Ask Slashdot: Do You Prefer One-Time Purchases or SaaS Subscriptions? (wikipedia.org) 356
Long-time Slashdot reader shanen remembers the days of one-time software purchases, before companies began nudging customers to a subscription-based "software as a service" model:
New bugs and security vulnerabilities keep being discovered, which means the product cannot EVER be regarded as completed. Whatever the original cost, no matter what the software was supposed to do, it needs unending support. Right now I'm unable to see any other solution than SaaS!
Not limited to Microsoft, of course. Perhaps Apple was the original source of the approach... Slashdot reader dryriver sees a dire trend: Current computing younglings may never know a future where you can actually run software locally on a PC you own, and/or not pay for it as SaaS. All perpetual software licenses may go away in the next six years. Autodesk and Adobe have already moved to SaaS-only.
But is there a case to made for ongoing payments to fund ongoing support? Or is SaaS just an exploitative business model that's bad for customers but good for software vendors? Share your own thoughts in the comments.
And do you prefer one-time purchases or SaaS subscriptions?
Not limited to Microsoft, of course. Perhaps Apple was the original source of the approach... Slashdot reader dryriver sees a dire trend: Current computing younglings may never know a future where you can actually run software locally on a PC you own, and/or not pay for it as SaaS. All perpetual software licenses may go away in the next six years. Autodesk and Adobe have already moved to SaaS-only.
But is there a case to made for ongoing payments to fund ongoing support? Or is SaaS just an exploitative business model that's bad for customers but good for software vendors? Share your own thoughts in the comments.
And do you prefer one-time purchases or SaaS subscriptions?
One time purchase FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: One time purchase FTW (Score:5, Informative)
One time, definitely.
My customers insisted on monthly payments (Score:5, Informative)
I think paying monthly is silly. That's why I priced the software I made as a one-time purchase. It was software used by small businesses (and sometimes larger businesses).
My price was $150 one-time purchase.
The competitor was $55 / month.
Customers routinely bought the competition based on price. I would tell them that we cost $150 for a year, the competitor cost $660 for a year. Many, many of them liked the $55 / month much better than $150 purchase. This is software you'd keep for years.
Finally I gave in and offered a $35/month option, with $150 purchase being the default. Probably half of the customers chose $35 / month. Seems stupid to me, but that's what they wanted.
I had customers pay $1,260 over three years and they, for some reason, wouldn't switch, even when I offered to convert it to a purchase for only $60. That makes no sense to me, but that's what many customers preferred.
Re:My customers insisted on monthly payments (Score:5, Interesting)
Absolutely true. I had a choice of paying monthly for Adobe Creative Suite or paying less than one year's subscription and buying Black Magic Resolve (with a lifetime of free updates -- and they update *very* regularly).
I chose the latter and never regretted it.
Now, if you check the groups and YT, it seems that a *lot* of people are ditching Adobe's subscription model and opting for the one-time purchase. At least in the area of video production, SaaS is already well on its way to exctinction.
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The nice thing about both of those is that they work close enough to Photoshop that it is easy to move to them. This is important for users who don't use it on a daily basis, but use it often enough to have it present. Plus, you don't have to buy subscriptions. This is very useful, especially when you have tons of machines.
For an Acrobat replacement, PhantomPDF isn't bad. It will crash if you give it very gnarly documents, but for most things, it works without issue.
Re:My customers insisted on monthly payments (Score:5, Informative)
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A monthly ft, they don't have to carry it on the books as a depreciating asset, with only a percentage of the cost deductible each year (they forget the bit about purchases below a certain amount being 100% deductible in the first year because most purchases below that amount are not software, so they are in the habit of treating all "computer stuff" as they would larger capital expenditures.
This is the problem. GAAP [wikipedia.org] doesn't work well with software purchases. It's easier to treat it as a monthly expense than an asset. It shows you how messed up our financial system is.
Embarcadero's Delphi subscription model (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, Turbo Pascal was $49.95, maybe about $100 in today's money. This was much, much less than anyone else's compiler offering for the PC, and at that price, it was "too cheap to pirate" -- you just sent Borland your $49.95 and moved on. By the time Turbo Pascal 4, was it, that supported separate compilation and generating EXE files (remember those restricted COM files, a holdover from CP/M?), it cost "a couple" hundred dollars. When Delphi (the first version with reasonable support for Windows came out), it was $1000+, depending on the "level", but initially there were "deals' to get Academic Versions with some restrictions on commercializing your software for much, much less.
A couple years ago, I purchased Embarcadero ("Borland" is a distance memory) Delphi 10.2 on a grant for a couple thousand bucks. My department purchasing agent passed on to me the e-mail nags from Embarcadero to purchase the "support" and my reaction was, "Yeah, yeah." Turns out that Embarcadero decided to quit offering Upgrades at a discounted price -- if you ignored their nags to purchase "support", sorry pal, you pay list price to purchase the new version.
I thought a need the new version because I wanted to compile my app for OS X in 64-bit for a college course I teach -- the version I have is only 32-bit because it is based on "Carbon", which won't ever do 64-bit. Turns out the new Delphi version doesn't support OS X 64-bit.
So I turned to the Lazarus Project IDE for Free Pascal, which purports to build OS-X 64-bit. That doesn't do the trick either because the IDE uses the Carbon libs and it ignores the Project Settings (silently with out an error message) to build 32-bit. It turns out that Free Pascal from the command line will build 64-bit, so I guess there is that. So I won't be paying for the Embarcadero "support" (that train left the station when I ignored their nags and a "last chance" was a true last chance) or paying full freight for their new version. With the command-line Free Pascal, that train has pulled away on Embarcadero.
For some software, yes. No seat based in this case (Score:2)
What you said makes sense for seat-based software that is installed on a bunch of desktops.
That doesn't apply to the software my company made and sold. It was for web sites, with a copy being for a web site. (Think something like WordPress). Most customers had 1-3 copies.
We had different licensing for companies with hundreds of sites.
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It's complicated. People are stupid and stupider, for sure. Something I've observed, but don't yet understand, is how very stupid people can be when it's not their money. It might be a power thing- the more they spend, the more powerful they feel, and the monthly thing keeps them employed a bit. Stupid is as stupid does.
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There maybe reasons you choose to do it that way, but I don't believe you HAVE to do it that way.
For my business, and blessed by my CPA, I write off the entire purchase each year in full and don't bother having to track that depreciation over time thing.
Absolutely true, from a purely selfish perspective (Score:3)
What you said is absolutely right - if the only goal is getting the maximum amount of money from customers on that single product.
The product was created for the purpose of giving webasters something they needed, being helpful. Providing excellent value is a goal.
Also, any monthly subscription that was enforced would leave customers high and dry if something happened to me or my company. Even if I just got burned out. That would suck.
Having said that, the company eventually went out of business, because re
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A subscription also means you're more likely to maintain the product, providing genuinely useful bugfixes and features...
If it's a one off cost, you will either abandon it when sales dry up, or come out with a new version and try to charge another "one off" fee...
Only in this case you need to convince users to buy the new version rather than sticking with what they have, so you end up making user visible changes, breaking compatibility or introducing bloated features that users don't want but that look good
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Re:One time purchase FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Now? Products released that are buggy and missing features. "Oh, just download the patch." And another. And another. Oops, that patch disabled stuff you needed? Buy our buggy and feature-incomplete upgrade. You have the Pro version? Sorry, that feature has been moved to the enterprise version (I could smell the end of Borland when they pulled that shit).
Re:One time purchase FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop paying and you have nothing
Supporting company decides to stop supporting/offering the product, you have nothing
Supporting company goes out of business, you have nothing
Supporting company retires features or legacy formats, you lose backward compatibility and your archives are useless.
Basically if anything goes wrong, you're fucked. SaaS is the worst of all worlds for the end users.
=Smidge=
Re:One time purchase FTW (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in the day, if an application was that critical, your legal department would make sure that the code base for the product was kept in escrow to protect the company when certain events occurred. That would give you the means to keep the business running. You'd hire programmers to maintain or update that code internally. This was supposedly a popular thing back when CA was buying companies left and right and then dropping support for those products in an attempt to get companies to migrate to CA's homegrown -- and much more expensive -- products. Customers were actually said to be entering into contracts with software vendors that specified that the code would be turned over in the event that the vendor was ever purchased by CA to prevent that support termination from ever burning them.
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The only time I can think of SAAS as a benefit is when needs are constantly evolving either for the software itself, or the business application of it.
Now we are stuck with so much “purchased” software that has maintenance contracts that SAAS isn’t quite as bad as it once was from an operations standpoint. Yes, it costs more. No, we can’t really control the costs looking even a few months out. But, as long as the software keeps improving in meaningful ways (and not just UI updates
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So pay for a subscription for patches, not the initial software.
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So less like renting a product and much more like extorting you with denial of access to the content you created. 'SUBSCRIPTION==EXTORTION'
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Basically if anything goes wrong, you're fucked.
Calm down. It's just software. If Microsoft goes tits up tomorrow we're not fucked because we subscribed to Office365, we'd just move onto something else.
No such thing as software "purchases". (Score:2, Insightful)
Hate to break it to you, but you did not buy the software. You bought merely a license. A very limited one.
Which is why making your own copies, licensing them away yourself, etc, aren't legal for you, if your legal system backs their imaginary artificial scarcity monopoly for distributors (aka "copyright").
Nor can you modify it.
SaaS is just worse, because you don't pay for the actual service (which writing software is) either. All that changed is that the assholes made your license *temporary* too.
An actual
It's the quality that counts (Score:3)
SaaS isn't worth it, stop paying and you have nothing.
Really, that was insightful? Seems a bit of a stretch, but maybe it's mostly due to the way the Slashdot editor interpreted my poor presentation of the topic?
Let me try to clarify that my underlying motivation was actually the quality of the resulting software. With SaaS there is much less incentive to produce high quality software because you can always fix it whenever.
With low-quality software and a EULA you can still deliver shitty software and fix it at your convenience. Slight incentive to produce bett
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SaaS isn't worth it, stop paying and you have nothing.
This is absolutely true! However, there are a few instances where SaaS makes sense. For example, when you are starting a company and you do not have the capital to purchase all of the software, but you do have the cashflow to pay the SaaS prices. Of course, for many startup companies this would be the ideal time to start using open source software on open source operating systems.
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Not everything is about ownership. Sometimes using something is good enough. I go to the cinema and when I'm done I don't own anything either. When I go gokarting and am finished I don't own anything either.
Some software is like that. I have no innate desire to own Office, I do however like the idea of being able to get access to it from anywhere on any device.
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That's what you get with The Cloud[tm] (Score:5, Insightful)
First, build an easy-to-use remote infrastructure to host files and provide CPU power.
Second, collapse the market for powerful standalone machines because hey, any thin client is enough to run a browser to access decentralized things.
Third, lock your customers in and charge them up the wazoo by running the software they need over the internet, and stop providing complete standalone software suites, because hey, who runs powerful standalone machines anymore?
Aaand... we're right back to the mainframe-terminals situation of the 60s and 70s, when vendors charged insane amounts of money for poor shared-time services with zero control over the software, that my generation was so glad to escape from when the personal computer came about.
History repeats itself...
Re:That's what you get with The Cloud[tm] (Score:4, Informative)
We're going backwards. Completely agree.
Today, I was just thinking this, because I installed Signal for Debian. Now... this client needs an entire web browser, can't minimize to the system tray, can't re-order contacts...
Pidgin had end-to-end encryption (via OTR), you could run your own server (and still can, if not for the difficulty of gettng people to stop using more popular but less secure and/or less powerful solutions), a full-featured messenger client, and all of this was 15 years ago... and didn't need a web browser eating a couple GB of RAM just to provide the simplest functionality.
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That one deserves the insightful mod, but mostly you provoked me into suggesting an alternative:
Imagine that the software was produced by teams of OSS programmers paid a fair wage up front for their commitments of time and effort. If there are parts of the software that require network support, then those parts would run as funded by the users of the software on a periodic basis. If the funding runs out, then the people who want to use those features would get the option to help fund the next period or use
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In the 1960s there was at least a technological justification for the situation. Now it is purely about greed.
SaaS (Score:2)
Re:SaaS (Score:5, Interesting)
That's why people used to sell paid upgrades every year or two. But those upgrades only got bought if they actually offered real benefits over what customers already had.
With SaaS, there is a perverse incentive, because you get paid whether or not you improve your product. In fact, you still get paid even if you make your product worse in order to open up new revenue channels, typically by spying on your users in some way and selling the resulting data or by pushing them to integrate with other SaaS offerings from yourself directly or your commercial partners. Once you've got them thoroughly locked in, you can even increase prices almost arbitrarily to really turn the screw.
Re:SaaS (Score:5, Insightful)
those upgrades only got bought if they actually offered real benefits over what customers already had. With SaaS, there is a perverse incentive, because you get paid whether or not you improve your product.
That's a really good point, and should be emphasized.
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That's a really good point, and should be emphasized.
No it's not. If you make the product worse, the customer won't renew your contract when the time comes. Customer churn is a huge concern for clod vendors.
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If you make the product worse, the customer won't renew your contract when the time comes.
That is far too broad a statement. In reality, it has to be significantly worse, because there are multiple barriers to moving. You might have a degree of lock-in due to data being hosted or in some proprietary format. Even if you don't, someone else has to be offering an attractive alternative.
The big difference is that with SaaS, you don't need to compete with your own previous version, because you can just turn it off.
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It depends on how much your business revolves around the software. I don’t think many companies that have gone with Salesforce could ever really migrate off of them (and they seem to be happy with that reality). But, if you are doing a commodity service and migrating to something else becomes almost as easy as cancelling your contract then you have the pressure on you now.
Smart companies are understanding that more and more. I spoke to a CEO of a niche company that has built their entire business a
For a business (Score:2)
Don't buy anything, lease it, including the software. That's if the math checks out obviously. But you may want to use open formats for the files so they can be portable.
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^^ Yup.
You need to make strategic decisions that include end of life planning for any product or service that your company uses.
Our accounting package “doesn’t import data.” They saw that as a selling point. Well, since it is accounting software, it needs to be able to export everything, even if it isn’t the most convenient form. We made sure that the data we could export would be sufficient to switch to another solution up front, but without that due diligence you really don
SaaS has it's place... (Score:5, Interesting)
Certain types of software are great for SaaS. The main one that jumps to mind is an MMO. If you are constantly sending them money, though should expect the server to stay up and more content to be in the pipelines. Both free and for cost, ala expansions.
The various cloud server offerings make a lot of sense with a certain outlook and since they maintain the hardware/software and maybe your data if you are lucky, seems like a great SaaS opportunity. At least in this scenario you can add or subtract instances of your service and someone else is keeping up with hardware/software. It handles a lot of technical business stuff most people can't stand to think about.
If your software has constant or semi-constant real world values that update per regulation or law or some other arbitrary thing, then a new yearly software release makes sense.
In a lot of other ways, SaaS is just a business screwing it's customers for maximum profits. Most software that sits on a clients desktop doesn't need much updating. It doesn't need Internet awareness and certainly doesn't need to be sending and receiving data via the Internet.
For techies and enthusiast we don't need SaaS. We build our own or use off the shelf parts and components to spin our own solutions. Yay for open source and the free software movement.
The only way I would consider SaaS a value. (Score:4, Insightful)
Software-as-a-service is only a value if it provides me with access to the same (or better) software for less money than I would have paid otherwise. This is generally just about impossible to do. In my case, I buy one copy of Office and use it for 8-12 years. I'm not remotely interested in Office 365, which offers the unparalleled option of... paying Microsoft far more money over that same 8-12 year period.
Other people, with different needs, feel differently. If you need 3-5 Office licenses and being up on the latest and greatest is important to you, then maybe O365 is a good deal. If you really want cloud storage, maybe O365 is a good deal. I do not want cloud storage and do not need multiple licenses. I therefore consider it a remarkably poor deal indeed. It would need to cost on the order of $10 / year for me to be interested, and MS isn't cutting the price *that* low.
Most companies have engineered these deals to pad their own bottom lines first, and any actual concern for the customer is... decidedly secondary.
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If the software is server-based, SAAS can help bridge location issues with multiple offices, reduce critical internal dependencies between locations, and often offer you with a more robust infrastructure than you would be able to create for yourself at a reasonable cost. My stupid example is needing the same file to be editable at once between two or more locations with a latency-sensitive application. We get corruption problems using a real-time synchronizing approach, huge infrastructure costs to go for
Depends on the service. (Score:3)
Software I download and run on my machine? One time purchase.
Software where I rely on their server? Subscription.
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But you are missing the other benefits of their server based services. That might be ok, but you added a non-zero one-time cost for the NextCloud service, plus an ongoing non-zero cost for using “non-standard” software. It might pencil out for some things, but it won’t for most.
If you give people the choice... (Score:3)
If you give people the choice, then most will pick a perpetual licence. The only thing with this is they want to receive updates and support in perpetuity for a one-off fee. Unfortunately it costs money to keep developing updates and supporting users on an ongoing basis.
Like it or not, the current push to subscriptions reflects people's expectations with software. They expect to get updates, and they expect to receive support for as long as they want to keep using the software.
You only need to see the number of threads on various software forums - "I updated my OS to $LATEST_AND_GREATEST and now my 8-year old version of $FAVOURITE_APPLICATION doesn't work. I demand you release a patch to fix it and I'm not paying to upgrade to the current version because reasons."
Re: If you give people the choice... (Score:2)
"Like it or not, the current push to subscriptions reflects developers gross incompetence in making and selling software"
FTFY
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Like it or not, the current push to subscriptions reflects people's expectations with software. They expect to get updates, and they expect to receive support for as long as they want to keep using the software.
Does it? I feel like for a lot of users software like photoshop or office were actually good enough 10-15 years ago
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Like it or not, the current push to subscriptions reflects people's expectations with software. They expect to get updates, and they expect to receive support for as long as they want to keep using the software.
Does it? I feel like for a lot of users software like photoshop or office were actually good enough 10-15 years ago
You're right - older versions of Creative Suite or Microsoft Office are good enough for probably 80%+ of professionals out there. While there are a lot of people still happily using Photoshop CS6, they're going to (and do) complain pretty loudly when an operating system update breaks their old software, and they expect that Adobe should fix it for them.
Both are useful, for different reasons... (Score:2)
No more old versions sitting around 'just in case', no more 'I need this product not that one', no more 'I need this to access my files'. Once they stop paying, it goes. You should also be receiving new versions that patch vulnerabilities.
Perpetual licences though can also be good, especially where you simply don't need to upgrade constantly for the latest bloatware functionality, a
Wat (Score:2)
Current computing younglings may never know a future where you can actually run software locally on a PC you own, and/or not pay for it as SaaS.
Seriously, don't be stupid.
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Cat Poo or Dog Poo, Choose Dinner (Score:3)
The answer is No.
I do not prefer to pay for software.
Paying twice doesn't offer any improvement over paying once.
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Some. But who cares.
All the software is already written.
Prove me wrong: What software is not already written? If somebody thinks of something, it is gonna be all unicorns spewing rainbows and shit.
I don't give away more code because everything already exists, giving away more code is just pollution. If you really thought of something that was needed, I'd be happy to write it and give it away, but guess what? 12 other people slept less than me and already released it before I was finished. There is a glut of
Question (Score:2)
Offer people everything (Score:2)
One year low cost.
Full payment.
That keeps everyone happy.
A user gets to try the software, does it work with their CPU, cores, GPU.
Buy for a year and see if other software is better in one year? Like the product a lot and make the full payment.
Re: Offer people everything (Score:2)
And if you don't support this model, it's probably only because no one would want to use your software for more than 30 days.
That's my assumption anyway. I want people to take my money so bad; it's just sitting there piling up waiting for competent software developers to make a product.
TAKE MY FUCKING MONEY! WHY WON'T YOU TAKE MY FUCKING MONEY?!?! WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU?!?!
If you can't price in support, gtfo (Score:3)
Purchased licenses with continuing security support. You wanna sell new features? Fine. You wanna sell security patches? You're worthless and should get out of software development. If you can't price in ongoing support, you don't belong in this industry. Go get a job coding for someone else who knows how the software business works.
Anf Two Others (Score:5, Informative)
TeamViewer and Quicken have both already transitioned to SaaS only, and it sucks.I _hate_ software leases or subscriptions, because I'm never through paying.
If I _BUY_ a car, it's mine; I can keep it. Other than gas and maintenance, I don't have to keep paying. When I _BUY_ my house, it's mine, with the same caveats. If I rent an apartment or lease a car or subscribe to SaaS software, when I stop paying, it disappears and I have nothing to show for my money.
And "NEW!!!" features in SaaS offerings are generally useless or buggy or both. The new Quicken 2019 crashes EVERY day and has no new features that I'm interested in. I'd go back to Quicken 2016 - or 2013 or earlier - in a heartbeat.
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If I _BUY_ a car, it's mine; I can keep it. Other than gas and maintenance, I don't have to keep paying. When I _BUY_ my house, it's mine, with the same caveats. If I rent an apartment or lease a car or subscribe to SaaS software, when I stop paying, it disappears and I have nothing to show for my money.
Yeah but why would you own a car? Then you need to register it, maintain it, get a yearly safety test, it takes up space in your garage. Why not just sign up for a car as a service and make all that someone else's problem.
Okay so your car has one use case, let's change the engine size:
Have you ever been gokarting? Did you buy the gokart, or use their Gokart as a Service option?
Re:Anf Two Others (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, this is the mistaken way most people think. Unless your car lasts forever, buying one is financially equivalent to renting. The only differences are how much you pay and how the payments are structured (and who is responsible for repairs).
Your purchased car has cost you a net total of $40,000 + $4,000 - $20,000 = $24,000. Divide it by the 60 months you owned it, and it cost you $400/mo. From a financial standpoint, you did the same thing as renting the car for $400/mo, except you just paid it all up-front and put down a $20,000 deposit which you got back when you sold it.
Most financial transactions are actually rates, and directly comparable to renting. e.g. People tend to think of their salary as an amount. But it's actually a rate. If you make $50k, it's actually $50k per year. You pay $3 for a cup of coffee. But if you buy a cup every weekday, you're actually paying $780 per year. If you bought Office for $200, and upgraded every other version (about 6 years), you actually paid $33.33 per year.
Very few financial transactions are amounts. Pretty much only stuff which you have to buy once in a lifetime.
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If you're only buying a car to use it while it's less than 5 years old, sure. I try to go for 15 years of ownership if I bought new. 10 years if I bought used. There's no way you can beat that by renting, even with occasional massive repair bills.
Do it yourself? (Score:2)
You whippersnappers may not remember there was a time when there was no commercial software, with the exception of assemblers and, if you were lucky, compilers. Somebody showed you how to punch cards or paper tape and gave you an instruction manual. (Thinking Datatron 205 or IBM 1620.)
So there were mostly no bugs except your own. There was little "OS" except a boot loader. There was no "network" and no bad guys lurking around.
It was a lot of fun.
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I wrote a whole bunch of stuff in Basica, because it was already there, free, and came with a complete manual.
I discovered Assembler when I couldn't get bascia to be fast enough, and got C and Pascal along with it.
Remember PWB, Programmers workbench?
It had a macro language built in that allowed me to keep using the assembler libs I bought well into the late 90's.
The NT programming model finally broke all those tools, as well as the hard drives being over 2GB, lol.
PWB can't open a virtual file on a disk over
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So there were mostly no bugs except your own.
Grandpa, you're snoring, wouldn't you be more comfortable napping in bed?
I've still got Adobe CS6 (Score:2)
It works just fine and does everything I need to do. The Master Suite is installed on my computer. Also, to protect against operating system upgrades causing a problem, I also have CS6 installed in an isolated virtual machine running OS X 10.11.
SaaS - as Adobe implements it anyway - is a joke. They claimed they were moving that way so that upgrades and new features would be continuously happening... yet what they've done is follow the same old release model, with major upgrade rollouts happening every 12-18
The only subscription I have is photoshop (Score:2)
No software to use your data = you have no data (Score:4, Insightful)
Rental software/SaaS and software activation generally are, in my opinion, very unethical practices that should be smacked down at every opportunity. I don't like to use legislation to fix problems but I think that software activation cracking should be made 100% clear-cut legal instead of being the grey area it is today. If you buy software but it has mandatory vendor activation, you don't actually own it after all. I do understand that SaaS serves a market and I don't have as much of a problem with it when it's something where the data is easily exported to a usable format even if your license expires (such as a customer database being dumped to a pile of CSVs that can be migrated into something else), but even in such cases, the data is unusable without the software until you come up with a way (or pay someone) to migrate it to another system where it can be used, so I still have a problem with it.
Sometimes, a third choice is necessary (Score:2)
The official options:
1) Purchase software and pay additional for upgrades if you deem the upgrade worthy of purchase.
2) Go with the subscription model where " updates " are laughable because they don't need to entice you to keep buying their product, you already are.
Problem with #1
Your " purchased " software is only operational as long as the authentication servers allow you to " activate " it. The moment those servers are gone, so is your " purchased " software. So, while you're not paying for it as an
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The official options:
1) Purchase software and pay additional for upgrades if you deem the upgrade worthy of purchase. 2) Go with the subscription model where " updates " are laughable because they don't need to entice you to keep buying their product, you already are.
Problem with #1 Your " purchased " software is only operational as long as the authentication servers allow you to " activate " it. The moment those servers are gone, so is your " purchased " software. So, while you're not paying for it as an ongoing subscription, it still has a limited shelf life. By design.
To a point:
When Adobe lost their CS2 activation servers, they made alternate CS2 downloads available that did not require activation.
When they deactivated their CS3 activation servers, they allowed the affected users to convert their Acrobat/Contribute/etc. CS3 key to a CS4 key, and essentially gave out a free major version upgrade.
Of course there are no guarantees, like when microsoft terminated their ironically named "PlaysForSure" DRM validation servers.
FOSS (Score:2)
Obviously, neither. Use FOSS so that you own & control your copy of the software. I don't want my computer to tell me, "Sorry, I'm afraid I can't let you do that, Dave."
I also don't want 1,000's of hours of my work locked up in proprietary file formats so that I have no other option but to keep paying a company to allow me to access & edit it, & that requires any recipients of my work to also pay a company to access & edit it.
One-time purchase (Score:4, Interesting)
The SaaS business model is one of the reasons why companies like Adobe are on my personal blacklist (I do have Acrobat Reader and Flash installed but I will never install, buy or pirate any of the for-pay Adobe products)
All the software I own (including Windows 7 and a fairly large number of games among other things) has been a one-time purchase and I will not buy any software that uses a subscription model.
For us individual users, one time purchases... (Score:2)
But for companies, SaaS has advantages.
1.) The budget for SaaS comes from Opex, not Capex, so is deductible from taxes.
2.) Instead of paying in advance all at once to equip say, 100 desks, you pay month by month, which improved the cashflow.
3.) If you downsize, the expense of the extra desktops goes as soon as the employee goes. If you do mass layoffs with buy once SW, you already paid, and the software will sit in a shelf, unused, acruring depreciation.
4.) Spekaing of depreciation, is easier to keep track
Wait, really? (Score:2)
People actually honestly prefer saas? I thought we all pretty much universally hated that shit. You guys don't just go to piracy when they stop offering real licenses?
Mincing no words (Score:2)
Avoid Subscription Software (Score:2)
The answer (Score:2)
Yes, that's exactly what it is.
The good news is that there's absolutely no software I need. I have great image and text editors, many other tools, great development systems and numerous languages at my fingertips, VM(OS)'s and their tools running under my primary OS, all locally. Many of my own creation.
I can stay with this until my hardware dies and I can't find a replacement on the used market. Somethin
SaaS boosted Linux and open source usage,.. (Score:2)
Personally, like most others, I prefer to pay more and get a life-long version than the monthly payment stuff.
Like with most stuff I prefer one-time payment over monthly costs to have lower base costs.
That said, the whole software as a service thing seems to drive more and more users and companies to Linux and open source software.
At least in my corner of the world more and more companies are switching and or alt least experimenting with Linux alternatives since they prefer to donate to projects (one time
Old school! (Score:2)
I am old fashion. One purchase for life even if unsupported. I still use very old stuff from decades ago as long as they still work!
I don't subscribe to tools for my work (Score:2)
I may pay for support and upgrades if I think them needful.
I most especially do NOT pay for subscriptions for code the providing company simply builds... i.e. did not write but simply packages.
THAT is utter idiocy and profiteering.
seriously ? (Score:2)
Is that a serious question?
My current machine is a 2017, but my wife is using my old 2011 and my notebook is from 2014. Some of the software I am using predates all of them. And it works just fine. I have an ancient version of Photoshop somewhere that does absolutely everything I need. There's a really old version of Cinema 4D that totally satisfies my needs. And a couple really old games are still fun when I play them now and then. The invoice from one of my most consistently used work-tools (Scrivener, an
sas is an excuse to charge for NOT (Score:2)
sas is an excuse to charge for NOT properly finishing development and fixing bugs.
Do NOT reward companies for releasing unfinished products (that they want to charge you monthly) to fix in the tiniest increments possible.
Delayed gratification (Score:2)
Our business aggressively avoided offering our product as SaaS until we started openly bleeding customers to an inferior product that was clou
There are good cases for SaaS (Score:2)
I worked as an agile coach for an engineering company.
A spin - off from a big international company. Their IT department could barely manage email and windows. So the desided they wanted web based requirements engineering and project tracking/quality ensurande software as SaaS.
Because:
* the provider does the backups
* they have different international teams in different projects
* they want to create projects and add users without negotiations with their IT
* they need gt. 99% uptime aka reachability, the VPN
I like my software like my politicians (Score:2)
Once bought, stays bought.
Why no hourly or daily SaaS usage? (Score:3)
I'd love to be able to use the Adobe Creative Suite on an hourly or even a daily basis. The cheapest I can seem to get it for short use is $80/month. Ouch. You'd think they could meter it by the hour or day, and even at the $80/month rate, $2.70 a day would seem reasonable.
There's a lot of software that would be useful to have access to on an ad-hoc basis -- a few hours here, a few hours there, but the minimum rates are so freaking high it's not worth it.
Re:Everybody wins solution (Score:5, Interesting)
It used to be buy the product , keep it and get bug fixes for 3 years. Upgrades would be introduced every couple of years, and users could get the upgrade at a discount, same as there were competitive discounts if you sent in the title page from the competitors user manual.
What you bought didn't stop working (heck, dBASE still runs fine in DOSbox if I feel nostalgic). Same with games (SimCity 2k in DOSbox let me finish it and yes, your city launches into space).
Would you buy a solitaire game as a service? Why would you buy an office suite as a service? It's not like they expire after a year or two. Heck, people are still running DOS, Windows 3x and 9x on emulators, no need to buy new software or rent it. Look at all the XP machines still in use. The software on many of them doesn't even have an upgrade or SaaS option. It will be emulators all the way down.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, you certainly managed to hit a nerve. Several times a month I actually run an ancient dBase II application on DOS. It's the back-end of a database app that I've never ported, though the primary front-end is PERL/CGI accessed via JavaScript... Crufty old stuff but I can't get up the incentive to rewrite it one more time in a properly integrated way.
By the way, I never could get dBase II to run in DOSbox or any other emulator. It apparently needs a physical hard disk with the old FCBs. Therefore one of
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Have you tried dosboxX?
http://dosbox-x.com/ [dosbox-x.com]
It does more accurate emulation than normal dosbox. Lots of custom patches in its source tree. It can do real network card emulation, does better IDE controller emulation, and thinks like that.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't remember trying it, so thanks for the tip, though I really think I should break down and just rewrite the entire thing in Python. I'm just too lazy in my retirement to find a good source to mangle, and the old systems work "well enough" for my purposes.
Re: (Score:2)
Word/Excel for Windows 95 still do everything nearly everyone needs.
And even though a little bloated at the time, they run like lightning on modern hardware.
Re: (Score:2)
How about I stop paying and my product version stays the same as I just paid for?
Re: (Score:2)
The summary assumes purchased software doesn't receive patches and only SaaS does. Not true.
And you assume one-time purchasers are going to actually purchase the new version when the vendor stops supporting it. Not true.
SaaS creates higher costs, but provides security via perpetual support. One-time purchases might be cheaper, but in the hands of cheap people/corporations almost guarantees it will become vulnerable due to lack of support/maintenance.
When you call it a one time purchase, customers believe you. Go figure what happens next.
Re: (Score:2)
Virtually nobody wants SaaS. That's why the model is forced on people. If people were eager for it, the companies offering it wouldn't have to use strong-arm tactics to get people to switch to SaaS offerings from permanent licenses.
SaaS has one viable justification, and unfortunately it's born from consumer ignorance because no consumer is "eager" to maintain their one-time software properly. Would I rather have one-time purchase models? Sure. But we can't have that because even "strong-arm" tactics like getting hacked aren't even enough to convince consumers to maintain software properly.
Capitalizing assets (Score:3)
From what I can tell, SaaS is more being pushed with software that costs hundreds of dollars, not thousands of dollars (as in the difference between OpEx and CapEx).
Accountant here. Under IFRS all leases are capitalized including software leases [centralts.com]. The fact that an individual seat of the software has a modest cost is irrelevant when you are purchasing hundreds of seats. GAAP is requiring similar measures and the accounting rules makers are aware of the complications that software subscriptions create on the financial statements.
And corporations have tax advantages with CapEx, so I'm not really sure why any company would not want to embrace it when justified.
Usually companies would rather expense things rather than capitalize them whenever possible. If you capitalize a purchase (equipment or lease
Depreciation (Score:3)
Regarding this last comment, while it makes sense from an out-of-pocket cost to expense everything and take the immediate tax writeoff, it's a bit inaccurate to financially state that equipment you're going to run for a decade only holds value for one year.
That's my point. Let's use a simple example. I buy a machine for my business for $10K and it depreciates straight line for 5 years ($2K/year). So I spend cash money in the amount of $10K right up front and then I have an asset that according to my books is fully used up and without value at year 5. My cash is gone immediately but I don't get to realize the full tax value of that for another 5 years whether or not it actually makes me money. Furthermore chances are that the machine is still going to be