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Not really - the market tempts you with free to hook you in. You cannot honestly say that the market has asked for every abusive free product that existed.
by ljm 3y ago
Not really - the market tempts you with free to hook you in. You cannot honestly say that the market has asked for every abusive free product that existed.
- duxup 3y agoUsers don’t pay up front. You don’t get any traction that way. User behavior is a part of this mess.
- Badumtss8 3y agoUsers have always paid upfront for software, until software companies with lots of capital started this non sense. All copies of Microsoft Office were paid upfront. Users are just reacting to what the software industry did.
- Dalewyn 3y agoNo, the users definitely play a role here. Remember how it became a meme to just pirate Adobe software because they were so bloody expensive? Well Adobe wants their earnings, regardless if their desire is justified, so Adobe and the rest of the industry changed gears to a model that greatly inhibits piracy and, at least in theory, reduces the upfront cost a customer has to pay in exchange for a higher cost over time.
- ljm 3y agoAdobe is basically a monopoly and it is well documented that they allowed piracy because it meant that the pirates would become dependent on their tools. Doesn’t matter how you edited a photo technically, it is still photoshopped.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TeMPOraL 3y agoYup, same with Microsoft - they won the desktop OS and office productivity markets thanks, in big part, to their tacit approval of individual-level pirating of Windows and Office.
- jj999 3y agoIndie shareware vendors predate "software companies with lots of capital" by decades. The big fishes seldom innovate anything.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoShareware is not SaaS/subscription-based software. That's the bad part, not "try before you buy".
- geraldwhen 3y agoNot really. There has always been shareware, aka trial demos.
- esafak 3y agoThose were only utilities and games, not enterprise software.
- kelnos 3y agoFair, but I don't think this negates the overall point, that people actually paid for software, and it was usually a one-time fee (often with the choice to pay again later for upgrades, or continue to use the old version forever). The "try before you buy" and expiring nature of shareware was nearly always known at the time of download, before investing time in using the software.
- ljm 3y agoIt was normal to pay up-front for software until about 10 years ago, just a few years after the 2008 crash where startups decided MRR/ARR was the metric for success Enter the subscription model, holding your tech hostage for periodic payments and predictable cash flow It’s not a coincidence that MTX happened in gaming at the same time, post 2008. Before then it was horse armour in oblivion.
- DANmode 3y agoUsers do what they think their corporate IT or manager will let them do. Which, by policy, is often little.