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The desire for ownership of your software most certainly doesn't just came from techies. I think this is the norm for the overwhelming majority of all people.

The desire for ownership of your software most certainly doesn't just came from techies. I think this is the norm for the overwhelming majority of all people. There's a fundamental "problem" that software-by-license is trying to solve. That's the fact that most software, in most domains, became good enough to do whatever you want with it, and pretty easily, years ago. Such tough times we live in. But the reason this is a problem is because companies have a zillion employees, sprawling high cost 'campuses', and baseline costs in the billions to tens of billions of dollars. So they need to sell to keep selling you new versions of products that don't really do anything new. And so this is where we enter the domain of 'free to play' style operating systems, paying rent for a spreadsheet, and so on. All of these business models completely suck for most people. And they're also completely self defeating at scale. Because paying $20/month for Photoshop might sound nice compared to a $2000 up-front fee for something you might not even be using in a decade, until every single piece of software you're using tries to go the same route - and suddenly to do everything you were doing before, you'd need to pay $2000/month forever (of course with annual price increases), all the while everything you're using also spies on you, tries to deliver "value added ads", and all other sorts of crap. It sucks. If companies were able to deliver products that people actively and enthusiastically wanted to buy, they would be. But they can't. So we get licenses, fees, rent for everything, spying, ads, and the further general enshittification of everything tech.

basseq 3y ago
People tend to want to best of both worlds. They want to "own their software" (i.e., pay once, use forever) but they also want the benefits of SaaS: low up-front investment, cloud services, continual evolution, network effects, etc. Photoshop is an easy example: would you rather pay $400 up front to have version X.X forever, or $10/mo forever to always have the latest version. That's a tradeoff! Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2. Cloud services are even harder because you start talking hardware. "Owning Photoshop" is easy because it runs on my computer. I'm maintaining my computer for me and only me. What would "owning their software" even look like for, I donno, Github? Are you running your own AWS instance? Are other people running their own instances? There are ways to build P2P software, or on-prem enterprise stuff... but no one really wants to buy it. They're ok paying $10/mo for the billions of dollars of infrastructure because there's really no other way to do it.
- turtledragonfly 3y ago
  > Photoshop ... Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2. Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not? I'm partly being facetious, but it's also partly a genuine question. Is there some research you know of that shows a majority of people genuinely choosing #2, when both are on the table? For a long time the standard model was "pay $X for the current version, then $Y to upgrade to the next version, if you want." That is pretty close to the best of both worlds, IMO, from a customer standpoint.
  - tveyben 3y ago
    > Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not? Completely agree! I purchased CS6 around 2012 and use it to solve graphical tasks for a client even today. I know that Adobes stock went up with ~25% (or was it more) when they announced the new subscription/robbery model, but I'm sure a lot of customers would like to do like me and keep getting value from the old investment by "owning" not renting CS<x>. Only if you HAVE to be using the latest and greatest SW features, then the math might also work for the customer. PS.: Too bad that my Macs are no longer able to execute CS6 as there is some 32bit code in CS6 and the newer Mac OS's only want to play with 64bit apps, that's a shame (but here Windows shine, by always(?) being backwards compatible (my client is a Windows business, so here that's not a problem…
    - basseq 3y ago
      > Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not? I'm recalling that they did run both models in parallel, but couldn't find a reference in a quick search. Regardless, the 25% stock price jump would indicate that from a "voting with their wallet" perspective, subscriptions were a rather unequivocal winner. There are certainly pay-once-use-forever models out there, though my perception is that they're niche pricing models for a reason. (And still not outright ownership!) Does that mean prospects and customers were happy about it? Maybe not. But I suspect the only answer that would have really satisfied the majority would be the unattainable "best of both worlds".

basseq 3y ago

People tend to want to best of both worlds. They want to "own their software" (i.e., pay once, use forever) but they also want the benefits of SaaS: low up-front investment, cloud services, continual evolution, network effects, etc. Photoshop is an easy example: would you rather pay $400 up front to have version X.X forever, or $10/mo forever to always have the latest version. That's a tradeoff! Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2. Cloud services are even harder because you start talking hardware. "Owning Photoshop" is easy because it runs on my computer. I'm maintaining my computer for me and only me. What would "owning their software" even look like for, I donno, Github? Are you running your own AWS instance? Are other people running their own instances? There are ways to build P2P software, or on-prem enterprise stuff... but no one really wants to buy it. They're ok paying $10/mo for the billions of dollars of infrastructure because there's really no other way to do it.

turtledragonfly 3y ago
> Photoshop ... Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2. Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not? I'm partly being facetious, but it's also partly a genuine question. Is there some research you know of that shows a majority of people genuinely choosing #2, when both are on the table? For a long time the standard model was "pay $X for the current version, then $Y to upgrade to the next version, if you want." That is pretty close to the best of both worlds, IMO, from a customer standpoint.
- tveyben 3y ago
  > Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not? Completely agree! I purchased CS6 around 2012 and use it to solve graphical tasks for a client even today. I know that Adobes stock went up with ~25% (or was it more) when they announced the new subscription/robbery model, but I'm sure a lot of customers would like to do like me and keep getting value from the old investment by "owning" not renting CS<x>. Only if you HAVE to be using the latest and greatest SW features, then the math might also work for the customer. PS.: Too bad that my Macs are no longer able to execute CS6 as there is some 32bit code in CS6 and the newer Mac OS's only want to play with 64bit apps, that's a shame (but here Windows shine, by always(?) being backwards compatible (my client is a Windows business, so here that's not a problem…
  - basseq 3y ago
    > Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not? I'm recalling that they did run both models in parallel, but couldn't find a reference in a quick search. Regardless, the 25% stock price jump would indicate that from a "voting with their wallet" perspective, subscriptions were a rather unequivocal winner. There are certainly pay-once-use-forever models out there, though my perception is that they're niche pricing models for a reason. (And still not outright ownership!) Does that mean prospects and customers were happy about it? Maybe not. But I suspect the only answer that would have really satisfied the majority would be the unattainable "best of both worlds".