Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription Software

Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by fy20 on Friday January 21, 2022 @08:22AM (#30023109)

Photoshop CS2 in 2005 was $599 for the full version. Today that's the equivalent of $850. That would pay for 3.5 years with the current subscription model. So if you were upgrading every 2 years it's actually cheaper now, but of course if you wanted to keep the old version for 5 years it would be more expensive.

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Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by ericd on Friday January 21, 2022 @09:14AM (#30023729)

Right, and the old way let you choose your upgrade cycle, rather than letting the company choose how often they’d like to make you buy.

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Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by warrenm on Friday January 21, 2022 @09:55AM (#30024286)

Outside of [possibly] amateur hobbyists, who isn't upgrading their software/hardware at least every ~3 years?

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Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by Macha on Friday January 21, 2022 @11:11AM (#30025507)

Have you _seen_ the IT infrastructure of some non-tech companies? The amount of companies that had to scramble for the Windows 7 (released 2009) EOL in 2020?

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Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by warrenm on Friday January 21, 2022 @01:12PM (#30027520)

I'm aware that some laces are completely unaware of the world around them

Doesn't change the fact that the world keeps going whether you're paying attention or not

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Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by ericd on Friday January 21, 2022 @02:46PM (#30028974)

Do you think version 21 of a piece of desktop software is usually substantially better than version 20? Do you think those places are missing out on a lot?

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Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by warrenm on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:12AM (#30058570)

I have no idea what version 21 vs version 20 of some hypothetical piece of software is in every case

though, the odds are quite good that version updates are improvements (security, platform support, features, etc)

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Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by ericd on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @04:59PM (#30092576)

Of course that's unknowable, which is why I said "usually".

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.

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Re:Tell HN: A Conversation Needs to Be Had over Subscription... by warrenm on Thursday January 27, 2022 @10:16AM (#30101524)

I cannot recall any commercial software I've used in the last quarter century or more wherein a new release did not bring a host of fixes and features along with it

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