Software is far more complex than most physical products. There are only so many failure modes for a screwdriver or a couch and they're all pretty foreseeable. The most complicated physical systems, like a car, house, or even a human body, do need maintenance.
I'm frequently frustrated with software bugs like everyone else (my building and apartment have this awful smartlock system that's riddled with bugs and which bricked me out of my own home due to a bad app update a few weeks ago--shoutout to Latch) but I'm not sure I'm on aboard with an anti-maintenance attitude. If there are bugs I'd like them to be fixed!
Me too! I'm not trying to be anti-maintenance (though I do wish technology will be developing towards less and maintenance required, but that's another topic). I'm pro-quality. The impression I'm having is that maintenance burden on software is being created in order to justify subscription model - and that the ability to do post-release updates made vendors and devs no longer care about delivering reliable and quality software (customers become the new QA, bugfixes can always be added latter, except they tend to be deprioritized in favor of new features).
Note I'm not postulating a conspiracy theory, just a spontaneous coordination of the entire industry due to market incentives. But the effect is still there, and I feel it needs to be countered.
in theory yes, in practice no. I work on a product that targets windows and macos. on windows yeah, a version of our software from 2015 probably works as well as it did the day it was released. apple deprecates stuff in their API every year that we have to go back and update. they also break a lot of stuff that isn't formally deprecated and we have to find workarounds for that to. "our software will work forever as long as you never update your OS" is not acceptable to most customers.
Still, as a Linux and Windows user, I've absolutely grown to expect my desktop software to work 10 years or more without updates. After that, I can always spin up a VM with an older Windows version.
I work in a hardware company, and for any important function I usually set up a dedicated computer, install the software, and then never touch it ever
This is how the more sophisticated oscilliscopes etc. work. They often have Windows XP installed if you buy them used. Simple, doesn't break, no internet, if it's mission critical or expensive it's worth a dedicated and frozen computer
Contrast that to traditional physical goods, where buyers expect the product to work as advertised, right out of the box, or their money back. Software in the Internet era has it easy, because it gets to release shitty half-finished versions, and then keep charging money while never quite finishing the software.
> subscriptions are actually the ideal way of aligning incentives for products that involve ongoing maintenance. but buyers tend to consider this a ripoff if they don't actually see a stream of new features in development
Because software does not decay on its own (despite the misleading term "bitrot" being popular in tech circles). That's literally why digitizing data has taken the world by storm: digital data does not decay; as long as the physical medium is readable, you can make a perfect copy of the data it contains. As a buyer, I don't expect my software to need maintenance. I expect it to work out of the box (just like I expect every physical product to work out of the box), and once I find software that fulfills my needs, I expect it to work all the way until computing technology moves forward so much that it's no longer possible to run the software. Which, in the era of virtual machines, may take decades.
So yeah, there's a need to clearly justify to the customers why you're charging subscription, because software in its natural state does not need maintenance.