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Comment by situational87 | Hacker News Reader

The thing about subscription software is that it's brand new. If you're under 40 you probably don't even realize this, but it's a weird new invention to us old timers, and a massive shift in the economics of technology that tends to extract a lot more money out of consumers, but not necessarily to their benefit.

From my perspective (as a consumer and employee of a large software company) all the innovation is centered around the demand for perpetual earnings growth. Few people seem to actually be trying to move the needle forward or truly improve a process, it's just making bills go up a little bit more every month.

Google just announced an unprecedented $25 billion in share buybacks. We're getting so good at extracting every penny as efficiently as possible from every segment that we literally have no idea what to do with all the cash anymore.

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Thank you for calling out the real cause of these issues. Shareholders, with their insatiable greed, demand more and more from all companies across the whole economy. Subscription models--rent-seeking--is a little peek into this reality.

Thank you for calling out the real cause of this issue. Greed. Let's make greed illegal

> Subscription models--rent-seeking--is a little peek into this reality.

Thats not what rent seeking means.

Indeed. Charging fees for something you built is very nearly the opposite of rent-seeking.

This is demonstrably not true. Take Microsoft Office for instance. I got my first Mac in 1992. Office was $600 for the Mac. You were only suppose to use it on Macs you owned, and you definitely couldn’t get a Windows version for free if you owned the Mac version.

Now, for $100 a year, I can get Office and run it on my Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPad, web and Android device if I had one. I also get one terabyte of storage and add up to five additional users with the same benefit.

The usual counterpoint is that you could spend the $600 a month and own it “forever”. But if I had bought Office in 1992, I would have had to have an emulated version in 1997 for the PPC Macs, if I had bought it in 1997, I would have had a non native classic MacOS version.

Today the situation would have been worse with the iOS release cycle if I were stuck on an older version.

The same could be said about Adobe.

Nobody paid $600 for Office. A few large companies did, maybe, but nobody else. That's kind of the whole point of subscription software, right? To cut back on the insane 90%+ piracy rates of the good old days?

Yes. And I get far more value out of the $100 a year Office subscription that is continuously updated than I did out of the pirated Word 5.1 that I kept for years past it’s prime.

It seems like a win/win. Microsoft gets more money from me and I get more value from Microsoft.

Stock buyback is just another form of dividends, taxed as capital gains if you do it right.

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