Comment by la_barba | Hacker News Reader

Comment by la_barba | Hacker News Reader

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>What ever happened to making a product, selling it once to the customer, who then gets to use it as they wish for as long as it works?

That was the old business model. It worked well for a while. Then most small software companies that sold general purpose software went out of business doing just that. And with App Stores basically stealing 30% of all your sales, its become even more harder to do that. A lot of major software companies have since moved to the subscription model and have seen a bump in revenue and profit. For me, its not a bad value proposition for things like Office or Photoshop where I appreciate the updates.

>I don’t want to pay your software team over and over so they can keep changing it on me over and over. Just make it once, sell it, then go make something else!

Interestingly, after Photoshop moved to the subscription model, Serif released their Affinity Photo software that was a one-time-payment-no-subscription software to compete with Photoshop and to cash in on the discontent. I bought it to support their efforts, but I kept using Photoshop because its just a better software and I'm more familiar with it. It will be interesting to see if Serif is still around in 5-10 years..

> It worked well for a while. […] And with App Stores basically stealing 30% of all your sales …

I’ve never understood that argument. Physical media production, packaging and shelf space was way more expensive than 30%. Not trying to justify the Apple’s Premium here, just pointing out that it’s a lot cheaper than physical retail used to be.

> I kept using Photoshop because its just a better software...

In some ways it is, in others it is not.

Well, I could sell it on my website and keep 100% of the sales? Modern operating systems seem to think any binary is malware these days. Windows ads a NTFS metadata tag to any file thats downloaded online and will throw up scary looking warnings when you try to run it. And the security folks spent years writing columns telling people not to download "random" binaries from the internet. So now we download "random" binaries from the App Store. Ofcource the app store has very little interest (beyond bad PR) in actually testing or ensuring that the application is not malicious, because who wants to hire tens of thousands of people for that when you can just use an "intelligent" algorithm to figure it out. They will pass the buck back to the vendor in a nanosecond when they discover malware in the app store. They're still going to keep the 30% of sales though. I'm not bitter, I promise! :)

Maybe I the buyer am willing to pay 150% in the store compared to on your website. I need to find my credit card, to trust one more random website with it... I have certainly decided not to buy things for this reason. And if I don't know too much about you, then I'll take all the sandboxing I can get, and happily pay a premium for that too.

And of course you only get 100% if you have zero fraud, zero hassles, no fees, no awkward cases.

Fair enough, yes the convenience factor can drive more sales which is mutually beneficial, I'll give you that. But the OS can still put you in control and let you run things inside a sandbox. Its the 30% money grab that I was complaining about because the app store provides no assurances on anything, and so we are pretty much back to square one. Its still a "random" binary off the internet. And for a basic sanity check, you can scan the hash to determine if its a known malware.

I think its just the same bullshit as Walmart and Target selling toxic toys and then shifting blame onto the original supplier. Not sure what happened to the lawsuit though..

Agree to your second point on fraud/hassles,etc...

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