Honestly this model of selling the consumer software in exchange for money that runs on their computer seems better than providing the software that only runs on the company’s servers in exchange for data and ads.
RIP Gamestop
Like, Google does not let you search their app store and filter by cost or spyware. It is hopeless to find some good utility tool without knowing its exact name.
A simple text-editor should be free. I don't want to give some dev reccuring revenue to unlock Notepad level features.
I strongly agree it shouldn't be this hard to find simple stuff.
Why would they? But Aurora Store does: https://auroraoss.com/
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...
That's the trick though, SaaS just keeps you hostage to the vendor and they can extract more value out of you. There are only two ways out of this:
1. The Internet becomes dangerous and unreliable for some reason, and we need to go back to treating software as a product for sale, rather than service for rent.
2. Regulation.
Neither way is great. It suggests distress in the system and forcing behaviors which are not natural to it. On the other hand, what's natural to this system we've created is apparently massive centralization in the hands of corporations, and whenever anything in this network of dependencies breaks, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.
It was also a solution to the problem of updates. You can't pay for continuous improvement with a traditional software product.
The problem companies had would be someone buying their software and then never buying updates. That's a product problem not a system problem. SaaS keeps the consumer captive in a permanent rental situation. The "it gives the customers a better experience" non-sense is false. One of the best case studies on this is Jetbrains. Sublime Text is still around too. It works. It just doesn't sell very well to SV shareholders.
It'd be a lot easier if they just said "we're greedy assholes". Since that's what it actually is. Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD. Updates were paid and it was okay because they were usually major improvements. There's been a whole lot of propaganda made to make SaaS seem like a net win for the consumer but this is by-and-large not the case.
But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Those are transaction costs. As is downloading and installing software, something software running on a server and delivered through a browser doesn't require. Those ongoing costs must be paid for with ads or subscription revenue.
> Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD
But it never was. Particularly in a networked world. Perfect is the enemy of good.
SaaS isn't a fit for all products. Some software can be written once and never updated. Most cannot, and for that, SaaS is a better business model fit.
Many did not, when the updates did not provide value. The false belief you seem to rely on here is that if companies get regular stream of revenue, they'll be compelled to work on updates. Why? They get the revenue anyway, they don't have to work on updates. They can in fact stop completely working on updates, except to match competitors, when their products get popular. But even that's not much of a problem when you have a closed file format, like say Adobe does with PSD.
It's about money. It's not about updates. It's taking away ownership from people in order to be able to drive up profits. Consider how normal software sales works. It's the same way. You lease enterprise-grade software to a company. Every year, as if by magic, something comes up and "prices need to increase". They just hacked off a zero or two and adapted this price model to the consumer. I fail to see how SaaS is not another variation of "Embrace, extend, extinguish" where the entrapment phase of extinguish is taken to it's natural conclusion: no ownership. Worse, you pay 5, 10, 20 times as much over time. Many companies capitalize on the subscription being priced such that you forget about it. Also known as the gym model.
The only acceptable SaaS model to me is JetBrain's. You pay a subscription and at the end of that term you own that version of the software permanently. You may continue to pay (because you find the product valuable) but you are not required to. At the end, you still own what you paid for. The truth is, SaaS provides very little value to people for what they pay.
An example: in 5 years you would've paid for a copy of AutoCAD inventor in full + some just leasing the worse Fusion360 over the same time period. If you are a sucker and buy into Inventor's SaaS pricing you would've paid for 5-8 copies at the previous model in the same time period. That type of capture is called theft in other modalities. 9/10 people would've never needed to pay for all the extra crap they saddle on in order to make the price seem "reasonable". They exist solely because the can extort (not capitalize) on the moat they have.
One day we'll look at this model of owning nothing as one of the greatest failings of our society. It's probably an unpopular opinion here at HN but SaaS is an awful anti-consumer model. We can hope that somehow we define what "providing sufficient utility" means and start cracking down on this.
It can be both. There is an ideological purity one tends towards when designing any system. Often times, that aesthetic sense of an engineer is right. Frequently, it's orthogonal to what customers need. SaaS isn't a fit in every case. But it's far from a universal money grab.
i give the example of Path Finder, which is a Finder replacement for mac. there’s not much to improve there, after a while it became bloated. they went with subscriptions after many years of owning the software (and rolled back that later with an alternative after the backslash).
i don’t use anything that came in the last few years, except the compatibility with the latest os. maybe it’s time to stop this madness and try to make every software do anything and extract money from the consumer for things that are really not needed (yes, i understand this is my opinion but i bet you all have a similar example).
Or put on your entrepreneur cap and realize this is an opportunity.
It's kind of like a lion. Sleeps most of the time. But don't get in its way.
With the traditional system the vendor has to work hard to put up an update that's worth it, and then you pay for it.
Adobe were clearly struggling to provide good updates to their software for years, creators were always kidding they just keep tweaking the UI skin because they're out of ideas, so there's no point buying the new updates. So when Adobe went subscription-only, they did it under the pretense they'll be able to ship new exciting features every month. And of course... in retrospect they didn't. In fact their updates are even more minor than before.
Except for security upgrades, I feel like most software rapidly hits a point where the upgrades aren't worth it.
Even with modern DRM, the cost, complexity, and inability to completely lock down software installed on a device under the control of the user puts some companies off.
So now we have software as a service, paid for with the user's attention (ads) or we have software that just stops working if the company's servers can't be reached. (Looking at you, VanMoof).
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Notable_payloa...
Neither do I, thus the cautionary tale of VanMoof. Software is now everywhere, in everything from your toaster to the electric grid. As a result, right-to-repair means right to reprogram. The owner needs to be able to fix bugs, change performance parameters, replace things that break. When my dad was working on cars, that meant put in a new carburetor, adjust the timing, clean the points - all physical parts. It's different today.