4 ms·

Flip side of that last one, sometimes you would even buy a program, and it would still work long after the company that wrote it went out of business. These day

Flip side of that last one, sometimes you would even buy a program, and it would still work long after the company that wrote it went out of business. These days, when a company pulls the plug on a web app, you are SOL.

tel 12y ago
Which is, btw, another incentive for web companies as it forces large companies who do decide to make use of a web product integral to their operation willing to pay a lot more to keep the web company alive.
enraged_camel 12y ago
I personally prefer the latter. When you buy a license for a desktop application, the price you pay includes tech support and often times future upgrades. When the developer goes out of business, you lose out on all of that. In contrast, the vast majority of web apps are on a subscription model - as long as you continue to pay, you're getting your money's full worth. Sure, it can be a bit disruptive when the company pulls the plug, but in most cases there are reasonable alternatives that are both easy to discover and easy to start using (usually within the span of minutes).
icebraining 12y ago
Unless it's Free Software, like Newsbeuter.
astrodust 12y ago
I'd take a software-as-a-service solution that I can replicate the data from in an open standard format like JSON or XML over a closed-source application with an impenetrable binary file format any day.
- mwcampbell 12y ago
  That seems like a false dichotomy. There are SaaS applications with no data export option, and there are closed-source locally installed applications that use textual data formats (e.g. XML), if only as a matter of convenience for their developers.
  - astrodust 12y ago
    I mean this by way of comparison to applications that were distributed on floppy such as WordPerfect, dBase, FoxPro and so on, where the data format was proprietary. It's only relatively recently that we've seen open-source and open-data applications. These are arguably better but relatively rare.

tel 12y ago

Which is, btw, another incentive for web companies as it forces large companies who do decide to make use of a web product integral to their operation willing to pay a lot more to keep the web company alive.

enraged_camel 12y ago

I personally prefer the latter. When you buy a license for a desktop application, the price you pay includes tech support and often times future upgrades. When the developer goes out of business, you lose out on all of that. In contrast, the vast majority of web apps are on a subscription model - as long as you continue to pay, you're getting your money's full worth. Sure, it can be a bit disruptive when the company pulls the plug, but in most cases there are reasonable alternatives that are both easy to discover and easy to start using (usually within the span of minutes).

icebraining 12y ago

Unless it's Free Software, like Newsbeuter.

astrodust 12y ago

I'd take a software-as-a-service solution that I can replicate the data from in an open standard format like JSON or XML over a closed-source application with an impenetrable binary file format any day.

mwcampbell 12y ago
That seems like a false dichotomy. There are SaaS applications with no data export option, and there are closed-source locally installed applications that use textual data formats (e.g. XML), if only as a matter of convenience for their developers.
- astrodust 12y ago
  I mean this by way of comparison to applications that were distributed on floppy such as WordPerfect, dBase, FoxPro and so on, where the data format was proprietary. It's only relatively recently that we've seen open-source and open-data applications. These are arguably better but relatively rare.