Favorite Games
Shroud of the Avatar
Plague Inc
Besiege
Hand of Fate
Age of Empires
Windward
Banished
«
»

Monthly Subscription = New Monthly Content

Published November 30, 2017 | By Don Pedro

As new versions of software come out, some vendors are moving to make software a subscription or “software as a service”, as Microsoft calls it. While this works for other kinds of products, I don’t believe software needs to be or even should be, a monthly subscription.

The first supportive argument is that subscriptions allows software developers a steady stream of income so they can continue to develop their product.

I disagree.

In a nutshell, if I’m paying monthly for software, I expect new features to be added monthly. Not just minor bug fixes, but new, enhanced features regularly folded in.

This would negate the idea of, our next version will have the big feature advancement you’re looking for. My expectation is a continuous development cycle, where each month the software is better than the month before. I should pay you to keep the status quo for a year?

The way Microsoft handles things, as soon as you stop paying, the software stops working. I’m not on board with that. That’s not a subscription, that’s ransom.

In other cases, developers force users into some “Cloud” service to sync to their mobile devices. I’ve paid for your program, now I have to pay to access my data? Absolutely not.

I pay for software based on how it works today, whereas I feel subscriptions are the promise of software features for the future.

Another trend is major releases on a scheduled yearly cycle, which makes software disposable. Why buy this release when in 12 months you’ll be asking for more money? You are already admitting this software will be obsolete in a few months and you have no intention of supporting the current. What kind of relationship does that build between us?

I prefer Lifetime licenses over subscriptions. I would rather pay more for a program I use regularly knowing that future updates will be free. I recently did this for RightNote.

Another software problem is restrictive licensing. I’m sure most people have multiple home machines, so a 3 user license should be the norm, rather than the single license, which is outdated.

Steam and iTunes handle this is a pretty good way. I can install what I buy on any machine I use. I just can’t use two copies at the same time. Simple.

Software is a fickle thing. We want fantastic, feature right software at dirt cheap prices. Despite how it’s presented, the subscription model doesn’t offer that. It’s an interesting idea for products that (needlessly) cost thousands of dollars or that need to be shared by dozens of employees at the same time. However, it has no place for home users.

Other articles of interest:

Posted in General

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Comments
  • How to Block games by Title and Tag on Steam (1)
    • JACK: Thanks, same just wanted to block anime games in my discover
  • How To Disable the Quicken Registration Prompt (25)
    • Greg: For me, holding the *LEFT* CTL + Shift then clicking Online, One Step Update worked. I originally tried holding the right CTL + Shift, and it didn’t work. I’m using Quicken 2006, so I don’t know if it will work...
    • Joe SR>: My monthly income is deposited into my Credit Union account. I use debit whenever possible. I write checks manually and mail them. I use Quicken 2012 off-line only. I have entered all my money and investment accounts. I...
    • Prtet: Never say never….every time I swear I will never use Quicken again, I discover that there are still no viable alternatives. Amazing that there is no decent personal finance software.
    • Joe D.: Holding CTRL + Shift keys and selecting On Line | One Step Update from the main menu worked for my Quicken 2004. I’m grateful that you wrote a synopsis (“Simply put, …”) just beneath the link to the blog...
    • Susan Long: I bought my quicken disc in the beginning and it came with a registration number. I rang the helpline and they gave me the code to put in and talked me through it. It you downloaded your version then you don’t own it...
    • Peter: You might consider running your old version of Quicken on an ancient computer. This is what I have done for years. The newer versions are fraught with problems- criminal, in my opinion. One version made mathmatical errors when...
    • Roslyn Chamberlain: Can I stop the countdown in quicken 2001 says only 8 sessions left. and what will happen after?
  • Parsing Strings in Katalon – Split, Substring and Readlines (1)
    • Ellen: Thanks for sharing!! I like your contributions to Katalon topics.
  • Working with Dates and Date Formatting in Katalon Studio (6)
    • Ajoo: Thank you for the details. How do i remove leading “0” from dates. i.e. while formatting i receive 04/21/2019, but i need 4/21/2019. (same applies for date)
  • What is Katalon Studio? A Distro of Selenium, Groovy and Eclipse (1)
    • Mahesh: Looking for more posts on katalon studio.your katalon stuffs are always exiting
  • Simple wildcard searches for pattern matching (2)
    • Don Pedro: For that scenario it seems .contains would be your choice. For example, variable.contains(‘amazo n.com’) to see if the url had amazon.com. In that case, www.amazon.com, forum.amazon.com, retail.amazon.com would all...
    • Jony: Hi, How can I use a wild card to assert a URL is the one I want. I just want to verify the domain ==expected but not anything after it. Tried * but not working and only works when I have full URL.
  • Create a Dynamic Object at Runtime (2)
    • Saish: How to add shadow root parent to this runtime object..
    • Jeremy Brien: I appreciate this! I saw this post on LinkedIn this morning and was able to find a use case for it! I found that defining my xpath with an iterable variable allows me to loop through and capture text from tables created...

Copyright © 2009-2015. All Rights Reserved.

Designed by 8x10gallery.com.