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Software used to require little maintenance work. You would buy your software and run it without a single byte changed for 5 or 10 years, and then buy a new ver

by Joeri 4y ago

Software used to require little maintenance work. You would buy your software and run it without a single byte changed for 5 or 10 years, and then buy a new version. This worked because OS updates were rare, and everything was local and file-based. In the modern era though software requires continuous maintenance, because we expect our data to move freely between all our devices and the cloud, because operating system vendors force breaking changes often (especially apple), because we expect more integrations with other software, and in general because we expect software to continually receive feature updates. This maintenance has to be paid somehow, and subscriptions have proven to be the most acceptable model. Jetbrains is a great example, because with a steadily growing ecosystem of third party developer tools that they must integrate with, their maintenance cost is probably high and rising. We expect our IDE’s to support everything under the sun but balk at paying for the never-ending work needed to support that. Something’s gotta give in that equation.

microtonal 4y ago
I fully agree with your JetBrains point. I use Rust and CLion and they have to continually adapt to new Rust features, etc. I happily pay for my JetBrains All Products Packs and their model is better than most subscriptions, since you get to keep versions that were released 12 months before the end of you subscription. However, there are a bazillion other applications -- password managers, note taking applications, Git clients, you name it, for which this is not true. I made a very niche-specific GUI application in 2010-2012 (a search application for Dutch treebanks), written with Qt. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's effectively abandonware or just done (depending on your perspective). I have released updates since then to make sure it keeps running on the latest OS versions. It takes me, maybe 2-4 hours per year? (Typically replacing some deprecated Qt APIs and I there was one libxml2 API change.) I think a lot of software companies just want to get on the gravy train. Usually, their yearly price is close to what a perpetual license used to cost. So if you successfully switch to a subscription model, you have much more income than before. The primarily loser here is the user. You are poorer after an application switches to a subscription model. If a company goes bankrupt or decides to pull the plug, better hope that your data is not in a proprietary format (while I can still run some old WordStar in DOSBox and open old files).
bluedino 4y ago
You can still run 30 year old accounting and manufacturing software on your midsize IBM. Plenty of people still do it.
- imperfect_blue 4y ago
  They do it not because they want to but because they have no choice. The UX on those software are horrible by modern standards and incur massive wastes of manhours. Had a subscription model been used, those software might have benefited from 30 years worth of usability updates...or they might still be garbage, looking at SAP.

by Joeri 4y ago

microtonal 4y ago

I fully agree with your JetBrains point. I use Rust and CLion and they have to continually adapt to new Rust features, etc. I happily pay for my JetBrains All Products Packs and their model is better than most subscriptions, since you get to keep versions that were released 12 months before the end of you subscription. However, there are a bazillion other applications -- password managers, note taking applications, Git clients, you name it, for which this is not true. I made a very niche-specific GUI application in 2010-2012 (a search application for Dutch treebanks), written with Qt. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's effectively abandonware or just done (depending on your perspective). I have released updates since then to make sure it keeps running on the latest OS versions. It takes me, maybe 2-4 hours per year? (Typically replacing some deprecated Qt APIs and I there was one libxml2 API change.) I think a lot of software companies just want to get on the gravy train. Usually, their yearly price is close to what a perpetual license used to cost. So if you successfully switch to a subscription model, you have much more income than before. The primarily loser here is the user. You are poorer after an application switches to a subscription model. If a company goes bankrupt or decides to pull the plug, better hope that your data is not in a proprietary format (while I can still run some old WordStar in DOSBox and open old files).

bluedino 4y ago

You can still run 30 year old accounting and manufacturing software on your midsize IBM. Plenty of people still do it.

imperfect_blue 4y ago
They do it not because they want to but because they have no choice. The UX on those software are horrible by modern standards and incur massive wastes of manhours. Had a subscription model been used, those software might have benefited from 30 years worth of usability updates...or they might still be garbage, looking at SAP.