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All you've said is true, but ignores the fact that many of these companies have large ongoing expenses to keep the old versions valuable. Servers, support, dev

All you've said is true, but ignores the fact that many of these companies have large ongoing expenses to keep the old versions valuable. Servers, support, dev time for those bug fixes, etc.

Silhouette 9y ago
Perhaps, but how many of those expenses are self-inflicted? In terms of fixing bugs, those are defects in the original product and I think it's reasonable to expect a software company to make a decent effort to correct them, just like any other purchase. That includes providing an appropriate level of customer support if something goes wrong. Updating existing software to support new protocols or maintain compatibility with new hardware or other software is a tricky area. My personal take on this one is that businesses selling software ought to indicate up-front how long they guarantee to provide this kind of support for so that everyone knows what the deal is, but then switching to some sort of ongoing support contract at a reasonable cost to extend the working lifetime of the software if the market wants it is fair, because this does mean extra work and provide extra benefit for the customer. (The crucial difference between this and the full subscription model is that paying for extra maintenance is optional here and you don't lose what you already have if you stop paying.) As for servers when businesses are choosing to store customers' data on their own systems rather than their customers', or to include activation or copy-protection technologies, or other similar issues, I have much less sympathy for the developers. In many such cases, the limitations are entirely artificial and basically only there as a way to enforce the need for ongoing payments or spy on customers' data or otherwise impose constraints that aren't in the customer's interests. Cloud-everything may be very trendy, but much of this new cloud-based software could have been implemented just as effectively on a customer's own network and using VPNs for their mobile staff if the industry had chosen to move in that direction instead.

All you've said is true, but ignores the fact that many of these companies have large ongoing expenses to keep the old versions valuable. Servers, support, dev time for those bug fixes, etc.

Silhouette 9y ago

Perhaps, but how many of those expenses are self-inflicted? In terms of fixing bugs, those are defects in the original product and I think it's reasonable to expect a software company to make a decent effort to correct them, just like any other purchase. That includes providing an appropriate level of customer support if something goes wrong. Updating existing software to support new protocols or maintain compatibility with new hardware or other software is a tricky area. My personal take on this one is that businesses selling software ought to indicate up-front how long they guarantee to provide this kind of support for so that everyone knows what the deal is, but then switching to some sort of ongoing support contract at a reasonable cost to extend the working lifetime of the software if the market wants it is fair, because this does mean extra work and provide extra benefit for the customer. (The crucial difference between this and the full subscription model is that paying for extra maintenance is optional here and you don't lose what you already have if you stop paying.) As for servers when businesses are choosing to store customers' data on their own systems rather than their customers', or to include activation or copy-protection technologies, or other similar issues, I have much less sympathy for the developers. In many such cases, the limitations are entirely artificial and basically only there as a way to enforce the need for ongoing payments or spy on customers' data or otherwise impose constraints that aren't in the customer's interests. Cloud-everything may be very trendy, but much of this new cloud-based software could have been implemented just as effectively on a customer's own network and using VPNs for their mobile staff if the industry had chosen to move in that direction instead.