I actually prefer the subscription model for my software, if the monthly price is reasonable.
It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time.
I hate the other model, where with Windows and Office you end up getting useless forced upgrades and terrible makeovers because they need that upgrade revenue every few years. Or the ad driven model. I wish I could pay a personal Google subscription for better results and no search ads, for example.
Subscriptions allow companies to better develop organic roadmaps that's not tied to an upgrade cycle, and deemphasizes the needless shiny that's often there for no reason. They don't need to refresh the UI unless there's just an underlying good reason to (like with IntelliJ), but can still keep adding new features.
As a user it means I don't have these huge spikes in my budget every few years and can just plan for a predictable monthly cost. Or sub for something for a month or two and cancel when I don't need it, which I do often.
Owning software is worthless to me because their effective lifespans are so short anyway, usually just a couple years, before the ecosystem has moved on and left them behind anyway. It's not like code is collectible or appreciates over time. Owning it just means you prepay years in advance and lose access to the present value of that money in the meantime, and can't easily switch to a competitor if and when one appears. The subscription forces companies to keep delivering value unless they want you to cancel.
I actually prefer the subscription model for my software, if the monthly price is reasonable.
Once the company has lock-in, you have no control over their pricing. The reason a company offers a good deal on a subscription is to get enough customers for it to be worthwhile to start soaking those same customers for whatever they are willing to pay - or imposing things to get more money or etc.
You can see this play out with MS Windows, Twitter and so-forth.
It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time.
Edit: It's amazing to me that someone thinks they can give a company money and expect it to be spent on what they want. The company always to prefers to pocket your dollars as profit. If you send them a check or something, that's what they'll do.
If I had data locked up in some software I would rather have an ongoing relationship rather than just hope that they decide to make a new version when an OS update or other critical need arises.
"Data locked up in some software" in practice means strictly SaaS with cloud storage.
If you have the data locally, you can always migrate it - whether manually, through the software that made it (e.g. if the app isn't supporting your new OS, then run it in a VM with an older OS to export to a more forward-compatible format), or through third-party converters. If enough people are in this position, someone will write a solution.
If your data resides in the cloud, however, it's up to the vendor whether or not you'll be able to access it or export it, and how much of it. If they're just sunsetting the product, you probably, maybe, will be able to get some data back (which is almost definitely in some unknown ad-hoc format, quite likely a database dump in form of JSON, so you'll need a converter anyway). If they terminate your account because of $random reason, you won't even have a chance.
Or, to borrow a cliché, "not your files, not your data".
They tend to for any software with non-negligible user base. The more so if those users suddenly all need one. Worst case, you can make one yourself. But none of that is even a possibility if the data is locked away in someone else's cloud.
These days its incredibly easy to find or write something up to extract data from a service. Take Spotify or Apple Music for example - its very easy to export out of either despite neither of it allowing it in their TOS or providing any tools to do so.
I suppose that's easy to get the contents of private Facebook groups, then?
Notice, getting stuff out of Facebook - or Twitter or similar walled-gardens - is double quandary. How you do scan/scrape/whatever the data and how do you avoid being banned for doing so. This given the formats/apis etc constantly and the degree of abusive platform protection also changing (we've seen Twitter's upheavals, imagine a similar abusive dictator buying Facebook and see how much he can squeeze).
And I'm sure someone will "you shoulda know about Facebook but my subscription sure ain't gonna trap me, no". Okay then...
> It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time.
> Owning software is worthless to me because their effective lifespans are so short anyway, usually just a couple years, before the ecosystem has moved on and left them behind anyway.
I find it strange that these two sentences are in the same comment.
I used VLC, Firefox (Phoenix), LibreOffice (OOo), MSOffice, paint, photofiltre, and notepad++ when I was a teen. They still work today.
The trending app ecosystem, the social network du jour and the JS framework fever seem to have given the impression to the new generation that there is not other way to do this.
It's not necessarily a generational thing. I grew up on DOS before Windows was common, remember v1 of OpenOffice and Phoenix and the birth of CSS and JS, and have been making webpages since before the div tag was invented. I bought and used many tools like Notepad++ and Ultraedit and Sublime, and used the heck out of Paint Shop Pro and some GIMP and the rest.
But many of those tools are quite a bit less powerful than the commercial subscription ones. Creative Cloud CC is very powerful when you use it professionally, as is IntelliJ. Worth it to me because I know the difference, having used both kinds of tools and payment models for more than 20 years. These days I make a little more money than I did back in the 90s, so I don't pirate or demand freeware and would rather pay for something sustainable and have it work well because my time is worth it.
Take IntelliJ for example. There was a big uproar when they moved to a subscription model, but their products have continued to get better since. The company would've gone bankrupt otherwise. Instead, their pricing is now both very fair and includes a perpetual fallback license, while their software still keeps improving. I am happy to pay for it because it adds tremendous value over VSCode or Notepad++ in my workflows.
Of course some FOSS software is still amazing. VLC is still the best player I know of. Audacity is still useful and I find myself using that more than Audition.
But other times the subscriptions just deliver better software that I'm happy to pay for.
I don't where/when/how this myth started. If anyone from JetBrains is reading this, please asking you sales/PR/marketing team to make it crystal clear on your website so that we can kill off this silly myth that hurts your excellent brand.
Many of those would be broken in various ways if they were not updated. For starters: VLC due to missing codecs, firefox not supporting newer standards.
All the software you mentioned was most likely heavily updated since your teens.
VLC got popular because it was the first media player that would always play whatever you threw at it. But thinking back to those times, perhaps there was merit in those older players which stayed the same, but made you occasionally install a codec pack. It was a sensible separation between the "chrome" that was stable in time, and the decoders which were changing often to accommodate new and better formats.
How so? Tech is moving so fast across multiple fronts that software obsolescence happens much quicker than before, not due to the developer themselves, but I mean things like Windows changing driver models, Apple changing silicon, Android APIs constantly evolving, web technologies mutating like a cancer... old versions quickly become useless without active maintenance.
Meanwhile the subscription services largely keep pace with one another and stay compatible because most users are on the latest version.
> old versions quickly become useless without active maintenance.
I think this is somewhat exaggerated. Not to mention that if you're using older versions of 3rd party software, you can use older versions of the OS too. In fact, many people don't like to update their OS version. If it ain't broke...
> Meanwhile the subscription services largely keep pace with one another and stay compatible because most users are on the latest version.
How is this different from upfront paid software? The latest versions of that stay compatible too. You may have to pay an upgrade fee, but that generally doesn't happen every year, unlike subscriptions.
Is it? A lot of my favorite games no longer work on the latest operating systems because they were on a buy once model. Others had their multiplayer shut down.
As for upfront paid software, sometimes it's also just not worth it to the developer to make a whole new version anymore or they shut down. The shareware industry is pretty much dead today, for example, although free trials for cloud subs are still very common. I think the sub model smooths out the feast and famine cycles, ultimately, and make for more intentional and less panicked releases.
Those old games still run on the old operating systems, and you can still get those systems because they were also on a buy once model.
If those old games were subscriptions instead, they would probably be unplayable today. Their authentication servers would be shutdown after so few players remained that it wouldn't be worth it for the company to keep it going. Just like a lot of multiplayer games are closed nowadays.
phrom already mentioned the "old subscription-products die" aspect.
The other thing games tended to do, that is basically a subscription, was frequent, sometimes yearly, releases. You just buy this years iteration of fifa or CoD. Playing the latest "version" will on current hardware, just like a subscription. Compare that to Fortnite, where you don't have a choice but play the latest version (i heard they removed building?!? not that i liked it, but that's certainly a change!).
You could consider https://kagi.com/ for a subscription-based, ad-free search. I've been using it for a few months and haven't had a case where the Google results were superior.
Funny, I've had the exact opposite experience, in most cases.
It definitely depends on the query, but Kagi seems to do better at common (for me) queries. In particular, it tends to recommend authoritative sources instead of clickbait/SEO sources (e.g. official documentation instead of w3schools).
Google does better at some queries, particularly those that require a bit of parsing of the query text, understanding when two words represent one concept, etc. But you can usually tell when Kagi is doing poorly at those and fall back to Google by adding !g on the end of your query.
For me, it's: s/fall back to Google/fall back to StartPage
(-:
What I mean is: StartPage.com is Google results with better filters and without the "bubble" that Google likes to put you in. Although…
I did have to reluctantly block StartPages ads on some puters,though, after they resorted to "make the topmost ads appear right where the topmost results I was alread reading and/or about to click already were". I'd have blocked only the topmost ads, but I timed-out while trying to conjure a better CSS selector. I was mildly annoyed with their "ads look almost the same as results" in recent years, but this latest move may eventually convince me to block StartPage's ads everywhere.
I like Kagi a great deal! My first attempt to leave Google was DDG, and I found myself mostly using bangs to search Google. I do not do that with Kagi. I actually use their search results!
I pay for an Office365 subscription so I can have it on Mac, but on my Windows PC I use Office 2010, which I paid for when it was current. It is lightning fast compared to the current release of Office, and has all the features I could ever want.
The company I worked for '05-'12 used Office 2003 that whole time. It was fine!
For authoring you can probably side-step that with a converter, unless you're one of those phantom people who use any but the most basic Word features.
(I don't know who those phantom people are. I'd love to meet them and learn from them. Everyone I know cares so little about the quality of the document itself they hardly use anything beyond immediate-mode font and paragraph styling...)
Subscriptions forces companies to keep re-inventing the wheel for the 100th time and inevitably break something they may have already perfected. A lot of software doesn't need to do more than it already does.
> Subscriptions allow companies to better develop organic roadmaps that's not tied to an upgrade cycle
This point is at the center of the move to subscriptions, and I think we should be more explicit that we want companies to eventually _not_ significantly upgrade products and keep them alive with minimal changes for a long time, while we're still paying for subscriptions.
It I think really important to lower the pressure on companies to have a constant flow of updates every month just to justify to users the money they're paying for. That would bring the old "one big revision every year" cycle to a more severe "meaningless small updates every months".
The roadblock is of course customers wondering why they're still paying every month for a product that sees little change, and I don't have an answer to that, except the alternative had other issues as well.
> This point is at the center of the move to subscriptions, and I think we should be more explicit that we want companies to eventually _not_ significantly upgrade products and keep them alive with minimal changes for a long time, while we're still paying for subscriptions.
How is that different from rent-seeking?
In particular, what does "keep the software alive" mean? I can understand that cloud services have a fixed cost of upkeep. I can understand that less so for software that runs on my own pc.
> The roadblock is of course customers wondering why they're still paying every month for a product that sees little change, and I don't have an answer to that, except the alternative had other issues as well.
That question is not that dumb. If you don't want any meaningful change to your software, why do you care that the company still exists? You might just as well have an old version that still works, whether or not the company is still maintaining it.
So yeah, in that situation, apart from the occasional security fix, I really wouldn't know what I'm paying for.
Yes, the question of paying upfront or sustaining a subscription isn’t simple.
I refuse to pay for Adobe CS and keep an old Lightroom license around when needed, but pay for Bitwarden just to keep them around for security updates and new OS support, and absolutely don’t want them to add new flashy features every month. There’s no one size fits all I think.
I've never really seen a subscription program stagnate in practice. In fact I find that subscriptions allow companies to detach revenue from feature planning and deliver useful features rather than shiny new UIs.
Of course it's subjective but my feeling is Photoshop hasn't added anything of significance since they went subscription. The majority of new features have been cloud intergration (something not even many of Adobe's employees want) and UI tweaks
You and I must be using completely disjoint set of subscription software, because I can't think of any that ended up delivering useful features and improvements, instead of cutting out and dumbing down the functionality, while endlessly messing with the UI.
That's a big reason people want sta ility of "buy once": to protect the tool they use now from becoming worse over time.
Agreed, the problem I face is that the pricing is hard to make fair. As a casual user I might use a particular tool very infrequently but some users are using it commercially and getting massive value out of it. It's hard to get the pricing right so both users are paying a fair amount for the value they get. This is the same problem as "buy once" software though, $2,000 is too much for the home user while it's pennies to the corporate user.
It gives me faith that they can actually sustain their business and pay their employees to maintain and improve the service over time.
I hate the other model, where with Windows and Office you end up getting useless forced upgrades and terrible makeovers because they need that upgrade revenue every few years. Or the ad driven model. I wish I could pay a personal Google subscription for better results and no search ads, for example.
Subscriptions allow companies to better develop organic roadmaps that's not tied to an upgrade cycle, and deemphasizes the needless shiny that's often there for no reason. They don't need to refresh the UI unless there's just an underlying good reason to (like with IntelliJ), but can still keep adding new features.
As a user it means I don't have these huge spikes in my budget every few years and can just plan for a predictable monthly cost. Or sub for something for a month or two and cancel when I don't need it, which I do often.
Owning software is worthless to me because their effective lifespans are so short anyway, usually just a couple years, before the ecosystem has moved on and left them behind anyway. It's not like code is collectible or appreciates over time. Owning it just means you prepay years in advance and lose access to the present value of that money in the meantime, and can't easily switch to a competitor if and when one appears. The subscription forces companies to keep delivering value unless they want you to cancel.