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Comment by wrycoder | Hacker News Reader

Corporations love the steady revenue of the subscription model. Look at Blackrock buying up all the housing and renting it out.

The idea being that people won’t own anything except (maybe) their clothes.

Well, certainly a lot less trouble for the kids when you kick off.

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Not actually owning anything is part of it, but the whole autopay push is a little more basic than that--it's eliminating the conscious decision to buy and turning customers into a passive income stream. My phone bill is significantly cheaper if I let it get autobilled to my debit card instead of actually paying it every month. Heating/cooling companies in my area push a monthly subscription that includes annual furnace inspections for the same price as the inspections themselves. Both of those are genuinely services, and not things I would have otherwise owned.

I don’t expect that trend to reverse itself given it benefits the people who have the most say in our politics.

I’m just waiting for them to go ahead and implement a privatized social credit score too at this point.

Credit scores are already privatized so why not? Citizen and Palantir could get in on it with Equifax. They'd just need to incentivize others to do the reporting of good/bad social actions.

Plus social media & potentially even ISPs looking to sell user data, I wouldn’t be surprised if every aspect of your online life is fed into a system like this. And simply hiding your traffic won’t be good enough because not using these things would be considered abnormal — not having active (and well behaved) social media presence could be a big detriment to a score like this. Something that employers are likely to look at too.

On the one hand I appreciate the stuff a company like Apple does around privacy, but on the other they comply with whatever laws are in place in a given country. So we have to hope the state of our democracy improves because effectively becoming a one-party state changes the game — then we actually have to worry the government will encourage or mandate dystopian systems like this. Good actors in the private sector won’t be good enough to mitigate if that happens.

Somewhat related I also wouldn’t be surprised if within the next couple of decades all driving related data is being monitored and aggregated, so that could also be used to build sort of a social / behavioral profile on someone and not just feed into self driving AIs and insurance data

Already happening but is at least opt-in for now:

https://www.intact.ca/en/personal-insurance/home/group/mydri...

Well right now it’s relatively crude and opt-in via your insurance but at some point I expect much more detailed telemetry from (internet connected) vehicles by default

> Corporations love the steady revenue of the subscription model.

Non corporations love it too.

Investors are starting to value companies exclusively off recurring revenue. Non-subscription revenue is not even counted.

If your company has $100000/month in MRR but manages to make $100M in a year, it's a $1.2M/year company.

I think investors are really starting to value companies with good economics, who can show profitable growth. Many VC-backed SV style companies over the past decade have not been like this, and I think that age is coming to an end.

Subscriptions/MRR happen to be a good way to get profitable growth, but that doesn't mean it's not possible otherwise. In fact subscriptions may be obfuscating otherwise poor economics, and I suspect that many customers are going to get subscription overload, or reach the end of nice introductory terms, and churn.

Some investors might be looking exclusively at MRR, but they are likely shortsighted. If too many value MRR and don't value other revenue, there will be plenty of valuable investments to be had in non-subscription companies and the market should rebalance.

Do you mean Blackstone?

Might as well be Blackwater for all the good it's doing the world.

LOL

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