Craft – A fresh take on documents

Re:Craft – A fresh take on documents by z3t4 on Thursday December 24, 2020 @04:12PM (#25531473)

As software development works today, the subscription model is the only logical business model. Unless it's like a single player game where you only play through or use once. Software today is an continuous process. When a software product ships it's far from finished. The subscription model is good for both users and developers, as it allows releasing a software product early, without a huge marketing and advertising budget. The incentive is not to make you buy it once, the incentive is to make you keep using it, by improving it, or keeping it good, take good care of customers, etc.

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Re:Craft – A fresh take on documents by setr on Thursday December 24, 2020 @07:01PM (#25532846)

> The incentive is not to make you buy it once, the incentive is to make you keep using it, by improving it, or keeping it good, take good care of customers, etc.

The problem is that this isn’t the only incentive, or rather, not a well-defined version of the incentive at play.

The incentive is to simply keep the customer as a customer, over time. Multiple strategies will work, which includes being nice to the customer, but also includes lock-in strategies like data availability (proprietary format, no export), logic availability (custom proprietary language, stdlib, etc), etc

That is, Jetbrains and Oracle both run on subscription models, with very different interpretations of how to process those incentives.

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Re:Craft – A fresh take on documents by stjohnswarts on Friday December 25, 2020 @07:55AM (#25536183)

I don't think it's good for -consumers- in the majority of cases and is only for those selling the software. I think anything else is rationalization in the mind of the developer. New versions should sell themselves as they provide security and feature upgrades if it's a good product.

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Re:Craft – A fresh take on documents by trevyn on Thursday December 24, 2020 @10:34PM (#25533957)

Not everything has to have a business model. Some people write code because they want to, and then give it away for free. If you plant a seed in the earth, it will give you food for free, too.

Also, we’re starting to reach the point where money is an ineffective incentive.

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Re:Craft – A fresh take on documents by dismalpedigree on Friday December 25, 2020 @12:02AM (#25534333)

I am sure there are a handful of rent seeking startups trying to figure out how to make sure you pay a subscription for planting that seed also.

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Re:Craft – A fresh take on documents by sojournerc on Friday December 25, 2020 @12:34AM (#25534458)

I laughed, but then then felt sad about my deep cynicism. Merry Christmas!

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Re:Craft – A fresh take on documents by read_if_gay_ on Friday December 25, 2020 @04:37AM (#25535396)

Nitpick: The seed’s business model is preserving existence of its species.

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