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Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ... They rest on their laurels,

by Fredkin 11mo ago

Subscriptions make companies lazy and it degrades the product. I'm looking at you: Foundry, Adobe, Maxon, heated seats on BMWs ... They rest on their laurels, enjoy the increased cash flow, say it allows them to work on regular updates. But this goes from being useful bug fixes, to merely shuffling the UI around, changing the fonts, introducing nonsensical features nobody asked for or can make use of, and gutting useful features for "streamlining" purposes... while longstanding bugs that actually need fixing are still unfixed. Eventually customers become dissatisfied with the product and make up for lost features and degraded user experience with a smörgåsbord of perpetually licensed or FOSS alternatives from various competitors because they too will want to improve their cash-flow instead of being bled dry every month. Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Also it makes your customers more committed to your product. You should invite this kind of challenge and forgo the temptation to boost cash-flow because it keeps you on your toes. Subscription-only will seem great for a while but eventually you'll atrophy and fail. Something similar happened when software went from being released on CDs/DVDs to regular patches and downloads. Not saying we need to go back to that era, but QAs had to work harder back then because distribution was expensive. Nowadays you can release things in an unfinished and broken state.

deafpolygon 11mo ago
Updates were fewer and far between back then, but they were bigger updates with more features. Now, many subscription services seem content to milk fewer feature upgrades staggered over years.
- JohnFen 11mo ago
  Yes, upgrades used to be a thing people looked forward to and celebrated. Now, they're often dreaded, pushy, and frequent.
conartist6 11mo ago
Man I think you're spot-on. Back in the day the biggest motivator companies had to make good products was that they would be competing in the market with their own old products. Not anymore, and it shows
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  They were also incentivised to stuff as many new features into their products in order to make them look like they were worth upgrading. Look at how bad Adobe Acrobat got before they even started thinking about subscriptions.
  - brabel 11mo ago
    If you have a product and a team working on it, it’s tempting to just keep adding things to the product. You can’t just sit around fixing bugs, they say. When that is precisely what customers would want. Can’t make upsells though and when you’re a business that kind of thing really matters… nobody from within can see that the ship is so heavy it can’t stay afloat anymore. Until it’s sunk.
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  Wow, really great insight--I've never seen it framed like this before, but it makes so much sense. Typically software becomes worse over time, and therefore uncompetitive with previous versions of the same software. The fix? Never make the previous software available, and force users to upgrade to the worse, new version. This explains a lot about why subscriptions have become the norm.
BLKNSLVR 11mo ago
Sorry, this was all the executives heard: > Subscription-only will seem great for a while The ayes have it. Motion passed, now let's discuss the subscription tiers. How many stickers should we include with the premium 'founders' subscription tier?
- hoherd 11mo ago
  That's not true. They also heard > Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade
lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
Subscriptions can create an illusion of a deal, because in principle, you’re ostensibly able to benefit more for a fixed price. But are you? Netflix is a good example. You can watch as much as you want for a flat rate, but how many people watch enough to justify the monthly fee? (Putting aside the question of whether watching so much is actually a benefit in the first place.) Companies recognize the distinction between potential use and actual use, and so in practice, many are paying more for less and subsidizing the outliers that consume more. When actual use exceeds predicted use, the company will raise the price of subscription. Subscriptions make sense for situations where there are regular maintenance costs or where the benefits are received at a steady and proportional rate.
- NaomiLehman 11mo ago
  I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? Everything in one place. It's actually more convenient than streaming services.
  - jasode 11mo ago
    >I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? [...] It's actually more convenient than streaming services. I think your technical sophistication means you're somewhat out-of-touch with what "most" people do. Most normal people watch Netflix/HBO/etc on smartphones/tablets, or stream devices like Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast puck, Apple TV cube, or the "smart tv app" built-in with their Samsung or LG tv. All of those "mainstream devices used by most" don't make it easy to access torrenting sites or files. Sure, one could hypothetically sideload a torrenting app on a Google Chromecast but now you're beyond the demographic of "most people" because you have extra complexity of also adding some USB storage to save the torrent or point to a local network share. The type of situations that makes "torrenting more convenient" are people watching everything on a laptop or have a dedicated HTPC media server hooked up to their tv. I'm technically savvy and it was not easy to sideload Kodi player onto Amazon Fire Stick to legitimately play DVD ISOs. It required a lot of google searches to finally figure it out. (E.g. after realizing VLC app for Fire Stick doesn't work, and then finally stumbling across a "developer setting", and then getting the SMB network path correct, and so on...) Thinking that most people could just torrent is being unrealistic.
carlosjobim 11mo ago
> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors. Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing? I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.
- trollbridge 11mo ago
  Affinity did have a growing userbase, partly because you could just buy the app for $50 and use it perpetually. I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".
  - ryandrake 11mo ago
    This is exactly why I bought Affinity. That, and the fact that the old version did not require an "account" and "activation". You send them money, they give you an unlock key, and that's the end of your relationship with them.
- tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
  >Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing? I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.
  - carlosjobim 11mo ago
zaphar 11mo ago
I continue to maintain that the problem here is not greed but laziness. Make money with less effort or make even more money over a longer term with more effort. Building for the future requires effort and investment and has the potential to make more money than focusing purely on the current quarter.
- doubled112 11mo ago
  Expecting something more for little to no effort might be considered a form of greed.
- sydbarrett74 11mo ago
  It’s both greed and laziness.
evanjrowley 11mo ago
The video game industry is plagued by this problem. With live-service games becoming commonplace, there has also been a recent trend of games being released in an incomplete state. The shocking part is that multi-million dollar "AAA" game studios are engaging in this behavior. There's also a strong "own nothing" component to the issue.
erikerikson 11mo ago
I'm sorry to write that all those were problems before subscriptions too. Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.
Simulacra 11mo ago
This is how I've felt about Apple, and it doesn't just include a model with a jack, but a worsening of the iOS system, models that are no for most users of previous models. Apple has run out of ideas, and maybe that's the entire smartphone category. People will still buy smart phones, but I think their will be less enthusiasm for the latest and greatest model.

by Fredkin 11mo ago

deafpolygon 11mo ago

Updates were fewer and far between back then, but they were bigger updates with more features. Now, many subscription services seem content to milk fewer feature upgrades staggered over years.

JohnFen 11mo ago
Yes, upgrades used to be a thing people looked forward to and celebrated. Now, they're often dreaded, pushy, and frequent.

conartist6 11mo ago

Man I think you're spot-on. Back in the day the biggest motivator companies had to make good products was that they would be competing in the market with their own old products. Not anymore, and it shows

tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
They were also incentivised to stuff as many new features into their products in order to make them look like they were worth upgrading. Look at how bad Adobe Acrobat got before they even started thinking about subscriptions.
- brabel 11mo ago
  If you have a product and a team working on it, it’s tempting to just keep adding things to the product. You can’t just sit around fixing bugs, they say. When that is precisely what customers would want. Can’t make upsells though and when you’re a business that kind of thing really matters… nobody from within can see that the ship is so heavy it can’t stay afloat anymore. Until it’s sunk.
ryandrake 11mo ago
Wow, really great insight--I've never seen it framed like this before, but it makes so much sense. Typically software becomes worse over time, and therefore uncompetitive with previous versions of the same software. The fix? Never make the previous software available, and force users to upgrade to the worse, new version. This explains a lot about why subscriptions have become the norm.

BLKNSLVR 11mo ago

Sorry, this was all the executives heard: > Subscription-only will seem great for a while The ayes have it. Motion passed, now let's discuss the subscription tiers. How many stickers should we include with the premium 'founders' subscription tier?

hoherd 11mo ago
That's not true. They also heard > Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade

lo_zamoyski 11mo ago

Subscriptions can create an illusion of a deal, because in principle, you’re ostensibly able to benefit more for a fixed price. But are you? Netflix is a good example. You can watch as much as you want for a flat rate, but how many people watch enough to justify the monthly fee? (Putting aside the question of whether watching so much is actually a benefit in the first place.) Companies recognize the distinction between potential use and actual use, and so in practice, many are paying more for less and subsidizing the outliers that consume more. When actual use exceeds predicted use, the company will raise the price of subscription. Subscriptions make sense for situations where there are regular maintenance costs or where the benefits are received at a steady and proportional rate.

NaomiLehman 11mo ago
I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? Everything in one place. It's actually more convenient than streaming services.
- jasode 11mo ago
  >I don't understand why most people don't just torrent? [...] It's actually more convenient than streaming services. I think your technical sophistication means you're somewhat out-of-touch with what "most" people do. Most normal people watch Netflix/HBO/etc on smartphones/tablets, or stream devices like Amazon Fire Stick, Google Chromecast puck, Apple TV cube, or the "smart tv app" built-in with their Samsung or LG tv. All of those "mainstream devices used by most" don't make it easy to access torrenting sites or files. Sure, one could hypothetically sideload a torrenting app on a Google Chromecast but now you're beyond the demographic of "most people" because you have extra complexity of also adding some USB storage to save the torrent or point to a local network share. The type of situations that makes "torrenting more convenient" are people watching everything on a laptop or have a dedicated HTPC media server hooked up to their tv. I'm technically savvy and it was not easy to sideload Kodi player onto Amazon Fire Stick to legitimately play DVD ISOs. It required a lot of google searches to finally figure it out. (E.g. after realizing VLC app for Fire Stick doesn't work, and then finally stumbling across a "developer setting", and then getting the SMB network path correct, and so on...) Thinking that most people could just torrent is being unrealistic.

carlosjobim 11mo ago

> Companies that choose to offer lump-sum permanent licenses have to make a bigger effort to convince customers to upgrade, which means the product improves. Why can't they expand their customer base instead? With a great product, you sell millions of copies, pay everybody's salaries and pay investors. Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing? I have never in my life seen an advertisement for any app with a pay-once offer, even though I have bought most of my apps as pay-once. And they're always several levels higher in quality than other offerings.

trollbridge 11mo ago
Affinity did have a growing userbase, partly because you could just buy the app for $50 and use it perpetually. I assume with Canva buying them out and making it "free", Affinity will fade away and eventually just be folded into subscription-only, cloud-only "products".
- ryandrake 11mo ago
  This is exactly why I bought Affinity. That, and the fact that the old version did not require an "account" and "activation". You send them money, they give you an unlock key, and that's the end of your relationship with them.
tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
>Something like for example Affinity should in a rational market eat at least half of Adobes customer base with their current offerings. So maybe it's a problem of marketing? I suspect Adobe's customers look at their tools in a different way to the typical HN poster. They don't want too many new features because that disrupts their existing workflow. They would prefer to get annoying bugs fixed over something that causes them to relearn the software. They aren't even that worried about subscriptions because the software is a means to an income.
- carlosjobim 11mo ago

zaphar 11mo ago

I continue to maintain that the problem here is not greed but laziness. Make money with less effort or make even more money over a longer term with more effort. Building for the future requires effort and investment and has the potential to make more money than focusing purely on the current quarter.

doubled112 11mo ago
Expecting something more for little to no effort might be considered a form of greed.
sydbarrett74 11mo ago
It’s both greed and laziness.

evanjrowley 11mo ago

The video game industry is plagued by this problem. With live-service games becoming commonplace, there has also been a recent trend of games being released in an incomplete state. The shocking part is that multi-million dollar "AAA" game studios are engaging in this behavior. There's also a strong "own nothing" component to the issue.

erikerikson 11mo ago

I'm sorry to write that all those were problems before subscriptions too. Managers trying to hit targets and ratchet performance metrics, product managers trying to clear queues, the exponential growth of complexity from size (ala mythical man month)... Fundamentally it's a misalignment of incentives and and as yet unsolved problem of scaling social knowing.

Simulacra 11mo ago

This is how I've felt about Apple, and it doesn't just include a model with a jack, but a worsening of the iOS system, models that are no for most users of previous models. Apple has run out of ideas, and maybe that's the entire smartphone category. People will still buy smart phones, but I think their will be less enthusiasm for the latest and greatest model.