Honestly? Because no software is free from bugs and there will always be a need for support. The difference between single sale and subscription can be life or death for a company, its products, and its support.
But if you don't feel that a subscription to a service adds value, please don't buy it and voice your concern to the developers. Especially if they're a small shop.
That said, subscriptions can be canceled. For example I needed Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator this month. Got to use those for a fraction of the cost I would have paid five years ago for each program and been stuck with a license. It's more flexible that way. But I understand it doesn't reflect every use case.
Then charge for bug fixes. Charge for updates that make the application run on a new version of the OS. If those things provide sufficient value, users will pay for them. I've been paying for that for decades for my commercial text editor.
And can subscriptions be canceled in practice? If you cancel your Photoshop subscription, your documents suddenly become unopenable. In this way, software subscriptions—at least for software you create with—are like protection money: "Nice documents there. It'd be a shame it anything were to happen to them."
> ...we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say "Would you buy a new version because of bugs?" You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis.
-- Bill Gates (1995)
How would you sell bug fixes? "Hi grincho, how would you like an update for X feature where we fix Y bugs for Z dollars?" Most people would respond by asking why they have to pay more money for things that should be working in the first place. It'll become hard to know whether a developer is fixing new bugs or whether they just wrote some buggy software knowing they'll get more money by selling bug fixes separately rather than writing it correctly in the first place.
Right. I should not have to pay again, or subscribe to some “service” to have the company fix their product’s defects. If I buy a vacuum cleaner that randomly rips up my carpet once every 100 sessions, or a garage door that opens by itself in the middle of the night, I should not have to pay the companies to fix them. This is why we have warranties and product recalls, which are conspicuously absent in the software business.
Charging for bug fixes can also be seen as protection money: "Nice security holes you've got there, it'd would be a shame if anyone were to abuse them."
And no software vendor would like to categorize bugs as security related or not, or maintain and test all combinations of old releases plus security patches applied. The easiest is if all customers stay on top of tree.
I bought Office 2007 around the time of its release because a client didn't like whatever word processor I was using. I've used Office 2007 ever since and absolutely have no need for any feature additions. And there were no bugs that affected my use. Why would I subscribe to the current overly bloated Office? Why should I?
Ideally. Assuming you haven't bought into a contract, and assuming the company... you know... stops charging you once you stop using their product and "cancel" using the mechanism they provide. That second problem can be mitigated with single-use credit cards, like what privacy.com offers, but if that gets to be too common, I can imagine companies requiring you not use those as a condition of service.
This is what disputing charges is for. Once you have told them, even once, that you are canceling your subscription, any further charges are fraud and you should respond accordingly.
I agree with this, provided that you did notify them in a reasonable way.
A random email from an unverified address to the first point of contact you can find with Google is not a reasonable way, for the purposes of this discussion. Nor is a casual ambiguous statement during a long phone call whose meaning clearly wasn't understood, if you don't clarify it at the time but then quote it out of context later.
Personally, I like the rule of thumb that it should be no harder to cancel a subscription than to take one out and you should be able to give that notice via the same channel(s) you could use to sign up in the first place, but no-one on either side is required to go any further than that. It keeps everyone honest, but it's also obviously reasonable and proportionate.
I wouldn't consider the second example telling them, and I wouldn't consider the first you, but I can see how it might be interpreted that way, so fair point.
Ultimately, though, they're periodically asking you for money; if you decide to stop giving them money, then things need to work out such they don't get any more of your money.
Ultimately, though, they're periodically asking you for money; if you decide to stop giving them money, then things need to work out such they don't get any more of your money.
Agreed, that is the important thing (though it implicitly assumes that you don't have some contractual obligation to continue making payments for whatever reason).
I'm not in any way advocating making legitimate cancellation artificially difficult here. I dislike shady businesses that do that as much as anyone else. I'm just also seeing it from the other side, as someone who has run subscription-based services, because sometimes customers will give ambiguous or conflicting signals and then assume you magically know how to interpret them correctly.
A particularly common one in my experience is a subscriber sending an email to ask how to cancel, receiving a prompt reply from you answering their question, but then not actually doing it. Contractually speaking, there seems to be no doubt at that point that their subscription continues and further charges are legitimate. However, if they just forgot to act on the response, and then they come back six months later claiming that they're still being charged after "they asked to cancel", that's always an awkward situation. It gets more awkward if they really haven't been using your product/service since that time, or if they haven't actively been using it but they do have some sort of data stored in it that would be deleted if their subscription ended. It can get much more awkward if they really did literally ask to cancel, but in an insecure/unverifiable way such as an ad-hoc email, and if you did reply advising them of that and explaining the correct procedure, which they didn't then follow.
Within reason, we tend to refund as a good will gesture in this sort of situation as long as we believe it was an honest mistake by a customer, but I don't think either the law or whatever payment service was used should be imposing any sort of obligation in that case. Insisting on a clearly defined cancellation process does have the advantage of being unambiguous and therefore reducing the risk of that sort of confusion.
Indeed. And software developers have largely enjoyed a free ride where they haven't been pursued under consumer protection laws for providing defective products because of the good will built by providing updates to fix defects for a reasonably long time after purchase. If the latter stops, why shouldn't the former?
I think it is also one of the rare industries where the price of the good is so vastly under-priced (often zero!) for the value it provides -- especially if you use the "sell once, update forever" model people claim to desire. Few people would want to pay for it that way though, I would assume.
Especially considering that so many people get extremely high quality software for free (open source, free software, apple style "comes with hardware purchase", etc) these days.
> The difference between single sale and subscription can be life or death for a company, its products, and its support.
Oh come on. Companies have been in business selling stuff for the longest time. It wasn't exactly wrecking capitalism before subscriptions became the normality in the last decade.
Expectations have increased in multiple dimensions.
1 - Users have been trained by Apple and Google to expect endless upgrades for $2. When I grew up, Eudora, an email client, retailed for $100-ish, with an incremental $50 for ugprades every couple years. You can make a living on the latter pricing, but require hugely popular software for the former.
1a - as software has moved to mobile devices and web, the OS updates more often. ios does annual releases, android does the same, and chrome has a 6-week-ish update cycle. There's simply more thrashing, and it's no longer good enough to ship to a copy of Windows that updates every 4 years.
2 - There is a lot less end-user only software that just runs on a users device. It's far more common for software to require running servers to provide part of the service, and/or to code against apis that regularly change and require ongoing updates.
I'm aware no eng is owed a living, but if they can't make a living, the software becomes unavailable: either not written or not maintained.
> We don't have plans for an iPad pro version at the moment. Yes, it has a beautiful screen, but there's more to consider, such as how to adapt the UI for touch without compromising the experience.
>But the biggest problem is the platform. Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices due to the lack of trials. We cannot port Sketch to the iPad if we have no reasonable expectation of earning back on our investment. Maintaining an application on two different platforms and provide one of them for a 10th of it's value won't work, and iPad volumes are low enough to disqualify the "make it up in volume" argument.
A lot of small companies that were selling shrink-wrapped software have shuttered down - for various reasons no doubt, but the effect of a steady revenue stream on any business cannot be dismissed. Most of the software I use is either free, under some kind of subscription, or has a large corporate brand/vendor behind it. What about you?
> the effect of a steady revenue stream on any business cannot be dismissed
Really? The effect of a steady revenue stream on any consumers can't be dismissed either, so how about we have those businesses pay us first? Then we can pay them back for their software. Is this how logic works? An effect can't be dismissed, therefore everyone else must dance to produce that effect?
As a consumer, you are free to engage with a business of your choice. Likewise, a business is free to adopt a business model of their choice. That is the only "logic" at play here.
> As a consumer, you are free to engage with a business of your choice. Likewise, a business is free to adopt a business model of their choice. That is the only "logic" at play here.
So the logic behind "this model is objectively bad and means life or death for a company" was "well, it's a free country, so if you don't like it, go somewhere else"?
What I said was much milder - "A lot of small companies that were selling shrink-wrapped software have shuttered down - for various reasons no doubt, but the effect of a steady revenue stream on any business cannot be dismissed"
Specifically, I did not say that the subscription model is the only way to make money or stay in business. You're needlessly polarizing the issue and at this point, I'm gonna have to set the troll flag on you, and this conversation has stopped being productive. Bye.
It's been wrecking software companies for decades. Name one consumer software company from the 1980's that still exists, besides Microsoft. In software, monopolies, consolidation, and integration are the name of the game.
In contrast, I can easily name dozens of companies in other fields that have been around for 50 years or more, including some small ones that have stayed small yet successful.
Nintendo should probably be on that list with EA & Activision as well. The only reason they still exist is due to their consumer software business. They've shipped an enormous amount of consumer software.
Microsoft hasn't been a pure-play software company in a very long time. So I would also include Apple and IBM on that list, as both have shipped huge volumes of consumer software at various points (Apple is both still alive and still ships consumer software; IBM still exists, but no longer ships consumer software).
Name one consumer software company from the 1980's that still exists, besides Microsoft.
Just down the road from me is Frontier, which was founded by David Braben. He was working on the original Elite back in the early 80s, and although Frontier didn't come along until a decade or so later and doesn't strictly meet your condition, I'd argue that it's a good example of a successful consumer software business and has got there by producing a sustained track record of successful products. A few years ago it was listed on the stock market, but by then it had already managed almost two decades as an independent and grown to hundreds of people.
But if you don't feel that a subscription to a service adds value, please don't buy it and voice your concern to the developers. Especially if they're a small shop.
That said, subscriptions can be canceled. For example I needed Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator this month. Got to use those for a fraction of the cost I would have paid five years ago for each program and been stuck with a license. It's more flexible that way. But I understand it doesn't reflect every use case.