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Comment by ken | Hacker News Reader

Except that revenue stream ends before the "fix bugs and improve performance" step. People buy based on screenshots/demos/trials/reviews, and those don't expose the deep bugs you run into 3 months later when doing real work.

Shovels break, light bulbs burn out. Then you go buy another one, and there's a good chance it's better than the earlier one. The manufacturer keeps working to improve the quality, and people keep paying them for this. "Buy a software license once for all time" is not analogous to this.

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> Shovels break, light bulbs burn out. Then you go buy another one, and there's a good chance it's better than the earlier one.

Not in my experience. Almost always the new ones are improved only in one respect: profitability. Generally this means they have used cheaper components, lowered the cost a bit, and made an inferior product. Ok. End of tangent.

> The manufacturer keeps working to improve the quality

Call me cynical, but I think it's naive to make this claim.

Manufacturers don't optimize quality, they optimize profits. Even if there's sufficient competition, manufacturers don't race upwards to improve quality, they race downwards to reduce the cost and undercut the competition.

You can see this in kitchen appliances. People complain about how they don't last as long as they used to and are harder to repair. That's because when a customer sees a $30 blender and a $50 blender on the shelf, they will nearly always pick the $30 blender, even if the $50 blender is a higher quality. There was a race to the bottom on pricing, and corners had to be cut.

Information asymmetry is also a problem. The $50 blender might be trading on a beloved brand name... but with the metal gears replaced by plastic and glue in place of the fasteners. How can the average person tell?

What you really want to read is reviews from 3 years in the future but you can’t. So you buy the $30 blender because it’s too hard to assess whether the $50 one is worth it.

I really liked the hn article the other day on assessing garment quality. The first step in stemming the tide of garbage is being informed.

In the software world SaaS tends to optimise for growth and customer retention, which is probably better aligned to meet people’s needs than optimising for first sale.

> I really liked the hn article the other day on assessing garment quality.

I didn’t see this at the time; if you remember the title or still have the link could you please post it?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20503194

At the start of our living together, me and my wife bought cheap kitchen appliances. Two years later, straight after the warranty expired, most of them died. One of them actually gave a very close call to a nasty accident. So now we learned. We buy the good stuff, based on brand experience and word of mouth from friends. If we havent the money, a second hand good one is in general both cheaper and better than the bad ones. It takes some time to find them sometimes. I know lots of people doing the same.

So you are right in the short term, but consumers learn. This will bite cheaper brands in the long term.

"Buy a software" is vastly different from "Buy a software license"

Problem being, <shovel> makers are now prohibiting you from owning your <shovel>. From fixing your <shovel>. From changing your <shovel> so you don't need to buy <super shovel>. Now with forced updates, you're now literally prohibited from keeping the shovel you have and like!

You are using <brackets> as though you haven't noticed the physical product companies are all racing to lock up their products in rent-seeking license agreements.

I think he's using it to show the ludicrousness of the system software has become. I haven't heard of any subscription shovels, have you?

Perhaps not shovels, rental cars/excavators and such aren't too different from a subscription model

> The manufacturer keeps working to improve the quality, and people keep paying them for this. "Buy a software license once for all time" is not analogous to this.

I agree, why I feel ye olde numbered software releases worked fine. I even think subscription based software is fine if the yearly subscription price is at or below what the old numbered version costs.

What happens these days is software converts to a subscription model and the developer decides to jack up the yearly subscription price to 2-3x the old yearly price.

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