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I've been investigating & studying the business of software market in the past 2 years, and I've come to the same conclusion. Software needs to be designed arou

by pnathan 12y ago

I've been investigating & studying the business of software market in the past 2 years, and I've come to the same conclusion. Software needs to be designed around revenue streams; renting software is essentially the future. This is particularly true for software which reaches maturity. E.g., I don't need new features on my text editors (spreadsheets, browsers, etc); they are debugged and work great for me. So a SaaS model is where software effectively has to land, modulo unicorns.

meepmorp 12y ago
>I don't need new features on my text editors (spreadsheets, browsers, etc); they are debugged and work great for me. I see how that's probably right from the developer's perspective but as a consumer, it'd make me avoid your products. I don't want to keep paying you to use a product in general, and particularly not if - as you say - there's no new functionality or features. I don't want to rent my text editor, and asking me to adopt that model for your benefit isn't appealing. I realize that keeping developers afloat benefits me in the long term, but that's not really my focus as a customer.
- pnathan 12y ago
  Abso-freaking-lutely! Commodity software income trends to zero, especially as competitors enter the market and trim away the features that are unwanted, leaving a minimal (fast to develop) product behind. I don't actually believe that B2C software for "average consumers" where user pays for software is a viable market outside of certain markets (e.g., antivirus updates). The incentives are simply too aligned with gratis software doing something acceptably well for the vast majority of people, probably ad-supported. patio11 recently linked an article about selling to flies/mice/deer/elephants. It's really worth reading. I firmly believe that the only games in town over the next 5-10 years for financial revenues from software are: 1. ad-supported mass market (E.g., gmail) 2. B2C niche (e.g., Bible study software) 3. B2C SaaS (backup software, dropbox, Google apps) 4. B2B SaaS (most of web stuff) 5. B2B desktop/server - usually 1-time fee + maintenance over a few years. B2C Desktop buy-once and run is pretty extinct, afaict. For me, it's been replaced by libre software like LibreOffice, Emacs, and Firefox.

by pnathan 12y ago

meepmorp 12y ago

>I don't need new features on my text editors (spreadsheets, browsers, etc); they are debugged and work great for me. I see how that's probably right from the developer's perspective but as a consumer, it'd make me avoid your products. I don't want to keep paying you to use a product in general, and particularly not if - as you say - there's no new functionality or features. I don't want to rent my text editor, and asking me to adopt that model for your benefit isn't appealing. I realize that keeping developers afloat benefits me in the long term, but that's not really my focus as a customer.

pnathan 12y ago
Abso-freaking-lutely! Commodity software income trends to zero, especially as competitors enter the market and trim away the features that are unwanted, leaving a minimal (fast to develop) product behind. I don't actually believe that B2C software for "average consumers" where user pays for software is a viable market outside of certain markets (e.g., antivirus updates). The incentives are simply too aligned with gratis software doing something acceptably well for the vast majority of people, probably ad-supported. patio11 recently linked an article about selling to flies/mice/deer/elephants. It's really worth reading. I firmly believe that the only games in town over the next 5-10 years for financial revenues from software are: 1. ad-supported mass market (E.g., gmail) 2. B2C niche (e.g., Bible study software) 3. B2C SaaS (backup software, dropbox, Google apps) 4. B2B SaaS (most of web stuff) 5. B2B desktop/server - usually 1-time fee + maintenance over a few years. B2C Desktop buy-once and run is pretty extinct, afaict. For me, it's been replaced by libre software like LibreOffice, Emacs, and Firefox.