Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

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You won’t convince them because you don’t understand why they think the things they do. Even if you hate management and business types altogether, you’re never going to be able to understand them unless you actually consider they may have a rational basis for their actions. In this case, they don’t care about subscriptions because they hate art or hate freedom or have a “theology” or anything like that.

Subscriptions are preferable to one-off payment for a software product primarily because software incurs an ongoing cost (support, maintenance, enhancement etc which users have come to expect and also servers etc for any online features the software needs) and therefore it’s better to match that with an ongoing revenue stream. If you have an ongoing cost base but only point-in-time revenue then every sale you make is essentially creating future problems because you are creating future cost that isn’t supported by revenue. You essentially have turned your business economics into a Ponzi scheme and can only keep going if you perpetually grow sales which is not sustainable.

Rich Siegel would like a word.

There absolutely is a theology of business, and currently it is this: make as much money as possible.

Commercial software existed long before the subscription model consumed everything, and it was, and still is, sustainable. Subscriptions didn't consume the software ecosystem because the alternative is not sustainable; subscriptions took over because they make more money (and often for less effort).

It's fine if you want to describe that as rational decision-making in business contexts, but I have to object if you cross a line into arguing that there are no viable alternatives. There are subscriptions, and then there are less profitable alternatives.

Exacly. Additionaly, you can sell software and include a year support bundle. If you want to have longer support (or extend support), you have to play extra (pear year). That sounds reasonable.

The standard way to do this was to sell a license for a specific major version. It goes through a lifecycle where it's initially the most current, then gets superseded by a new major version and maybe gets a few more bug fixes, and at some point one of those releases is the last one for that major version and it's done. Buyers can continue using it forever, but there's no maintenance/enhancement cost, and support can be stopped too if you want.

This worked for decades and continues to work today for some companies. It's not a Ponzi scheme in any sense.

> also servers etc for any online features the software needs

This is usually a deliberate choice made by software companies. They take their software that could be (or used to be) run on the user's local PC and then unnecessarily move it to a server. Then, they conveniently have a "Well I have to run a server" excuse for changing to a subscription model. You wouldn't have the costs of running a server if you didn't decide to shoehorn that server into the software in the first place!

Even if you only sell shrinkwrap software there are ongoing costs for your business in the form of sales, accounting/payroll, office rent, customer support and so on.

If you want to have bugfixes available for customers you have to pay developers to do that, and infrastructure for releasing them - this is an ongoing cost.

The problem is orthogonal to where software runs: there are subscription models for fully downloadable software that doesn't have to interact with a server (jetbrains for example, and some games).

All of the logic in this entire sub-thread is based on the idea that thet s/w has to be ssold by a vendor.

Large orginazations, representing classes of users (architects, engineers, people who type documents and calculate numbers) could produce s/w for their own use, not to sell, and make this s/w available under a free software GPL license.

They would save the money they would have spent buying this s/w, and spread those savings to everyone else who used the s/w.

I don't want to retype or paste the entry I made below, but please read it and respond to this alternative.

Thanks for the discussion!

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