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Consumer software is expected to be next fast-growing segment (1994)
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoHonestly this model of selling the consumer software in exchange for money that runs on their computer seems better than providing the software that only runs on the company’s servers in exchange for data and ads.
- zer8k 3y agoI agree. SaaS was supposed to be a model that was highly beneficial for vendors selling to corporations. Once it penetrated the consumer market it became death by 1,000 cuts. Now everyone's life is loaded down subscriptions for things that 20 years ago would've been bought once. I miss the days of owning software. I guess I can be thankful it pushed me towards open source.
- heattemp99 3y agoSaas is also a way of combating piracy imo.
- cratermoon 3y agoIt is, with the downside that if the company goes out of business, the buyer is out of luck. See, e.g. VanMoof
- antupis 3y agoSaas in hardware is kinda stupid if you cannot offer some real benefits eg game pass.
- 0max 3y agoPlaystation Plus with the streaming package really changed my view on gaming once I got fiber optic piped into my building. The hardware fan doesn't spin up when I stream Ghosts of Tsushima instead of playing locally, essentially turning my PS4 into a thin client for Sony's services. RIP Gamestop
- zer8k 3y agoIt also greatly exacerbates piracy. I'd be willing to bet movies, music, and certain software like CAD are seeing unprecedented levels of piracy after SaaS. Especially when SaaS enables companies like Netflix to betray their consumers.
- sbuk 3y agoProfessional-level ‘CAD’ has always been susceptible to piracy as it has always been criminally expensive. Music services are at about the right price, and if anything offer pretty good value when one considers that album prices were reaching the $20 mark.
- rightbyte 3y agoYe. On my phone I used some half-bad text editor, Acode, to view a patch I meeded to review on the fly. It shows ads and does an ad popup when you try to exit. Like, Google does not let you search their app store and filter by cost or spyware. It is hopeless to find some good utility tool without knowing its exact name. A simple text-editor should be free. I don't want to give some dev reccuring revenue to unlock Notepad level features.
- mfashby 3y agoTry f droid store, all the apps there are required to be open source so there's fewer spy/malware. Or look for apps by secuso on the play store. Fwiw acode on f-droid doesn't seem to have ads. I strongly agree it shouldn't be this hard to find simple stuff.
- andrepd 3y ago>Like, Google does not let you search their app store and filter by cost or spyware Why would they? But Aurora Store does: https://auroraoss.com/ https://auroraoss.com/
- carlosjobim 3y agoAt least on Apple systems, I have always found paid good apps at fair prices for all my needs.
- dmvdoug 3y agoSadly, though, we’re starting to see a lot fewer Mac-assed apps[1] these days. [1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-apps https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...
- JimtheCoder 3y agoMaybe with Gen AI potentially lowering the cost of software development, it will be economically viable to go back to the "pay once and own" model...
- xp84 3y agoI don’t really care where it runs, or if it’s one-time purchase vs subscription. It’s just the “paying indirectly for ‘free’ software products” vs “paying for software” that I care about.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago...in exchange for data and ads, and money. That's the trick though, SaaS just keeps you hostage to the vendor and they can extract more value out of you. There are only two ways out of this: 1. The Internet becomes dangerous and unreliable for some reason, and we need to go back to treating software as a product for sale, rather than service for rent. 2. Regulation. Neither way is great. It suggests distress in the system and forcing behaviors which are not natural to it. On the other hand, what's natural to this system we've created is apparently massive centralization in the hands of corporations, and whenever anything in this network of dependencies breaks, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.
- dec0dedab0de 3y agoThe third way out is to simply not participate. If something is SaaS only I pretend it doesn't exist.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> SaaS just keeps you hostage to the vendor and they can extract more value out of you It was also a solution to the problem of updates. You can't pay for continuous improvement with a traditional software product.
- zer8k 3y agoI never had problem paying a company for patches. The problem companies had would be someone buying their software and then never buying updates. That's a product problem not a system problem. SaaS keeps the consumer captive in a permanent rental situation. The "it gives the customers a better experience" non-sense is false. One of the best case studies on this is Jetbrains. Sublime Text is still around too. It works. It just doesn't sell very well to SV shareholders. It'd be a lot easier if they just said "we're greedy assholes". Since that's what it actually is. Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD. Updates were paid and it was okay because they were usually major improvements. There's been a whole lot of propaganda made to make SaaS seem like a net win for the consumer but this is by-and-large not the case.
- cratermoon 3y agoThis model still exists, somewhat. One factor that worked against it, from the standpoint of the software companies, was that there was no effective way to prevent copying and sharing (aka 'piracy'). Software companies put a lot of money and effort into trying to stop it, but every technical scheme was eventually cracked. The elaborate schemes that involved having a physical copy of the game's packaging annoyed users. Some schemes were downright abusive[1]. Even with modern DRM, the cost, complexity, and inability to completely lock down software installed on a device under the control of the user puts some companies off. So now we have software as a service, paid for with the user's attention (ads) or we have software that just stops working if the company's servers can't be reached. (Looking at you, VanMoof). 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Notable_payloads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Notable_payloa...
- flangola7 3y agoI don't want companies to be able to lock down a user's device. That isn't a business model that should be legitimized or allowed.
- cratermoon 3y ago> I don't want companies to be able to lock down a user's device Neither do I, thus the cautionary tale of VanMoof. Software is now everywhere, in everything from your toaster to the electric grid. As a result, right-to-repair means right to reprogram. The owner needs to be able to fix bugs, change performance parameters, replace things that break. When my dad was working on cars, that meant put in a new carburetor, adjust the timing, clean the points - all physical parts. It's different today.
- ghaff 3y agoAlso, if you wanted on-prem software, open source alternatives increasingly became an option. (As in the case of office suites, SaaS also allows for some collaboration and other options that couldn't really be done with desktop software installs. I never want to go back to mailing around copies of files and merging changes again.
- haunter 3y agoAren't most video games still following this rule?
- cjs_ac 3y agoGiven the rise of free-to-play-pay-to-win games, microtransactions and DLCs, no.
- smokel 3y agoIn 1993 in high school economics, our teacher explained that economics was based on scarcity. Even the most dimwitted individual would have to conclude that something is horribly wrong with economic models if governments would not soon make exceptions for the software industry. Fast forward 30 years, and many software developers and startups actually think that their skills are worth so much. Sigh?
- the_only_law 3y ago> and many software developers and startups actually think that their skills are worth so much. Sigh? Don’t worry, the past year taught at least a few of us the hard way. Unfortunately when I was younger, I drank a lot of the industry kool aid.
- hker999 3y agoCopying software that was built and saying there is no scarcity is like saying you should be able to spend the millions of dollars you made by copying a $100 bill multiple times on an inkjet.
- l33t233372 3y agoAre you implying software isn’t valuable? Because that’s just a non starter — it obviously is.
- smokel 3y agoNo, I am implying that software reproduction is so easy, that it is not a scarce good, and classical economical models are a (very) bad fit. Custom software, or software for a small audience obviously is scarce, but a word processor or operating system with similar complexity that can be used by millions, if not billions of users, should not cost more in total. Open source (free) software would not even be possible if it were as scarce as, say, oil or apples.
- nerdponx 3y agoMarginal cost being close to 0 doesn't invalidate the basic economics.
- samsquire 3y agoFrom the 2000s onwards (given my age) I remember permanent licenced software being very expensive and out of reach: Photoshop, Visual Studio, Macromedia Flash, Visual Basic. > ``You're going to see an economic model where software companies become giant incubators for good ideas,'' he says, likening it to the record business, which takes the creative product of an artist and markets it. I feel the big tech companies should be expanding into many markets by their sheer programming prowess and complexity budgets/capacity. They should try run the cost of complexity to zero and make complexity a commodity. Maybe I'm in a bubble but I don't see much new desktop software. I feel it is difficult to get people in the world to pay for digital things. £10 for an iOS APP??? What software am I actually willing to pay for? Probably software that earns me something. I bought Sublime Text a long time ago but nowadays I just use notepad++ or IntelliJ or VS Code rarely. I bought Typora, a markdown editor because I write a lot of markdown. The same problem also applies to the web. What websites would you pay for? Would you pay $3 for a HN subscription? What about digital magazines? Are there any newspapers that are actually worth it, that enhance your life? EDIT: it just occurred to me that the web IS a digital magazine. But I meant publications. I feel if you want something to stay around then the market has to support its costs at a bare minimum. If you only charge lifetime licences/permanent licences traditional software then the software has a lifespan because the company can only support it while their costs are covered. SaaS is the outcome of web technology, browser technology and business needs. I just don't like the duplication of effort, every SaaS has to implement authorisation and authentication, backup, security measures, billing, subscriptions, user management, account management, an Android app, an iOS app, dashboards and maybe a desktop client. It's such a waste of effort. What about a SaaS dashboard SaaS, where all your SaaS are mangaed from one place? Edit: Saas As Code?
- mrweasel 3y ago> I feel it is difficult to get people in the world to pay for digital things. £10 for an iOS APP??? It very much seems like developers have stopped trying. The app store for the iPhone/iPad is broken and I blame in-app purchases and subscriptions. I feel that Apple should be VERY restrictive about what is allowed to be an in-app purchase or subscription. Try browsing the apps available, especially for children, it's all free, with in app purchases or in-app subscriptions. I was trying to find a coloring app on the iPad, there's like one that's reasonably priced. It's free for 5 - 10 coloring pages then you pay $5 - $6 to unlock everything. Completely reasonable in my mind. The rest: $30 per year as a subscription... well, now I'm not buying anything, that's not something that should be a subscription. I really want the app stores to start very clearly advertising that the in-app purchase is an unreasonably priced subscription and preferably require that the price to unlock an every feature. Most of all I want in-app purchase and subscriptions to go away. My life already have plenty of subscriptions, I refuse to sign up for more. I have four streaming subscriptions, two news sites, online storage, password managers, internet, phones, service contracts for my car... Just F-ing stop and let me pay up front for things that REALLY doesn't need to be subscriptions because I can't deal with anymore.
- CSMastermind 3y agoFor those who weren't alive at the time it's probably hard to understand what an inflection point Windows 95 was. Both in terms of the number of homes with computers in them and what those computers were able to do things skyrocketed. The software business went from primarily being targeted at businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at mainstream consumers in a once ever opportunity to establish a brand name with people who have literally never purchased anything in this class before. It was the most dramatic shift certainly that I've seen in my life with the adoption of the internet being second and the adoption of mobile phones being third. It's been more than a decade since we've seen anything like those shifts. The 2010s feel a lot like the 1980s to me. Lots of progress, lots of it incremental, but no inflection point. I do wonder if AI will be the next big paradigm shift like Windows 95, the internet, and the iPhone.
- mistrial9 3y agoWindows 95 was years behind the state-of-the-art on the day "Chicago" shipped. The technical choice of the backslash for file system paths, and hiding the real disk contents from the user view, caused years of headaches. The architectural design choices for extensibility ended up as a swiss-cheese architecture for malware. MSFT-chairman literally saw himself as the new savior. glad you see this as important?
- petemill 3y agoImportant in terms of adoption.
- function_seven 3y agoNone of your assessment matters regarding how big a deal it actually was. My mom didn’t give a damn about backslashes and my dad had zero use for seeing hidden files. The “state of the art” in 1995 was for nerds doing nerd stuff, Windows 95 was for regular people who couldn’t afford a Macintosh.
- hackzzz 3y ago[flagged]
- gumby 3y agoLooking at my phone and laptop, I have a lot of open source code, some $0 apps, some $50-$100 apps, and a couple of annual subscriptions for roughly $25/yr. It’s interesting that those price points are sticky, like detents on a slide.
- dmvdoug 3y ago> WANT to sell the next great piece of computer software? > “It's not about technology anymore. It's about marketing, merchandising, brand management, and shelf space....” Just, no.