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Why I Hate Subscription Software, and Why I’m Wrong

There are good reasons to dislike the push to move from perpetually licensed Software to subscription software:

1) The primary motivation for the push is greed on the part of software companies who aren’t getting as much of my money as they would like. These are the same companies who (mostly) offer me nothing new that I want but charge me money for the nothing and charge me time to learn and use the new, bloated interface. I say this as a card carrying computer geek.
2) Marginal cost of product should approach marginal cost of production as volume increases. Given the basic materials for a software purchase are a mass produced DVD and perhaps a book, or perhaps just a web download, we’re obviously far from that. So, we’re being grossly overcharged currently, and the price is going up.
3) I won’t be able to escape monthly software charges the way I can easily skip version “upgrades” that give me 1) a slower PC with a new-for-no-reason GUI, and 2) productivity enhancements consisting entirely of features I don’t use, with a new-harder-to-find-things GUI.
4) When I am offered something good, say in improved security, it’s usually just the vendor uncrippling their product slightly. That’s not the way to treat security. If the penny pinching airlines thought like software vendors, they’d charge us for air and flotation devices.

My fundamental objection is that software vendors want to charge me more when they weren’t doing a great job to begin with.

Here’s why I’m wrong:

1) Smartphone app prices (free or fixed price right now) and Google apps (pretty much free for consumers) are serious competition now and will help control the costs.
2) Barriers to entry for new software providers are pretty low, thanks to existing smartphone stores.
3) Monthly charges mean that a vendor has to care whether I keep paying for his software each month. This will punish vendors who traditionally take me for granted,
4) As computer technology becomes increasingly part of our culture, loony lawsuits over copyrighting trivial stuff are less of a problem. I’m not saying the legal system has gotten smarter. Lawsuits still focus on the software equivalent to, “your car can’t have a gearshift on floor/column/steering wheel, I thought of it first!”, but the most basic bad legal decisions about GUIs and file formats already happened and the effects of those lawsuits are fading. Thus, reduced barriers to entry again should help control cost.

So, we’re being overcharged, but the companies overcharging us probably can’t keep us captive for long in the new system.

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The post Why I Hate Subscription Software, and Why I’m Wrong appeared first on Intentional Security.



This post first appeared on Intentional Security, please read the originial post: here

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