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> What changed Businesses often prefer operational expenses over capital expenses. What changed is that your average business IT (bigcorp or mom's basement) n

> What changed Businesses often prefer operational expenses over capital expenses. What changed is that your average business IT (bigcorp or mom's basement) now has reliable access to the internet, which means that an operational expense for software has just recently become possible at all.

throw0101a 6y ago
And why did that preclude Adobe from also allowing actual purchases of their products instead of just the rental model? Capture One has subscription and license: * https://www.captureone.com/en/products-plans/single-user/capture-one-pro https://www.captureone.com/en/products-plans/single-user/cap... If I had a need for, say, cloud/sync features I understand a monthly cost as servers and bandwidth costs money; totally on-board. But for people who do not need/want cloud-y stuff, what re-occurring cost is there? I was happy to purchase YNAB4 for budgeting, and would have purchased YNAB5—but it's subscription and I have no need for the sync stuff that's part of the 'deal'.
- infogulch 6y ago
  It's a lot easier to develop a single software product continuously by tying continuous development to continuous revenue. It frees the business to devote its resources to development instead of product sales strategies and version differentiation which just distract it from focusing on its core product. This also enables their customers to do the same thing, tying continuous use of a service to continuous production of its own product or service. If a business can completely outsource the problem of providing good tools to their professional digital artists by paying Adobe $Xk/year, it might even be worth it to them financially just to save everyone the time of deciding whether to upgrade or not every other year. OS updated? New file format? Solved. New employee? Employee left? Solved. This is like IT infrastructure moving to cloud: businesses decide that the problems of maintaining IT infrastructure 100% in house is not worth it when you can outsource a big chunk of the business problem for a known cost. In my opinion all of these are examples of the same trend that also includes the direction that k8s, serverless, even companies like uber, doordash, wework etc are moving towards: a global relaxation of artificially maintained buffers down to solving problems continuously, automatically, and on-demand. (Since it begs the question, my critique of uber, et al. is that they're trying to be too big for their problem.) I think this is the general trend, but I don't know why. My guess is that it is vastly more efficient; not more efficient in cost, but more efficient in time.
  - hansvm 6y ago
    Would it be too reductionist to say then that the main value of a subscription as opposed to just buying the major versions you want is that you don't have to pay the costs for a decision that isn't impactful? If not, could an org not otherwise reap those same benefits by just choosing to upgrade every major version, but then retain the flexibility to not shell out for a new version if a pandemic temporarily hurts finances or something?

throw0101a 6y ago

And why did that preclude Adobe from also allowing actual purchases of their products instead of just the rental model? Capture One has subscription and license: * https://www.captureone.com/en/products-plans/single-user/capture-one-pro https://www.captureone.com/en/products-plans/single-user/cap... If I had a need for, say, cloud/sync features I understand a monthly cost as servers and bandwidth costs money; totally on-board. But for people who do not need/want cloud-y stuff, what re-occurring cost is there? I was happy to purchase YNAB4 for budgeting, and would have purchased YNAB5—but it's subscription and I have no need for the sync stuff that's part of the 'deal'.

infogulch 6y ago
It's a lot easier to develop a single software product continuously by tying continuous development to continuous revenue. It frees the business to devote its resources to development instead of product sales strategies and version differentiation which just distract it from focusing on its core product. This also enables their customers to do the same thing, tying continuous use of a service to continuous production of its own product or service. If a business can completely outsource the problem of providing good tools to their professional digital artists by paying Adobe $Xk/year, it might even be worth it to them financially just to save everyone the time of deciding whether to upgrade or not every other year. OS updated? New file format? Solved. New employee? Employee left? Solved. This is like IT infrastructure moving to cloud: businesses decide that the problems of maintaining IT infrastructure 100% in house is not worth it when you can outsource a big chunk of the business problem for a known cost. In my opinion all of these are examples of the same trend that also includes the direction that k8s, serverless, even companies like uber, doordash, wework etc are moving towards: a global relaxation of artificially maintained buffers down to solving problems continuously, automatically, and on-demand. (Since it begs the question, my critique of uber, et al. is that they're trying to be too big for their problem.) I think this is the general trend, but I don't know why. My guess is that it is vastly more efficient; not more efficient in cost, but more efficient in time.
- hansvm 6y ago
  Would it be too reductionist to say then that the main value of a subscription as opposed to just buying the major versions you want is that you don't have to pay the costs for a decision that isn't impactful? If not, could an org not otherwise reap those same benefits by just choosing to upgrade every major version, but then retain the flexibility to not shell out for a new version if a pandemic temporarily hurts finances or something?