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I 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 prod

by zer8k 3y ago

I 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.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> I never had problem paying a company for patches But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Those are transaction costs. As is downloading and installing software, something software running on a server and delivered through a browser doesn't require. Those ongoing costs must be paid for with ads or subscription revenue. > Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD But it never was. Particularly in a networked world. Perfect is the enemy of good. SaaS isn't a fit for all products. Some software can be written once and never updated. Most cannot, and for that, SaaS is a better business model fit.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  > But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Many did not, when the updates did not provide value. The false belief you seem to rely on here is that if companies get regular stream of revenue, they'll be compelled to work on updates. Why? They get the revenue anyway, they don't have to work on updates. They can in fact stop completely working on updates, except to match competitors, when their products get popular. But even that's not much of a problem when you have a closed file format, like say Adobe does with PSD.
- zer8k 3y ago
  I can tell you having worked at a majority SaaS-type of companies my entire career the amount of "updates" we put out is as frequent, or less, than the previous model. Despite working in the industry (it's impossible to avoid as you likely know) I encourage nearly everyone I know to find other options before paying for software subscriptions. It's about money. It's not about updates. It's taking away ownership from people in order to be able to drive up profits. Consider how normal software sales works. It's the same way. You lease enterprise-grade software to a company. Every year, as if by magic, something comes up and "prices need to increase". They just hacked off a zero or two and adapted this price model to the consumer. I fail to see how SaaS is not another variation of "Embrace, extend, extinguish" where the entrapment phase of extinguish is taken to it's natural conclusion: no ownership. Worse, you pay 5, 10, 20 times as much over time. Many companies capitalize on the subscription being priced such that you forget about it. Also known as the gym model. The only acceptable SaaS model to me is JetBrain's. You pay a subscription and at the end of that term you own that version of the software permanently. You may continue to pay (because you find the product valuable) but you are not required to. At the end, you still own what you paid for. The truth is, SaaS provides very little value to people for what they pay. An example: in 5 years you would've paid for a copy of AutoCAD inventor in full + some just leasing the worse Fusion360 over the same time period. If you are a sucker and buy into Inventor's SaaS pricing you would've paid for 5-8 copies at the previous model in the same time period. That type of capture is called theft in other modalities. 9/10 people would've never needed to pay for all the extra crap they saddle on in order to make the price seem "reasonable". They exist solely because the can extort (not capitalize) on the moat they have. One day we'll look at this model of owning nothing as one of the greatest failings of our society. It's probably an unpopular opinion here at HN but SaaS is an awful anti-consumer model. We can hope that somehow we define what "providing sufficient utility" means and start cracking down on this.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > It's about money. It's not about updates. It can be both. There is an ideological purity one tends towards when designing any system. Often times, that aesthetic sense of an engineer is right. Frequently, it's orthogonal to what customers need. SaaS isn't a fit in every case. But it's far from a universal money grab.

by zer8k 3y ago

JumpCrisscross 3y ago

> I never had problem paying a company for patches But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Those are transaction costs. As is downloading and installing software, something software running on a server and delivered through a browser doesn't require. Those ongoing costs must be paid for with ads or subscription revenue. > Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD But it never was. Particularly in a networked world. Perfect is the enemy of good. SaaS isn't a fit for all products. Some software can be written once and never updated. Most cannot, and for that, SaaS is a better business model fit.

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
> But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Many did not, when the updates did not provide value. The false belief you seem to rely on here is that if companies get regular stream of revenue, they'll be compelled to work on updates. Why? They get the revenue anyway, they don't have to work on updates. They can in fact stop completely working on updates, except to match competitors, when their products get popular. But even that's not much of a problem when you have a closed file format, like say Adobe does with PSD.
zer8k 3y ago
I can tell you having worked at a majority SaaS-type of companies my entire career the amount of "updates" we put out is as frequent, or less, than the previous model. Despite working in the industry (it's impossible to avoid as you likely know) I encourage nearly everyone I know to find other options before paying for software subscriptions. It's about money. It's not about updates. It's taking away ownership from people in order to be able to drive up profits. Consider how normal software sales works. It's the same way. You lease enterprise-grade software to a company. Every year, as if by magic, something comes up and "prices need to increase". They just hacked off a zero or two and adapted this price model to the consumer. I fail to see how SaaS is not another variation of "Embrace, extend, extinguish" where the entrapment phase of extinguish is taken to it's natural conclusion: no ownership. Worse, you pay 5, 10, 20 times as much over time. Many companies capitalize on the subscription being priced such that you forget about it. Also known as the gym model. The only acceptable SaaS model to me is JetBrain's. You pay a subscription and at the end of that term you own that version of the software permanently. You may continue to pay (because you find the product valuable) but you are not required to. At the end, you still own what you paid for. The truth is, SaaS provides very little value to people for what they pay. An example: in 5 years you would've paid for a copy of AutoCAD inventor in full + some just leasing the worse Fusion360 over the same time period. If you are a sucker and buy into Inventor's SaaS pricing you would've paid for 5-8 copies at the previous model in the same time period. That type of capture is called theft in other modalities. 9/10 people would've never needed to pay for all the extra crap they saddle on in order to make the price seem "reasonable". They exist solely because the can extort (not capitalize) on the moat they have. One day we'll look at this model of owning nothing as one of the greatest failings of our society. It's probably an unpopular opinion here at HN but SaaS is an awful anti-consumer model. We can hope that somehow we define what "providing sufficient utility" means and start cracking down on this.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > It's about money. It's not about updates. It can be both. There is an ideological purity one tends towards when designing any system. Often times, that aesthetic sense of an engineer is right. Frequently, it's orthogonal to what customers need. SaaS isn't a fit in every case. But it's far from a universal money grab.