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.
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.