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.
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.