Blame the victim?
We din't get any impression, as we don't set the prices. The companies set those prices.
For example Adobe customers never got or set any impression that "software should be free/low price". They paid 100s to 1000s of dollars for each update or package respectively, and they still got the mandatory subscription (and were some of the first users to be hit with one).
>How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.
We don't want "super cheap products", we want reasonably priced products we own after we buy.
I am afraid the ‘we’ here isn’t nearly as large a demographic as you think it is. If it was, we wouldn’t see the mass of advertising supported products we see.
Mainstream consumers do want free / cheap products, despite the many caveats associated with them and the market has adjusted to give them that.
The other follow up is, as a consumer, how do you determine what is a reasonable price for something. You have no visibility into the COGS other than your own experiences which may or may not apply.
Similar to the OP, I am not advocating for high subscriptions with no value or horrible dark patterns around unsubscribing…
Companies prefer subscriptions because it maximizes revenue. It's as simple as that. Zero sum game between company and consumer.
That's patently false
I, for one, happen to like being able to push costs from capex to opex (and yes, that's true for my own personal use like it is for business use) *for most things) - a subscription price gives me a closer approximation of a given tool's/service's value proposition than does a one-off purchase (most of the time)
Everything from car leases (albeit I typically purchase my cars, leases most definitely have their place for a significant portion of vehicle operators) to Netflix fees come in the form of a "subscription" - follow the terms of the subscription, and you get to use whatever it is as long as you want
I should say your choice to subscribe should not be taken away. I don't think my choice to own should be taken away.
Cars are typically usable for well over a decade :)
Whoa whoa wait! How did we get to this point? Maybe I’m living in the past, but software should work essentially forever. There are no moving parts. No wear/maintenance items. It doesn't distort like a photocopy when loaded to and from media.
The only thing that should cause working software to fail is some underlying change to its foundation: an incompatible OS or browser change or deprecated API, and so on, and we should hold platform vendors accountable for regressions and breakage. I wish platforms took backward compatibility seriously.
Apart from a cosmic ray flipping a bit somewhere, there is no physics reason software should “wear out.” How did this become a fringe point of view?
Really? You're still running operating systems that are a decade old on hardware even older?
Why?
10 years is not that long ago. In computers and software the difference between 2022 and 2012 is not as big as it was between 1992 and 2002.
It's still an immense period of technology time - OS and hardware vendors don't support their products "forever": it's not sane to do so
Run 10-year-old hardware/OS if you want ... but you should expect increasing issues over time
The really old programs run in emulators. This is how I play 1980s video games. I highly recommend Mario Brothers (not "Super") from 1983. Still works.
The point is that software should remain usable, but in your example that hasn’t been the case.
Apple did Rosetta in 2006. That proves this approach has been _commercially_ viable on top-end machines for at least 15 years. Not 39 years!
It looks like Adobe does sell one-time purchases of Acrobat Pro 2020 for $450. I'll cease my cloud-yelling.
But you can run software you bought with capex as long as you want and it doesn’t cost more forever. And you don’t have to agree to new terms and conditions.
...only if you still have hardware and operating systems that support it (or that it supports, depending on your point of view)
If that was true, financing wouldn't exist for consumer products. In practice, people pay extra to turn a one-time payment into a subscription.
Also, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in a home they own than burn money renting.
I am not a fan of products that make it difficult to unsubscribe, but I do like the variable cost aspect of SaaS. Generally quick to start using and quick to stop.
I have not seen it commented on, but my sense is security is easier with a SaaS model. How many pirated versions of software have you come across in your career pre-Saas?
1. They have no idea it can be different
2. They wouldn't know what it would look like if it were different
3. They don't understand, or they resign to accept, the ethical implications of the status quo
Now that the internet has removed any friction between business and customer, business is reaching its ideal state: one where the customer pays as long as the business has recurring expenses, where production never stops, and where productivity of labor approaches infinity.
For software the initial costs are big, but after that it can be pretty low maintenance or at least costing much less to develop new features when the foundation is set.
When you start to think about recurring expenses that's when you have to find a way to justify those expenses. And that is usually by adding bloat and unnecessary features that those that already bought it might not even want.
So now you have to pay for features that you don't want to keep using the features that you've already bought? Tough sell...
Note: I'm not defending the practice (if you dig in my comment history, you'll see pretty incendiary stuff against SaaS abuse very recently), I'm just saying that it's what business naturally tends like - in the same way it naturally tends towards paying people as little as possible, exploiting them, etc etc. This is what the market becomes when left to its own devices. If we don't like it, we need to proactively intervene in law.
I’m happy to pay for a new version if my current version stops working. OS or browser update broke the app? I’ll pay for the new version.
But they are trying to force me to pay every month, therefore they remove my ability to use the app at all unless I pay for their cloud storage which I neither need nor want.
You don't only get compatibility with X with the new version but all that as well.
They should not pay them, they should use one of the numerous alternatives.
Side note: Daring Fireball has had some discussion recently about 1Password moving to enterprise for employee password management and adopting the SaaS model in order to make this transition, alienating current client base in the process. A ballsy move!
Written by someone who - probably - doesn't understand how complex software is to write/update/expand/maintain
And the case have previously been that such development is largely paid for by new users.
The answer is that it makes it harder to justify perpetual revenue streams then.
Well, that's on the software maker.
Why pay salaries in perpetuity for something made and sold once?
>Anything sold on Apple platforms, for example, nowadays has to be updated at least once a year just to keep up.
Factually wrong.
I think the need to update software constantly is sometimes a self fulfilling prophecy with SaaS. Features that need constant maintenance get added because: "Why not? We have a continuous income stream."
Edit:
Another example: I use Transmit on iOS. It hasn't been updated since 2017[1] because of lack of sales. Still works great on the latest iOS/iPhone.
Incorrect.
If the software companies (in mobile in particular) had a race to the bottom, it's on them - and on those (hobbyists etc) that undercutted them (though, if hobbyists can undercut your prices, is your product really worth that much, or could it just as well be replaced with a hobbyist-made app?).
Users have since forever paid top dollar for shrink wrapped and then downloaded software like MS Office or Abobe Creative Suite and co, that now is nonetheless "subscription based".
But they would then have to answer why would non-business buyers, that is, users who did "leave the update treadmill" and bought new updates (or skipped them) at their convenience, suffer the subscription model too?
There is nothing stopping Joe-who-only-pays-full-licences to continue using his MS 2007 Office suite, is there?
Products get deprecated/go out of support all the bloody time - there is nothing wrong with that: should Ford have to "support" the Edsel or Model T today "for free"? Why?
Or you can sidestep the whole thing entirely and use/fund/ promote Free Software. Your "small monthly amount" will go a long way and you will be free to pick and choose as you want.
Professionals who make their living using Photoshop usually don't have much trouble with the cost, whether paid monthly, or occasionally when a new version has a feature they care about.
Being able to bring in some more casual customers with a lower initial cost is just a bonus.
So you could skip 90% of the BS updates you don't care for and get the 10% you do, as opposed to pay the full update price or maintain a subscription...
In other words, you could get a base product, they keep maintaining, and even release new versions you can update to for free/cheap, but with features you haven't paid for locked. Then, if you paid for a feature, you get to enjoy it for all free/cheap updates of the program.
One way to increase recurring revenue when you have a captive audience (i.e. they can't refuse an update) is by adding adware to your software. I think SaaS is the driving force behind the ad-tech surveillance state, not the thing that will save us from it.
That sounds like an extension of "you wouldn't download a car".
I don't think it makes sense to call anyone making an informed decision to overpay for a service a victim. If you don't think the deal is reasonable, then don't accept the deal and use something else.
The exception being profiteering in the case of a shortage, but I don't think this is the case. There is no software shortage being taken advantage of.
No, those I'm calling victims are people like me, who would like to buy the update and own it, but are instead forced in a subscription - which if they ever have to stop paying for whatever reason (e.g. out of a job, medical bills, etc) they lose their access to the programs they've been paying for month over month for years.
A music program called Reason is a good example of the scumbuggery involved. It used to have $129 annual updates - which were already overpriced, as they had minimal changes, and more professional competitors like Steinberg with much bigger update deltas (new features, work involved, etc) charged much less for their annual updates.
Now, they switched to subscription, for $20/month ($240/year) where they give access to some extra plugins to entice you. But to force the user's hands (since they still offer the paid annual updates), they also bumped the annual update price to $200/year (without the extra plugins, the regular, already-overpriced-at-129 update).
Which gets incompatible and can't run with changes to OS, plugin SDKs, and so on.
Victim here doesn't mean "they put a gun on your head".
It means they removed a specific update model and replaced with a shitty one, while doubling the prices, and fucking you over if you want to continue using the platform.
Subscriptions may make more sense as B2B software where the needs change over time, businesses tend to like having a two-way conversation more and a well-defined bill at the end of each year isn't necessarily a bad thing. As a private consumer though, selling a subscription is a surefire way to make me say no -- I'm not doing it.
The production cost is subsidized as a Hobbie not as a profession, so it's hard to expect a 'consumer product'. When you put external money and corporate interest in your hobbies, something breaks.
Not saying open products don't have to exist, we all love them. They cover different creative needs, and usually are a gift for the community.
https://apenwarr.ca/log/20211229 - The Gift of It's your problem now
[0]: https://everymac.com/systems/mac-clones/index-mac-clones.htm...
That has [effectively] never been the case
You don't "own" software once you buy it
You own a license to use it (with some level of constraints around how/when/where you use it)
Even if that license happens to let you use it as much as you want anywhere you want, that doesn't mean it will continue to work "forever"
So many people don't understand that digital products are nothing at all like physical ones (except that you pay for both) - you own a paper book (albeit with restrictions on what you can do with it (can't make infinite/excessive copies of parts or all of it, etc), you have a license to an ebook; you don't own a copy of Microsoft Office - you have purchased permission to use it on X-many devices running Y operating system(s)
Even if you "own" some copy of a public domain or freeware tool, it's still constrained by the system(s) it will run on
That's neither here, nor there. I didn't argue we buy and then own software like a shoe or a tire. People bought software before and we know the semantic and legal differences between it and buying physical products.
But that's irrelevant, the discussion is about software-bought (with the license and all it entails) vs software subscription -- not about the semantics of bought software vs bought physical stuff.
My scribble on the HN wall that you're reading right now involved thinking about something more than I thought it deserved.
Well, you might not care or what to think about the market, but the market cares and thinks about you.
And if you don't pay attention, you can easily get taken for a sucker, overcharged, forced in abusive rent-seeking relationships and so on...
I'd fully expect someone to provide this if there is a market for it.
Kinda like how the money and safety provided by monopolies can’t be corrected by market forces either.
There are two markets: the market of customers who might buy your product and the market of VCs who might want to fund your startup. Lately the latter has been making most of the decisions. It's nearly impossible for a bootstrapped startup to compete against products sold at a loss with VC backing.
To take IntelliJ as an example, I can't think of an improvement since 2018 that I really would pay for. Largely enabling that is why they moved to the subscription process because people like me would use IntelliJ 18 for five or so years then update for OS support or whatever. €100/yr is way more than I used to pay for intelliJ, €240/yr is way more than I used to pay for Photoshop, etc. because SaaS conversions generally involved splitting the old upfront price as if customers were on a 2 year upgrade cycle rather than 5.
As for security updates, these feel like general hygiene, e.g. if someone's selling a physical electronic product here they need to keep it from manufacturer defects for two years. If my headphones have a bug where they catch fire the manufacturer needs to eat the cost and recall and fix/replace/refund them. Even if it does wipe out their margin from the upfront €100 cost. Similarly if commercial software lets someone own my computer with log message, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect recent software to be fixed.
100€/year for tools I use professionally every day and that improve my business is a no-brainer to me. Also I really like the way the prices go down if you use it for more than a year.
https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...
> Even if it does wipe out their margin from the upfront €100 cost.
That assumes what the initial price wasn't at least x20, though.
> splitting the old upfront price as if customers were on a 2 year upgrade cycle rather than 5.
It is also about perceived cost and maintenance costs: you can charge $10/y but ~$3 from this sum would go to fees and taxes, and you still need a profit margin and sustainability margin for the future growth (and recession) and to be able to give out refunds.
Yes, I assume this is true because these companies were profitable businesses charging 2x annual, not 20x, before the move to subscription models. Requiring 20 years of subscription to profit sounds highly risky and not all the kind of thing investors would support.
Doesn't change the fact that the world keeps going whether you're paying attention or not
though, the odds are quite good that version updates are improvements (security, platform support, features, etc)
As for the second part, that's not been my experience with commercial software at that point in its life at all. Maybe yours has differed.
You can keep running old version(s) as long as you want - but when a major rev releases, they have an upgrade option
The updates aren't "indefinite" - but they're pretty long-lasting
Nah you are missing the forest for the trees. Office at the moment is a gateway drug for Microsoft to get you on their cloud services. Office is not an end product anymore, it is a hook to capture market into their cloud services. They could sell office at a loss and still make money from all the Corporate/government contracts they got hooked on Azure.
Not to mention the anti competitive nature of these two parties. They can just bundle an additional app in their subscription at not additional cost, and this way drive a competitor out of business.
Forced updates that remove or disable features people use.
Adobe created and added XD (Sketch competitor) and put it into its CC.
Sketch's still doing great but I honestly don't know how long it will be the case as XD becomes more mature.
When and how did that happen? SAAS has been the wet dream of the big software houses for a long time, it was just not really acceptable for people for quite a while.
It's also sounds like this is about poor software developers making a living, but the reality is that software developers are amongst the highest paid professions and software companies are ruling the world and typically have the highest profits. In fact I would argue this really started to take over when investors realised that they could get insane ROI from very little investments for software companies and started to expect these kind of returns.
The other thing that is driving this push is that the FANGS want to commoditize everything except for "owning" large amount of data, because that's their value add and everything else is just a cost centre for them.
I of course understand your point that software developers need to pay rent, but i'm interested in exploring other possibilities, such as non-profits gathering donations to pay for development/UX (like framasoft does).
Now, the same problem applies to all kinds of workers, from bakers to carpenters. If we take a look at the wider picture, why would anyone have to pay for rent and food? Wouldn't we all be better off if we did what we loved and shared unappreciated tasks more equally so that money doesn't get involved?
It seems like we have a "these people are not getting paid enough to pay for basic survival while doing their critical job" discussion every other week.
Since the 1950s and 1960s. IBM, for example, provided source code for their products until 1983.[1] The full Apple II source code was included in the Apple II Reference Manual;[2] similarly for the Atari 400/800 Technical Reference Notes.[3]
1. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hSBrPSYgjI4C&redir_esc=y (page 59)
2. https://archive.org/details/applerefjan78/page/n78/mode/2up
3. https://archive.org/details/CO16555AtariHomeComputerTechnica...
This sounds true, but isn't. Some software grow new features and should sell new versions to users who want those features. But many applications continue to be rented while they reached peak features a long time ago.
Office 97 was fine. Office 2003 was more than fine. You buy it once, you should not need to buy it again, or "rent" it, for no benefit at all. Same for Windows NT / 7. Every Windows version since 7 is worse than the previous one!
Developers need to be paid only if they build something users want. Many times, the opposite seems to be the case: they build things users would really prefer not to have, yet are difficult to avoid.
But that's still work! So your only chance is to abandon the software and reap the insults coming from clients who upgraded to a new Windows installation and can no longer run your software.
If there was some realistic ways to bundle software in a fashion that it will continue to run forever even if environment changes, then sure–but your software better not be networked. (This is also where docker and the likes come into play).
Before the App Store, it wasn’t easy to update software, so it was straightforward to lock updates behind paid upgrades.
if there's a security vulnerability, i'm sure you'd expect the update to be free.
I don’t know if I can explain why. Maybe security wasn’t as big of a deal.
I think software sellers is doing a courtesy when they provide security updates for free. They are not legally obligated to do it. The users are entitled to switch to a competitor however - by not having their data held hostage (which, i think modern laws don't properly address).
There are no locks that can't be picked. If it unlocks itself all the time you bet your ass that I'll get to exchange it for a new one. Maybe you should be more careful when making analogies.
https://www.cycleryusa.com/articles/kryptonite-locks-recall-...
Every single comment thread on Parallels releasing update is crying "money grab" over and over.
By economy of scale. If you have 50,000 paying users, $10 each, that should cover either 5 man-years of average software development, or 2 man-years of one senior/principal level developer.
Most products in question have users in the millions, paying 10 to 100 times as much. Do the math.
This didn't happen by accident. Apple still refuses to add a paid version upgrades feature to the App Store. And by providing software like Numbers/Pages at a loss (for free) they normalized a zero or near zero cost of software in their ecosystem. At this point I'm pretty sure this is an intentional strategy of "Commoditizing their Complement"[1] on Apple's part.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
I also agree with you about Apples’s position re upgrades, which - until now - I found quite baffling. I guess that the subscription model is intended by Apple to create both a lower barrier to entry (cheaper in the short term) which reduces the entry cost for complements, and long term recurring revenue which potentially creates a lock-in effect - quitting the ecosystem means losing access to the investment in apps on the platform. It’s win-win from Apple’s perspective.
On the other hand I have always argued that when you write an app for iOS, you’re creating an accessory for their devices, and so you do so on Apple’s terms. (That’s fine IMO, as long as you understand that this is what you’re doing).
The bad part about these models is that they reflect the power of stakeholders in a company, not so much the worker/programmers. It reflects a mode of production keen on generating capital, not the interests of the workers on getting their salary, whatever many figures it may have.
The finger must be pointed at stakeholders doing what they do best; finding ways to generate capital. There is no animosity generated between work done and one paying for it at a market value, but there is between work and capital generation.
The marginal cost of another sale approaches zero. So if you make a popular enough product, you can sell many units rather than relying on rent seeking from your existing user base by forcing them into a SaaS subscription. Yes, the onus is now on the company to make good products that people want, and to continue to innovate such that people want to pay for the next upgrade. It’s easier to rent seek.
There is one case I can think of where this makes sense from both the provider and consumer side: niche software that has a high development cost and a small market. In this case, the one-time acquisition cost might be too high for many customers, so moving to a subscription model allows them to use something they couldn't otherwise afford.
Of course, that's not to say that updates shouldn't be expected.
Except when money does materialize out of thin air with fractional reserve banking. That's not for us, though. Obviously, we all know that burnin'-money for us tech folks grows on VC trees these days.
What confuses me is seeing this kind of question on the same forum where people often gripe about not being paid the 6 digit salary they expect to produce the software we use. How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.
PS: my comment comes off as advocating for the subscription model. I personally hate it with a passion: I’d rather pay for upgrades/updates to code, and pay for resources metered by my usage. My comment should be interpreted as understanding where the model comes from, not necessarily liking it.