so you don't need to buy <super shovel>. Now with forced updates, you're now literally prohibited from keeping the shovel you have and like!

I agree, why I feel ye olde numbered software releases worked fine. I even think subscription based software is fine if the yearly subscription price is at or below what the old numbered version costs.

What happens these days is software converts to a subscription model and the developer decides to jack up the yearly subscription price to 2-3x the old yearly price.

New Mac OS version? Users want <software> to support it. Found a bug in a library <software> uses? Users expect to get a fixed version etc.

And while as a software user/buyer myself I like the idea of paying once and be done with it I kinda understand why people need recurring income if they keep on working on a piece of software even if it's just "minor" things.

No, they expect to have the opportunity to upgrade to newer versions which may be different if they want those differences. They don't expect the one they bought, learned to use, and have grown proficient with to suddenly be completely different one day for no good reason.

Consider buying a truck because you haul stuff around a lot. You don't expect to just come out to your driveway one morning and find a fuel-efficient minicar there instead because someone at the car company decided that people like fuel-efficient vehicles, so they would steal back all the trucks they made and replace them. However, maybe you used to haul a lot of cargo but you don't anymore so you've been thinking of replacing the truck and a fuel-efficient car would interest you, but you want that to be your choice.

I can guarantee you that inboxes of all iOS developers who have not implemented dark mode will fill up the first day iOS 13 is released to public.

Heck, people expect your app to work on the first beta and will complain if it does not.

Its this weird delicate balance of improving the UI but not changing it too much. I tell people all the time UI is the hardest job in the world, an entire team of PhD's cannot get it right most of the time. Its simple an impossible task to consider the 'work flow' of every user- it is just beyond the scope of human intelligence I think.

All you can do is create a good UI that works for a majority of people, and try to manage it from there.

A delightful assertion that is the precise opposite of TFA's entire point.

I have been avoiding the available OS update for my Macbook Air because I've heard it kills performance, reduces battery life, may not run one of my favorite applications, and AFAIK brings nothing that I actually want.

You might not want security updates, but you probably need them, and probably should have them.

Example: A customer bought your app on iOS 9. It worked perfectly fine. You wrote it once, because you couldn’t expect more revenue from existing customers. It stopped working on iOS 11, because 32-bit support was ended on Apple’s side.

Of course, it’s not Apple who gets the blame, it’s you, because your app doesn’t work anymore. But it is supposed to work, because your customer paid good money for it ($4.99).

Back in the day, sure, if you bought a software that worked on MS-DOS only, it’s your fault when you got Windows and it didn’t run your software. No expectations, no hard feelings. But iOS is iOS. It’s the thing running average Joe’s smartphones. Software bought for iOS should work on iOS. Forever.

Your examples all describe products with an expected expiration date. Software used to have expiration dates. But not anymore. The expectation changed.

What you're glossing over here is that for literally decades, that was a pretty good baseline assumption, because we actually valued backward compatibility. The lengths that Microsoft went to in order to maintain that compatibility in the first several major releases of Windows are legendary. The lengths that Linux developers still go to are also remarkable.

It's only in the crazy new world of X-as-a-service and not even controlling the OS on your own devices that anyone thinks deliberately breaking stuff every few years to force the upgrade treadmill is a good thing. And the people who think that are largely the ones who also see you as nothing but a data point in a revenue maximisation model, not the actual users.

Ask yourself this: Have you ever met anyone who isn't a software developer who told you joyously about how much they appreciate the endless stream of updates that everything they buy now gets? I haven't. But I have lost track of how many friends and family have bemoaned things being changed that they didn't want, older devices that seemed to be working perfectly well but then got broken by some software update, some service they depend on being broken or switched off, some content on a service they pay for being removed or blocked unless they pay more, etc.

This is not progress. This is a failure of regulation, the triumph of capitalist free markets in consolidating so much power in so few places that competition is no longer an effective protector of the customer's best interests.

But: How useful is your copy of Windows 98 these days? Can you collaborate with others with your copy of Photoshop 5.0 or Office 2003? Can you easily install Quake I on a modern machine without hassle?

> Ask yourself this...

It depends. I see your point and you are right to a certain extend. But then I see lots of people asking for new features or are glad about new capabilities the app now offers. I’d say it depends a lot on the type of software.

> competition is no longer an effective protector of the customer's best interests.

Why? You still get to buy some software or use your iPhone 3GS. It’s just a security thing. Or did you expect free updates to your OS?

The buy-once-use-forever software doesn’t really work, because software is rarely isolated like some Linux CLI tools from the 80s. You need to have security updates or collaborate with people by sharing files. Someone wantsnew features and change, others don’t. At least under the new model, you get to use software for a low price if you don’t use it that much (Adobe cloud is what, 10 bucks a month compares to 600 upfront?).

It's that they replaced the old toolbar with the awful ribbon interface, instantly breaking years if user familiarity.

I suppose that depends on what you're trying to do. I can still run those programs, and I can still access my data created in those programs. Obviously they don't support some features and formats that were added in later versions, but forward compatibility is a different issue. My point here isn't about new things being given to you free by magic, it's just about not losing things you already had.

But then I see lots of people asking for new features or are glad about new capabilities the app now offers. I’d say it depends a lot on the type of software.

Again, just to be clear, I'm not objecting to change in general. Of course in some cases we hope that our software will add useful new features or fix bugs or improve an interface.

What I'm objecting to is software that forces updates on users whether they want them or not, which Apple for example has a history of doing with iOS devices through a variety of mechanisms.

It has total control of the only major source of software on its platform, and it seems to have no problem with mandating that any software supplied through that store complies with its latest guidelines. As a developer, that might mean issuing a new version of an otherwise working app for essentially cosmetic reasons. Don't comply, lose your whole market.

Crucially, Apple also pushes new versions of its OS that bundle essential security updates with functional and cosmetic changes. You can't keep an Apple device secure without accepting everything else as well, even if the everything else makes your experience worse than when you chose to buy the device. This, to me, is the really nasty shift in recent times, and it's one that Microsoft is guilty of as well now.

You still get to buy some software or use your iPhone 3GS. It’s just a security thing. Or did you expect free updates to your OS?

Yes, if my product does not work as it should because of a defect, it is reasonable to expect that the supplier of that product should remedy the defect, or otherwise compensate me in some reasonable way for the loss caused by its failure. This is how consumer sales normally work, and indeed the principles are enshrined in law in many countries.

Software companies have had a very easy time on this score, despite the large number of bugs in what they ship, and I think that is in large part because of the informal arrangement that essential bug fixes and security updates would be issued free of charge for a reasonable period after someone made a purchase.

If software companies no longer want to uphold their side of that unspoken bargain, then I don't see why we shouldn't get stricter with them about consumer protection and their liability for failures. Obviously we don't know how to write perfect software and it's unrealistic to expect a developer to ship a flawless product, but let's not kid ourselves that huge numbers of corners aren't being cut in order to push things out the door more quickly, nor that those compromises don't sometimes have damaging results that were entirely avoidable.

On Linux retrocompatibility is handled at the source code level. So stuff will work as long as you are ready to compile your own old versions of all libs in a chroot somewhere. Trying to run even a few months old binary will often fail.

Mac is similar to Linux but the burden of recompiling is on the developers. Many applications ship an old version that you can run on some Eldritch version of macos.

If you introduce a cloud component everything breaks unless you are ready to support multiple versions of your DB.

No wonder so many entreprise devs fled to evergreen web apps.

Retrocompatibility was a given because it was relatively easy.

I hear the big downside is that you have to offer enough improvement over the previous version for your customer to be willing to pay for them. That's just crazy talk!

I think the absence of this theory in reality is proof that it is not a successful business practice for software development. If you believe that this model accurately translates to software then I challenge you to start your own software shop.

Then you have to secure a new vendor when it eventually breaks completely which is basically the same as buying yearly versions. Or you pay a subscription/maintenance contract so that the software keeps being maintained.

The problem with software maintenance is that it isn't a 'full company' job so you have devs sitting around who might as well add features for large clients since it makes them happy and you keep getting that sweet ARR.