Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them. People prefer free and second to that a one-time payment model. Maybe that payment only includes a year of patches, but people still prefer it.

Companies prefer subscriptions because it maximizes revenue. It's as simple as that. Zero sum game between company and consumer.

>Nobody asked for subscriptions. Nobody likes them

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

Leasing vs. ownership of cars is a great example of having a choice between ownership and a service. About 1/3 of cars are leased rather than owned.

I should say your choice to subscribe should not be taken away. I don't think my choice to own should be taken away.

The example breaks-down (no pun intended) on cars, though: software is likely not usable after 3-5 years (the length of a normal car lease)

Cars are typically usable for well over a decade :)

> software is likely not usable after 3-5 years

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?

>software should work essentially forever

Really? You're still running operating systems that are a decade old on hardware even older?

Why?

I own Lightroom 4.0 from 2012 (that's 10 years ago). It doesn't have the latest features, but it's still a very capable RAW processing software. I don't use it anymore because I've subscribed to the current Lightroom. I've subscribed last year, because (finally!) the new features were compelling enough for me. The old version still works well, even on latest-ish macOS. It still produces great pictures now, as it did 10 years ago.

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.

>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 newer versions of OSes aren't supposed to break compatibility, and in fact they really don't.

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.

But has it worked continuously on contemporary platforms for the entire period of its existence? I reckon there were many years between the retirement of the original platform and your ability to emulate that platform.

The point is that software should remain usable, but in your example that hasn’t been the case.

No, but that's because it's from 1983. It's only modern machines that have this awesome excess of power.

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!

My Acrobat 9.0 is getting pretty long in the tooth. I still run it on occasion, but there are more issues with DPI scaling and new PDF features.

It looks like Adobe does sell one-time purchases of Acrobat Pro 2020 for $450. I'll cease my cloud-yelling.

> follow the terms of the subscription, and you get to use whatever it is as long as you want

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.

>But you can run software you bought with capex as long as you want and it doesn’t cost more forever.

...only if you still have hardware and operating systems that support it (or that it supports, depending on your point of view)

> Nobody likes them.

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.

Except with financing you own the product and one day the payments end. You're saying that home ownership is the same as renting if you don't buy upfront? That's simply not true.

Also, the vast majority of people would prefer to live in a home they own than burn money renting.

Some financing leads to ownership. Leasing a car does not lead to ownership - it is an extended rental.

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?

Sometimes people think they want things a certain way because

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