If Adobe went out of business, you wouldn't lose any local stuff.
From [2] (due to sanctions from the US to Venezuela)
[1] https://twitter.com/AenderLara/status/1181291242531020800/ph...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20904030/adobe-venezuela-...
Do you have examples?
Most new businesses fail regardless of their business model, so you'd have to argue that this phenomenon was somehow worse for non-subs.
> Not to mention that a yearly subscription is cheaper than buying outright
Not in the long term.
For any well run company, the more the users are paying, the better the product is likely to be. With a once off purchase, any future improvements are based on a Ponzi scheme requiring constant new users which is unsustainable.
What do you mean by this exactly? There are always new customers to sell to, so of course you can make money by updating your product.
Will the buyer continue to receive free software updates forever? No, probably not. Eventually they may have to pay an upgrade fee. But the great part about upgrade fees compared to subscription is that the choice and timing of whether or not to upgrade is in the buyer's hands. Whereas with a subscription, it's a forced update, with the timing determined by the software developer, not the buyer. You pay yearly, or the software stops working now.
Yes, we aren't forced to buy from the exact same brands like in a subscription model. Practically, we end up buying the same products in a predictable schedule, to keep the wheel spinning.
Physical products wear out eventually, but they can last for many years. They're not necessarily perishable.
Cleaning products, washing powder, fabric softener, bleach, fuel, windshield wiper fluid, tires, batteries.
Books, sure, they seem to be maintenance-free. I guess glasses too.
Businesses are working year-round — manufacturers are manufacturing new products, software developers are writing software updates — and also selling year-round. If you run out of customers, that's of course a problem, but that's not a unique problem to software.
As a software developer, I sell new copies year-round, every day, and also release updates year-round. If I run out of new customers I'll let you know, but last month was actually my best sales month ever.
What do you mean exactly by "constant growth"? You need constant sales, yes. You don't necessarily need a constant increase in sales, if sales are at a sustainable level.
This is the trade-off, as far as I'm concerned. By paying one time, I get the product … once. It might be a bad purchase that I regret; that happens. But, if it's great, I want that product; I don't want the developer's new and greatest idea of how they think I want to use their product. Too many products that were once great ‘evolved’ away from being useful for me. For the software that I own (and that runs on a supported platform), I can just keep using it. For subscription software … well, too many developers don't care that they're leaving a dedicated base behind if they open up a new (and fickle) base.
And I'm at the extreme end of anti-capitalism. I'd prefer to see everything employee/citizen-owned. But in the world we actually live in today, I see no inherent problem with subscriptions.
There can be contingent problems. I won't, for example, subscribe to any music streaming services because they give musicians an unfair deal. But that's little to do with subscriptions per se.
It's a nice bonus when you get an upgrade for your payments. But other times you're an Adobe subscriber and lose access to your colors, because turns out you should also be subscribing to Pantone for those. And who knows what you'll have to pay for next.
But “life supporter” faded to “subscribe” after more time went by.
Much like the mirc thing really.
I kinda miss the days of “buy version X. Get X. X always works… tease with upgrades to get user to buy upgrade.”
He should've taken more money. I paid for Sublime Merge, but it's nowhere as useful or great (so far) as Beyond Compare.
I basically pirate everything that requires a subscription now or us a FOSS alternative, even though there was a period of time where I would pay for software between when I was poor and had to pirate everything and now when I can afford to pay for subscriptions but the situation with lack of control over SaaS is so fucking untenable that I just can't. I don't believe SaaS is moral, it basically removes all the power from the consumer and allows the software providers to rake you over the coals over and over. I'm not interested in funding such things. I feel more comfortable with piracy than I do with SaaS on a philosophical level.
SaaS companies don't innovate, they buy competitors because they're using an abusive business model with bad incentives.
P.S. SaaS can probably be implemented in a decent way, and some SaaS does actually provide an ongoing service, but in general I believe my point stands.
Excel today is way better than the Excel I used in the 90s. I wouldn't trade it for a moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...
Support for Android apps sounds nice, but you can't even reposition the taskbar anymore.
https://winaero.com/classic-calculator-windows-10-creators/
How can you f* up a simple calculator on a very complex one?
Windows, as an example, is an interesting one in that you’re paying once for a license and it’s good more or less indefinitely (or until things stop working and are no longer supported), but Microsoft does still have an obligation to be pushing out updates, whether security or QoL, so I’m not sure that it being worse over time has any reflection on the license model.
When Windows Vista and Windows 8 released, people got mad, and enough of them stuck to Windows XP and Windows 7 that Microsoft had to address it, for example by going back on the Windows 8 start menu. Now that they're switching to this permanent license, free upgrade, model, that is going away. Thankfully Windows 11 is very boring, but if they pulled off another 8 start menu, there'll be no real way for people to avoid it or have their voice heard now.
p.s.: Nope, no viruses or things like that. Windows 7 is so old that it's not supported by botnets anymore.
I've lost so much more time to work computers where I'm forced to use retail Win 10/11 and have to deal with intrusive update policies than I have due to malware.
Having to nuke a few computers from orbit once a decade is a small price to pay for having systems that I can trust to work the same as they did yesterday, systems that never interrupt my flow.
I’ve lost more work to forced updates resetting my computer randomly and making operation less stable than I ever have to malware (the latter being never in my adult life).
The biggest threats haven't come from direct external assaults on the OS for years. I expect a typical consumer device is more at risk from an out of date browser than any other type of vulnerability now. The biggest risk for most of us as personal users is someone stealing our data via a hack, which often doesn't require root/administrator access to the host system anyway if you can compromise something already Internet-connected like a browser or messaging app.
Of course old versions of Windows not getting updates from Microsoft any more is a concern on some level but it's probably a long way down the list for anyone who actually has a good reason to still be using the old versions. I know quite a few people with quite a few different and entirely rational reasons for doing so, though many of those reasons involve some other form of predatory business model by some other big company that makes hardware and/or software. (Hardware that was declared EOL and doesn't have drivers for newer Windows versions, software with some sort of DRM that ties it to running on a specific system, that kind of thing.)
As I said before this kind of vulnerability is still a concern. Obviously it's a much greater concern if you're talking about something like a laptop that might be connected to an untrusted network, which would be crazy with an unsupported or unpatched OS. But for a home user who stays on their own network it's probably quite a long way down the list of things to be worried about.
So I get it, they bought the hardware with a one-time purchase. The maker moved on. One day the OS moves on.
But the hardware company is predatory for not writing a (free?) driver for their obsolete hardware on a new OS?
Surely if the model is "buy once" then there's no expectation to return to the well for "software updates"?
The solution is, as you noted, to freeze the OS. Which is perfectly fine, as long as you are happy doing that.
The rest of the world deals with this problem by adopting standards. There are plenty of peripheral makers in the PC world who could perfectly well have followed or established standards too and then their equipment might be useful indefinitely through generic, long-lived drivers. In reality many of them chose to use proprietary protocols with no public documentation available instead. Building in artificial obsolescence is certainly a predatory business model.
Likewise, new CPU and/or chipset generations might require not just new drivers, but dedicated OS support, which in all likelihood won't be backported to the LTSB versions, either.
I may be an atypical user—I'm definitely sub-power user in this domain—but everything Adobe has got worse for me since moving to "Creative Cloud".
Fair enough. I didn't mean to claim that everyone had a negative experience, just that it was far from a one-sided thing where these apps could be said unambiguously to improve. ("In summary, Adobe Creative Cloud is a land of contrasts.")
Also the mandatory syncing across devices is annoying. I sometimes listen on my PC, and don't want my phone to lose it's place where I paused it previously.
Also finding playlists by "humans" not algorithms seems deliberately blurred. Spotify wants to push certain content, so they've designed their service to make it unclear or unintuitive if you want to find playlists curated by people only.
Still can't organise songs in any meaningful way, can't rate songs, playlists suck, shuffle is broken, and they keep pushing podcast content when I never listen to podcasts.
1Password also used to sync to Dropbox for free and even had an HTML version that could serve from Dropbox.
Also, arguably, shuffle is not broken, it is working as intended, as there is an intended method to shuffle the songs according to popularity, right? Unless they changed that.
FTFY
This is why I kept all of my old CDs, Mp3s, and DVDs... One day we're going to have to boycott everything and it will be painful for those who only had subscriptions on entertainment & productivity apps.
I'll load up windows 98 if I have to! I'll do it again!
Squeezebox Server was awesome, and these days it’s way easier and more accessible to host a media server and playback in ways you want.
I think lyrics was a bit of legal hurdle so Spotify had to get rid of it. I imagine they brought it back recently as they worked out a legal way to provide them again.
In either case, I do think some of the points the other comment made are prescient. Spotify Connect is definitely a killer feature and I think Spotify Wrapped is one of those cultural phenomenon that you can't reliably predict the impact of. Network effects definitely seem to be quite powerful.
I keep looking at Deezer for its cheap hi-def support (the premium plan now has FLAC, for the same price as Spotify). But integrations with non-officially sanctioned devices seem janky, at best.
Maybe things have improved, but at one point I had a Yamaha receiver, officially supported, which basically replicated the Deezer interface inside the receiver's app. I couldn't control it from my computer. IIRC Tidal was the same. With Spotify, this just works. Bonus points for supporting the use case of "having friends over who can play their music on my stereo".
I also use multiple "devices" to play music: phone, personal laptop, work laptop, personal desktops, media PC. I don't know how Deezer's "three registered device limit" is implemented, but I'd hate to have to log in again every time I change the computer.
Spotify Wrapped is also kind of a cultural phenomenon. People enjoy sharing and talking about it and I guess it's the default assumption that you're using Spotify so you can easily share playlists and stuff to other users. Spotify has the network that smaller services don't.
Unfortunately, something as basic as lyrics is rife with legal challenges, and you can't just slap it onto an app.
I think what makes it worse is that they've got a section of their community site where you can 'vote' for features and bugs to be fixed - why on earth you need a voting system for bugs is beyond me. But overall its pointless, theres feature requests going back nearly a decade with thousands of votes and all they keep saying is "keep voting". How about no, how about you actually update your damn platform.
Except on the desktop which was updated to be crippled (can't edit items) and it advertises for the SAAS version with every other click. Which, fuck them. Their move to SAAS has done nothing but corrupt what was a good software company.
IntelliJ - JetBrains actually offers perpetual model along with subscription. That is the reason I use their product.
Postman - I use free version to play with the APIs. It costs me nothing and if it disappears tomorrow my development is not going to get disrupted at all as for anything serious I just use plain old scripts that are free.
Companies ruining their product lines is not really a good argument against subscriptions unless the company has monopoly like power and customers have no choice but to stick with inferior (these exist). If it's a sticky product, it would've been sticky either way owned or subscribed. Password managers are commodities even if it takes effort to move.
Main problem here is bosses want to go with incumbent big dog or has a relationship with sales, sticking the company to products that are subpar or going downhill. If anything subscriptions make it so that there are competitors chasing those dollars while being willing to help you migrate
To be fair, I sampled some passwords, not all of them.
For attachments, it took me almost a day, I found an official command line tool called lpass and modified the existing script to do what I needed, then I had to manually re-attach every attachment to the right passwords. A giant pain overall.
Apparently there is a PR to export password history on their lpass tool, but it was never merged.
For services, it might make sense. Even so, what exactly is "getting better all the time" about Spotify the software? It's been the same for like 5 years now.
As for the rest: 1Password declined (turned to Electron shit), Creative Cloud keeps adding bloat while not adressing decades standing issues, IntelliJ is, I guess OK, Figma I don't use so can't tell.
And I know (even use) many more software that turned into subscriptions and now sit on their asses or deliver minimum value - and of course will stop working the moment you had enough with their lack of progress end your subscription.
The most glaring one: search. Which is verifiably worse UX now.
Other text entry fields don't seem to suffer from this problem. AFAIK this wasn't a problem before the switch to Electron.
Whoa, I didn't know that one. Was that functionality around in earlier version?
If Adobe worked like that I’d be like 75% pissed off at their products and pricing.
Recently they started to add more cloud/collaboration services/a web app and switched to a regular old subscription model, but you can bet your ass i'm staying on the legacy model for as long as I can.
The one reason why I tolerate IntelliJ's subscription/pricing model is that unlike Adobe, they actually do deliver constant and worthwhile updates. Their software also rarely crashes, and their universal workflow (across different languages, themes, key bindings, plugins) also works as promised.
If not for the above the subscription would be a very hard sell for me.
There’s also an unspoken but important accounting detail here - if you run an online software business and offer a one-time, lifetime purchase for your product, you are now contractually on the hook to provide that service to customers forever, even if your business stops growing, which means that the liabilities of your business are not capped. This is bad if you operate with a lot of cloud expenses, and it means that these businesses are unsustainable unless new customers keep coming in, whereas a subscription model scales with utilization.
The real rule is not pissing off your customer base by taking important services offline while they still use that particular product. Doing so would be a PR blunder, and obviously effect sales of future products.
You are paying for both the content and the software bundled together. And no, you don't get it "for free".
Ever-growing my ass. I've had lots of songs on my playlists removed because they were taken off the platform. And not some obscure acts, for example Westbam's Götterstrasse (which features anybody, from Brian Molko and Iggy Pop to Kanye and Lil' Wayne).
But I guess you have to keep in mind they are in an ongoing pivot to cloud and that understandably disgruntles those of their customers who have a strong aversion to cloudy products. If you look at 1Password as a standalone app for managing local vaults synced via dropbox, I guess you could argue it's kinda shitty by now and getting worse, and every cloud feature is a net-negative in that view. If I had to guess I'd say most people want a cloud solution these days, but I guess that may be what's behind a lot of the negative sentiment. Or maybe not, but as someone who buys 1Password Family for the cloudy features, has used it a lot at work and doesn't have a single local vault, I'm a very happy customer and I've yet to run into a non-trivial bug with v8.
You can use the version you buy forever.
I think it took the wrong turn around a year ago at the same they changed the splash screen (that is why I remember it), after that the updates have been worse.
Done. Everything else is meaningless.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1password-7-password-manager/i... and https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1password-8-password-manager/i...
That assumes that iOS 15 requires a new phone... which isn't the case. Apple generally has an excellent track record of supporting older devices when they release new major OS versions.
Taking a look at the devices that support iOS 15[0], the oldest one appears to be the iPhone 6S... which was released in 2015. So you could theoretically use the new 1Password 8 on iOS 15 on a phone that is 7 years old. No need to pay for a new phone.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...
Meanwhile, Sublime Text and Procreate hold up and I’m not paying monthly.
Im also quite worried about privacy with their shit tastic hosted vaults and still use my own local Copies.
1password is always my first example of what goes wrong for the user when companies decide they should subscribe for $50/year to a product they once bought for $40.
Spotify is more of a content provider, but even there, a few year ago I found it to be one of the best software out there and their Spotify connect was just magic. Not hey seem to be everywhere: soundbars, watches, the apps are a bloated mess that I need to restart Spotify desktop in order to update the like of a song that I liked on my phone. But this is the natural lifecycle of software products, something starts off as a great product coming to replace some sort of legacy monster, only to end up becoming the monster that they replaced.
Instead, it's often endless addition of features no one asked for and UI redesigns/reorgnization. No thanks. I'd probably be willing to pay a subscription to withhold that part.
That’s a huge assumption, likely wrong.
The progress is real and if you stop paying, you lose the ability to upgrade your IDE, but the older versions still work.
However, I agree...pirating is a must-do these days. It's almost impossible to figure out how well a software package is going to react to your needs without actually using it on said needs.
I do, however, think it's very important to remind everyone that you eventually must buy the product if it's filling your needs well enough.
Pirating is a crappy solution to a crappy problem.
> I basically pirate everything that requires a subscription now or us a FOSS alternative… and now when I can afford to pay for subscriptions but the situation with lack of control over SaaS is so fucking untenable that I just can't.
Imagine stealing peoples work you admit you can afford, and claiming their business model is immoral!
The only moral model is free software.
SaaS is a perversion created by a system that cannot separate value from scarcity even though the reality is that software is infinitely replicable.
People need new business models. Selling bits doesn't work. Attempting to make it work requires the destruction of free computing as we know it.
So you'll be okay with me photocopying a printed book you published and giving it away for free, because "trivially" is a relative term, and I can certainly "trivially" reproduce your book a million times (compared to 12th century monks copying holy works by hand)?
> Attempting to make it work requires the destruction of free computing as we know it
And I suppose copyrighted printed books (and poems, and song lyrics) destroyed "free press" as we know it?
Yes.
> And I suppose copyrighted printed books (and poems, and song lyrics) destroyed "free press" as we know it?
That's not what I was talking about. The destruction of free computing will come about due to copyright enforcement and the technology necessary for its implementation.
Copying is a fundamental computer operation. If I'm in control of the computer, I can make it copy anything including copyrighted works and there's nothing they can do about it. So how do you prevent people from copying whatever they want? You take control of the computer.
This is our reality today. This is their solution to the "allow them to run all programs except those we don't like" problem. Our computers are already pwned right out of the factory. They have inaccessible memory, secure enclaves, ring -3 operating systems overseeing everything, cryptographic checks to ensure the corporation's system hasn't been "tampered with", the works. Apple computers have cryptography that prevents you from running software not blessed by trillion dollar corporations.
With this technology in place, our computing freedom is gone. We can no longer do what we want, only what they allow. It's gonna get way worse. One day we're going to need government signatures to run software because democratized cryptography undermines their authority and is too subversive to be allowed for the common citizen.
I think computers are among the most important inventions of mankind and far too valuable to sacrifice for the sake of irrelevant business models from centuries ago. One would think other Hacker News users would understand and agree since the copyright industry works every day to undermine and destroy everything that's dear to us.
For example - I don't think subscription licensing for media is moral, and I think legally it's a rife place for some serious case law.
Simple example - Recording shows for personal consumption (time shifting) is absolutely allowed under current copyright law. If I subscribe to netflix for a month and record every show I want to watch to my personal NAS... I'm not breaking the law at all. I'll then happily stop paying the subscription after a month. Moral? Probably not. Legal? Sure.
But... what if I really do want a moral way to consume netflix content at a later date for a non-recurring, non-changed-at-their-whim cost? Well - sucks to be me because there's literally no way to buy it. I think that's also fairly immoral. I'm literally being held captive to a subscription for eternity, with no way to negotiate the deal, and the real loss of any catalogue item at any time with no recourse. Moral? Fuck no. Legal? Sure.
So... Where is the middle ground? Because I'd really, desperately like to see a better middle ground. Where I don't have to feel like a thief, and also don't feel like I'm getting extorted to watch some shows.
This mostly also holds for many saas companies. It's especially obvious in cases where the product used to be a stand-alone binary that I could install, but is now a packaged saas product, that's arguably worse (adobe photoshop comes to mind - but lots of companies are moving this direction).
I used to be willing to enter a deal where I got a static item in exchange for a fixed cost - but the new deal is... I get ephemeral products that change price/features/capabilities at any moment and with zero recourse.
And companies aren't doing this because it benefits the users - they're doing it because it's LITERAL rent seeking behavior. They know that profits are higher with this strategy.
So again - is stealing it moral? I would say no. But I don't think that in any way invalidates that the subscription model is hands down abusive to customers. Personally I've moved to self-hosted and open source everywhere I can.
> So... Where is the middle ground? Because I'd really, desperately like to see a better middle ground. Where I don't have to feel like a thief, and also don't feel like I'm getting extorted to watch some shows.
Most content can be purchased outside of Netflix at some point, on DVD or another medium.
At least it's still mostly possible to buy a set of *.flac files when you want some music.
Then buy the streaming version. If it is available by DVD, then you can probably find it available to purchase digitally.
You cannot buy Netflix original movies on DVD or blu-ray. They do sell some of their series (although not all of them - mostly just the very popular entries).
I think that maybe what you really don't like is the fact that US monopolies are not regulated and so all of your options suck whether or not they are SaaS companies.
The reason you believe these things is because people build software in stupid ways in order to justify ongoing costs. Cloud-first software architecture is something you do because you want to collect rents, and then you try to write good software DESPITE it. It's not a sound technical choice for most of the software that goes that route.
Same and similar. I resurrected an old pc and re-installed som backed-up old software and it mostly worked...well!! Apart from that, I prefer portable, non-installable software. I got burned a couple of years ago - spent €100s on some music software, two months later it went to subscription, for some Reason.
This software was mainly sold to mid-large size companies, so although it could be trivially defeated with minimal reverse engineering, I doubt this was ever a real issue.
Every new version of Windows that Microsoft released would coincide with many customers purchasing the latest version of our software.
And I also don't get microsoft bugging me every day to install windows 11.
> New release '20.04.5 LTS' available. > Run 'do-release-upgrade' to upgrade to it.
The Debian package manager telemetry is opt in, for example. Whereas iirc Ubuntu used to bundle an Amazon store in their default release? And who could forget that guy who got a cold call "hey, we saw you spun up a Ubuntu VM in Azure. Want to buy support?"
Aside from the other point, the idea that someone continuing to pay money for software is going to keep the company from going out of business seems misguided.
I still subscribe, pay fucking money, to Meetup.com but over the years, despite a large subscriber base, the site become a buggy moribund piece of junk (but still the only thing in it's area). Such drift into worthless is typical for just about all subscriber software because software needs maintenance and because once a subscriber model reaches saturation point, the primary approach of management is simply milk it for all the money possible by reducing labor costs to the minimum (look what Musk's doing to Twitter, it's not weird it's typical).
That may be true for Windows, but it isn't true for Mac (unless you never upgrade your computer).
I have been writing and supporting the same piece of commercial software since 2005 on Windws and Mac. v1 of my software probably still works on Windows 11. Not a chance on Mac (it has gone PowerPc -> Intel -> Arm in that time!).
They almost never stop working on you, and are far easier to maintain cross platform.
Using the same thing on Mac at work and Linux at home is a joy.
Increasingly, I actively try to use the command line approach to all my software. Not because it's better (often it... isn't. FFmpeg is actually remarkably annoying for example), but it's bloody reliable.
Who needs that? I use office 97 with Microsoft’s office converters package for modern formats. Super fast and does all I need
I use photoshop cs2. Local. Fast. Offline
Software can easily reach “good enough”.
What is it with people today that makes them think that no updates or no recent changes is bad?
I WANT my tools to be stable and not change from under me.
Own-it-for-life means "I expect free updates for the next 20 years" which as we've seen with the mIRC author isn't the best business model. Turns the software developer into indentured servitude to all the people who bought it in the past.
The JetBrains model where you own it up need to rent it to get upgrades seems to work reasonably well, but given how languages like C# and Rust are moving forwards all the time you want get those upgrades. Since I want to see the developers doing that work for me, it seems rational that I should be paying them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33864660
(Whatever perf issue HN is happening makes it hard to figure out right now)
And offering upgrades for life and then trying to backtrack on it is even worse.
Individual customers, and corporate customers, are wildly different.
The "buy it for life" business model works very well if you're trying to launch a mass market product to individuals.
In your first year of a product, those users who'll pay upfront 3 years of subscriptions for a "lifetime pass" are an awe-inspiringly useful customer segment to identify.
They're your way to run experiments to find "what am I doing well and how can I do more of it."
Plus, they're effectively loaning your business money against future revenues. During the first 2 years of your product, that's an amazing deal all round.
Just... never, ever, let corporations "buy it for life." Corporations will exploit by it for life dramatically.
What’s so agonizing about it? You check the release notes to see what’s been added, what’s been removed. Then check the reviews and make a simple decision.
> as strange as "owning" a music album.
Physical copies of music albums exist. It’s much stranger to me to rely on the streaming provider to listen to my favorite albums when everything in the streaming world can be removed tomorrow over some copyright issues.
Is it still alright to own a book?
praying that this is a joke rn
software was (marginally) better before than now. congratulations, you fell for their trick
In many ways, I feel much software needs to transition to "be maintained," very quickly.
So much engineering time and energy is spent releasing not very useful, incremental features.
Engineers... ironically, need to give up sooner in many cases.
The hubris of "the thing I make is genuinely useful, surely" is the profession's Pandora's box.
Pride is most dangerous sin etc etc.
Really? How many companies did you see do this? Because I see lots of companies still around who have been selling software for decades. Because the marginal cost of software is near zero it’s possible to make money off upgrades and new products because it’s not a linear function of labor to customers.
I think it’s more profitable to charge as a service. Adobe and Microsoft weren’t at any risk of bankruptcy when they switched to subscription.
Just my two cents but your comment here seems like it was pulled out of a some future corporate dystopian novel.
Most “subscription” models I see these days are more cash grabs than actual continued support and feature enhancements. Just take a look at the ios app store if you want to see simple apps exploiting a “subscription” model.
I still own the very first music album I bought, an LP purchased in 1979. I still play it on the same turntable which my dad gave me.
> Not to mention that a yearly subscription is cheaper than buying outright
> the idea of "owning" software feels positively archaic to me, as strange as "owning" a music album.
1) Upgrades aren't all that valuable in lots of cases. Why should software require constant upgrades to work right? Lots of rarely upgraded software works just fine. The easy example here is Sublime Text. One of the best text editors, bar none. It had how many years between major upgrades? And old versions work just fine.
Maybe for security sensitive software constant upgrades are important, because there are adversarial actors trying to break it. But that doesn't apply to things like Photoshop.
2) My best guess is that the real reason for companies moving to the subscription model is effectively as a form of seller-provided financing. Remember how much Photoshop used to cost when you could buy it? After googling around, I see prices in the $700-800 range. Now it's like 20 bucks a month, so Adobe makes the same amount after a few years of a subscription, but in addition probably gets a lot more casual users who don't quite realize that the monthly payment still adds up over the end.
(Edit) Also, one other point on the whole notion of software companies going out of business because people didn't buy the next version. Isn't that just the same thing as planned obsolescence in the non-software world? Don't we get mad when non-software companies insist on forcing people to re-buy their products over and over again in order to make money? Also, how do non-software companies manage to pull it off? Honda cars last a famously long time, yet we don't see people shedding tears for them because once you buy a Civic you don't have to buy the "upgrade" in a year.
If the Monthly Recurring Revenue is a make or break for companies that provide the software, then inversely the Monthly Recurring Expense would also be a make or break factor for customers or business using the service. Buy once may reduce the overall cost for customers and allow them to invest in upgrades only when their revenue is better.
There has to be balance and empathy for the customer too..
With subscription based software there is no set moment to do that, so there are naturally a lot of sleeping subscriptions and otherwise subscriptions which are rarely re-evaluated on its value. In my opinion this makes the vendor lazy.
How is a subscription model any less volatile to the long-term support of an application from the end-user's perspective? To my mind, a subscription service is equally likely to close up shop if the subscriber count dips low enough, which is something that can happen as easily as a "new version" failing to sell well in a purchase model.
The downside is compounded, however, in a subscription model because when a subscription service fails, every user is impacted, both those who would have upgraded had it been a purchase and those who would have kept plugging away with an outdated version. At least with the purchase model, abandonware continues to function for some time.
Funny you should mention owning music because I also prefer to do exactly that rather than pay for a subscription service. And this preference is for two reasons: (a) I like being able to use the music where-ever and whenever I want, and (b) I like that more money goes to the artist via Bandcamp than say, Spotify.
I would much rather own the software, books, and music I buy in a hard copy form than a "digital" form that can be removed without my consent.
You cannot have it both be cheaper and have the developers earn more money.
> a yearly subscription is cheaper than buying outright
That depends on how often you buy. If you bought every update for full price, maybe you're right. If not, the consumer has much more freedom to decide on their course of action, consider alternatives or just save money while sticking to the old version. Consumers are completely deprived of choice with the subscription model.
> in some cases I no longer need the software, or now prefer to switch to a competitor
Have you met Adobe? Those guys are great. They let you pre purchase an entire year of their subscription with no other options. Oh and you can't cancel in the middle, or rather you can, but don't expect a refund. It's so great they have this business model that allows them to rake in money while basically handcuffing their customers to their plans! The shareholders are ecstatic.
> the idea of "owning" software feels positively archaic to me, as strange as "owning" a music album.
This is starting to feel like a generational gap. I don't know how old you are, but perhaps being accustomed to subscriptions from a young age will make you more tolerant towards this business model. I think that anyone who owned their own music, and software, having total liberty and no dependencies on when you and how you can access your stuff, will find letting go of this liberty a difficult prospect.
The company part - just look at how Adobe increased profits when they moved to subscription model. Many vocal users hated it since day 1, but majority goes and buys it even if they complain, even if it costs them much more long term. Why? Well if you are a photographer, you will need Lightroom or Photoshop as today as in 10 years. Nobody at Adobe cares that you would be perfectly fine with same version as purchased, not enough cash can be squeezed out like that.
As for users part, it has 2 subparts - quite a few really benefit since they get cheaply access to otherwise expensive tools (like say editing 2 videos per year in Premiere if we stay in Adobe realm). But most simply see increased TCO long term on product they are sort of 'stuck' with, in sense they have workflow and tool they are good at, fast, and understand it, possibly even paid for some plugins or similar. Very few people migrate away from Lightroom for example, competition would have to create something remarkably similar which normally is not how product strategy looks like.
At least they didn't start requiring you to move all your assets to their cloud in order to use them, that's outright slavery sold as added value. I am sure companies like Adobe would be very happy to put this in place.
So yeah, companies do it because they can, if they feel that market will accept this move and move on, and not stop using its products. Kind of semi-monopolies. I do expect Microsoft will come up with similar model for OS if it hadn't already done so.
This is my exact issue with lightroom. I have 9 yrs of edit history, and workflows setup + a mobile app that seamlessly imports everything from my phone into my main catalog alongside my "big camera" shots. If there was a competitor that migrated all of this cleanly, I'd be happy to modify my workflows to break out of the lock in.
In their words "Why? Because we believe you should get the program you paid for, bug-fixed and updated for as long as we develop FL Studio." [1]
[1] https://www.image-line.com/fl-studio/lifetime-free-updates/
I don’t want to worry about waking up one day and finding that, because the company’s chief designer needed to do something to justify his salary, the whole UI of my software was redone and everything was moved around. I don’t want to find that it now runs 2x slower because an update brought unwanted features. It’s like buying a hammer and a week later the handle is shorter and it turned into a hatchet.
The problem with not having solid infrastructure for updates is security issues. Of course, there is a class of software where this is not a problem, but determining whether software falls into that category is pretty difficult given the structure of modern OS and the propensity for things like static linking. You have 3 choices: * leave software vulnerable. * track security vulnerabilities is all your software and its dependencies and manually update. * Bite the bullet and have robust auto-update infrastructure.
I’d argue the bigger problem is that implementing robust, dependable and user configurable auto updates with easy rollbacks etc. is a complex problem, so every piece of software ends up implementing its own shitty variant that sacrifices user control and doesn’t distinguish between necessity and churn.
So very true, but the complexities can be considerably reduced by not forcing updates - whether security, dependability, or UX. So many updates I see nowadays are the very 'churn' you mention.
It's disappointing - is what we have really all that is possible...? I actually don't think so, but what will improve the situation? Some kind of AI thing? With my FOSS desktop software background, I think the disappearance of "applications" in favor of a more integrated system also holds some promise. Without companies, there is no need to have marketable distinct pieces of software.
> By this point, the idea of "owning" software feels positively archaic to me, as strange as "owning" a music album.
You would have to be very young to not have owned (physical) music albums - and I'm a pretty young person myself.
I really hope this isn't a bot/paid PR thing, because boy would someone have wasted their money.
I would absolutely reject a subscription for using my operating system though.
So yeah, subscriptions are fine but not for everything.
Generally speaking, I'm happy to pay a subscription because this way I get a steady stream of all the updates, and it's much more likely the company has a sustainable business model. And I don't have to agonize over whether paying for a major upgrade is worth it.
Not to mention that a yearly subscription is cheaper than buying outright, and I find that in some cases I no longer need the software, or now prefer to switch to a competitor. So I feel like in the end, a greater proportion of my money goes to the software companies who have actually continued to earn it.
By this point, the idea of "owning" software feels positively archaic to me, as strange as "owning" a music album.