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Software companies used to survive through maintenance contracts for enterprise software and upgrades for consumer software. With the Apple App Store model, all

Software companies used to survive through maintenance contracts for enterprise software and upgrades for consumer software. With the Apple App Store model, all upgrades are required to be free. This of course took a huge chunk of revenue away from software shops. >It's just a case of holding information hostage in the cloud because you can. Or because they have to. >Consumers aren't there as a substitute welfare state to provide eternal employment for hungry programmers. Software is expensive. Developers are expensive. I much prefer the upgrade model to the subscription model, but the marketplace in a round about way, decided it would rather pay eternally rather than one version at a time. Photoshop use to cost around $800 for a license, now it's $20 a month. That works out to 3.33 years until you pay as much as an outright license. I'm fairly certain that the Photoshop upgrade schedule was shorter than 3.33 years, so in the end, you end up paying less, assuming you constantly upgraded. *The upgrade prices was usually cheaper than the original full license, but I don't know how that works out long term with the subscription model.

detaro 9y ago
With Adobe CC it really depends on what combination of software you had and how often you updated. AFAIK, if you bought only one or two applications and skipped every other version, CC is basically always more expensive. (update prices were a lot lower than full, and upgraded the second-to-last version as well (and in the beginning, even more)) If you bought the larger bundles and/or want to keep it up-to-date all the time, CC pricing generally is similar or cheaper.
nhtoe78hnt 9y ago
> With the Apple App Store model, all upgrades are required to be free. That's not true at all. You can, at any time, take your FooSoftware 1.x off the store and make a new product called FooSoftware 2.x and charge the new price for it.
- Clubber 9y ago
  Yes, but that's a workaround. All the effort you put into marketing an app called "FooTime" is now devalued because the actual app name is now "FooTime2" Furthermore, if you remove "FooTime" from the store, there are now a bunch of dead links.

detaro 9y ago

With Adobe CC it really depends on what combination of software you had and how often you updated. AFAIK, if you bought only one or two applications and skipped every other version, CC is basically always more expensive. (update prices were a lot lower than full, and upgraded the second-to-last version as well (and in the beginning, even more)) If you bought the larger bundles and/or want to keep it up-to-date all the time, CC pricing generally is similar or cheaper.

nhtoe78hnt 9y ago

> With the Apple App Store model, all upgrades are required to be free. That's not true at all. You can, at any time, take your FooSoftware 1.x off the store and make a new product called FooSoftware 2.x and charge the new price for it.

Clubber 9y ago
Yes, but that's a workaround. All the effort you put into marketing an app called "FooTime" is now devalued because the actual app name is now "FooTime2" Furthermore, if you remove "FooTime" from the store, there are now a bunch of dead links.