> In the case of the TV the service component wasn’t even mentioned at all until well after installing the bloody thing
In europe there's a seven day money back no question answered right to protect consumers from hardware trying to pull these tricks. Won't last forever, but I could recently return a digital camera trying to pull this very trick.
Vote with the wallet, educate those who don't etc etc. It wont ultimately work, but if we can postpone it enough it'll become a next generation problem.
The "Internet of Rentiers" argument is exactly right. Things are made unnecessarily cloud-y for monetisation reasons.
In some ways this is the end of the software piracy wars. Software as a single purchase that you buy once and use forever without restriction is basically over. Besides, it needs updating to cope with both security threats and changing ecosystems. So that requires ongoing effort. But users don't want to pay for it in the first place.
So the solution we've arrived at by default is for the software to remain inside the datacentre fortress where the user can't pirate it, and make the user bring their data inside the fortress instead where it can be ransomed. Quite a lot of SaaS is "free!" but with monetised privacy invasion or the questionable gimmicks of free2play games.
IoT makes it possible for this untransparent renting business model to be brought to physical objects. If you buy an appliance once and then use it for 20 years, to the capitalist you're a bad customer. Why do that when you can pay for annual fridge software updates and a new fridge every 5 years when it stops being "smart"?
100% correct. Side by side on sites that advocate for piracy or free everything with no advertising, you'll find complaints about the subscription business model.
The subscription business model is the end result of piracy. For some applications, it's a legitimately better model. For most...it's basically just a business decision.
I don't think piracy is the main driver of the subscription model. Certainly its a factor, but it's not like non-subscription models aren't viable anymore. Preventing piracy has a negligible impact on revenue for most products. There's a combination of factors that make it more appealing.
I think it depends on who you sell to, I have very few problems with piracy but I know people with different types of customers who have horrendous problems.
If only they would keep updating the Internet of Things for many years, but I'm more worried most IoT devices will be forgotten within 2 years (although even $500 smartphones don't seem to get that much, so probably less), and you'll need to "buy the new generation device to continue to get software support".
This isn't made any easier by component suppliers, such as chip makers, which also tend to support their chips for very little time. Last I checked, even Qualcomm, the dominant player in the mobile chip maker, was supporting its SKUs for only 18 months. Basically, the whole ecosystem has decided to support their hardware as little as possible.
On the flip-side, I love how much is so cheap, it's easily disposable, which leads to experimentation. Take Arduino/Raspberri-pi for instance: There's some cool stuff being done with those, that nobody would blow $300 to try out.
I agree with your point though. I wish tech was more "recyclable/upgrade-able" than "disposable".
I completely agree with this sentiment. Unfortunately there's no motivating factor for the companies that produce these things to continually update products that are "in the wild".
I recently bought a Volkswagen 2013 model and have been playing around with its bluetooth. Unfortunately the good stuff is only available in this years models - which is a hardware upgrade as well as a software upgrade. (Think Android Auto, automatic mirroring of the smartphone onto the car console, etc)
The only situations in which the Internet of Things will work is where it is acceptable to replace the Things on the same cycle as we replace phones - every year or every other year. For the vast majority of appliances, this is not the case.
I must be unimaginative but I can't figure out what a Smart Fridge would do that a normal one doesn't already (besides the incredibly useless remind me to get milk or whatever).
Will it become as annoying as my printer that tells me when it's time to order genuine non-warranty voiding ink (just click here!)?
Or detect if I haven't used OEM parts or a factory certified repair service?
Edit: Wait, I thought of one. A Weight Watchers tie in that detects how many times I've cheated and locks the door.
How about a fridge that can detect when some food is going bad? "your eggs will be off in the next 3-5 days. here's some recipes that fit your lifestyle and taste, and will let you use the eggs vs throwing them away".
More realistically, the manufacturer will generate extra revenue by telling you that the eggs are probably now bad, and hooking you up with suppliers so you buy more. See: Amazon.
That's why we need these systems to be open and modifiable. If I could do that same thing, but point it to "awesome-egg-recipes.com" instead of "amazon.com", it'd be an awesome service. I do foresee your take on the matter being the one that wins out, unfortunately.
So how do you induce the incentives to create such open systems? Why does Roku exist to connect any TV to nearly any service, but not the same thing for IoT? Is it the insistence on making money through services rather than the lower-margin hardware? (Noting that Roku also makes money through channel placement and probably affiliate fees.)
I'm afraid that the only way it's going to happen is if the government wades in. But first enough people have to give a shit about these systems, and that'll require them actually being useful to a majority of consumers.
> So how do you induce the incentives to create such open systems?
Unfortunately, I have no idea. Obviously I can say "only buy systems that are open", but it'll take a lot of people to make a significant impact. Hopefully, when things die, we can say "I never had that problem with $vendor because their systems are open!"
This started at least 20 years ago. I remember my dad complaining when I was a pre-teen about how everything was moving towards disposable or recurring-fee models, and you couldn't buy anything that was built to last and hold onto it for a lifetime anymore.
It's kinda ironic - during the Bush II presidency everyone was talking about the "ownership society", but the trend today has been toward the "renters' society", where consumers own nothing, the means of production are increasingly centralized in a few specialized producers, and everybody pays out of pocket for momentary needs. It's accelerating, too: car ownership => leases => Uber, suburban homes => urban apartments, vacation homes => timeshares => prepackaged "experiences", careers => gig economy, pay for printers => pay for ink, books => the Internet, videos & DVDs => Netflix, CDs => Spotify, exercise bikes => gym membership, building companies to last => hitting quarterly numbers.
I wonder sometimes why consumers put up with it, but most seem to actually prefer renting things for the short term rather than buying them for the long term. It's like the time preferences of society have compressed radically, and where people would used to think about investing in things that last for 30 years, they now focus on what they need in the next 30 minutes.
I guess you can argue that it's not worth the cost, but at least half of the trends you listed are in the direction of increasing utility for the consumer. Spotify or a pile of CDs? Are you kidding?
The main problem with this trend is not that it's happening, but the way that a few companies are able to position themselves as gatekeepers. This will lead to abuse or at least monopoly pricing. Unfortunately, competition isn't really a good solution. I don't want a second Spotify.
I think the replacement of products with services inherently tends toward monopoly, and your last sentence illustrates why: once a business is focused on servicing the immediate need rather than providing tools to service the immediate need, then customers will naturally gravitate toward whichever service fulfills that need best.
When you sell a physical product, there are inherent inefficiencies in distribution & usage that allow for some differentiation; this allows multiple firms to exist in the same market. When you sell a service, your distribution goes straight to the consumer at the moment they have a need, and you have the opportunity to tailor your service directly to the customer. It becomes more efficient to buy up small companies that offer slightly-differentiated variants of your service and incorporate them into your own offering than to maintain separate firms.
Interesting. This seems like a tradeoff of efficiency vs. freedom: the more you outsource a task, the more convenient things become for yourself, but the less agency you have over the terms under which that task is conducted.
I don't know... maybe there could be another big competitor to Spotify. I can imagine the record labels would want one. The threat of there eventually being such a replacement probably puts a cap on how much leverage Spotify has. I don't think the data Spotify owns (my playlists? listening preferences?) is particularly valuable, but maybe I'm wrong about that.
Another factor is that selling physical products often results in a market for lemons, where the buyers can't figure out which product will last longest and so purchase based on other more visible factors. Buyers can try to trust brands, but many brands will cash in on their brand by switching to greatly reduced quality at the same cost.
Replacing a product with a service can better align the incentives. If, instead of a refrigerator, you purchased a service contract for refrigeration for X years, then the supplier will want to provide a refrigerator that doesn't break.
Unless the company goes out of business, or you decide all of a sudden you aren't okay with the new "cloud-enhanced food profile" your refrigerator builds about you with the newest cloud-pushed update that records everything you eat and sells it to advertisers. Or until the market is flooded with the cheaper, ad-supported fridges that play out loud ads for sponsored products whenever you run out of something.
There's something, I don't know, honest about building something that works, and works well, and just selling it to people who then own it.
Very good points. I wonder why many consumers act like that.
I understand that companies prefer to rent or lease because of tax avoidance and/or lowering overhead (fixed costs) (because of inflexible accounting programs, blabla).
On the otherside, as a consumer (and if you have the money and your interest is longterm), why not just buy it? Why rent/lease something? In the long term you are better of buying it. Renting/Leases are always more expensive in the long run.
Also owning something is a lot more rewarding, relaxing, (and it can be used many years later) than handling some leased/rented subject with utmost care.
Because people have been conditioned to think in terms of their monthly pay they like to allocate it by the month rather than to save and then spend one time. Saving requires long term thinking and planning, monthly allocation requires a horizon not much longer than a month. Also: instant gratification.
Of course they get burned but that won't stop them from repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
I've got a hypothesis, but it's kinda out-there. It has to do with shifting time priorities across society.
The generations that grew up in the 50s-80s could be reasonably confident that the world a decade later would be more or less what it was before. Fashions would change, social movements would get started, more home appliances would be introduced, but as long as nuclear war never happened, the basic economic underpinnings of society wouldn't change too much. And so it made sense for them to buy things for the long term, because the purchase they made now would still be relevant & useful in 20 years.
Starting with the Netscape's IPO in 1995 and perhaps exacerbated by the fall of communism in the early 90s, that changed. Even before they came of age, Millenials had witnessed the dot-com boom & crash (in which many of their elders lost their life savings); obsolescence of PCs every 2-4 years; 9/11; the rise of MP3 sharing and then its clampdown; the rise of cellphones, their replacement by smartphones, and then the 1-2 year upgrade cycle of continually getting a new smartphone; the 2008 financial crisis; manufacturing jobs moving from the U.S. to Japan to India to Bangladesh to China to Southeast Asia; and the rise of sharing-economy companies providing services that you previously needed to buy a product for. Many have also been personally burned by investments in skills that were supposed to be a sure thing, like taking on $100K in student loan debt and not being able to get a job afterwards or landing your dream job and then being fired or laid off 3 months later.
The combined effect of all these is to send the message that the future is not worth planning for. There will be better products on the market in 2 years. There will be new services. That skillset that's so hot right now may be completely obsolete. The education that everyone says is crucial to your future won't get you a damn thing. The financial investment that's up 400% now may crash to zero tomorrow. You may have to move to a new city to find work, or to follow a significant other who needs to find work.
When the future becomes radically unpredictable, it makes sense to buy for the here-and-now, because the durable product you carefully invested in may be useless anyway.
This trend was already well underway in the 70's. Especially in things like consumer electronics, vehicles and furniture. Cheap credit drove it in the US, miniaturization (Moore's law) and cheap overseas labor added to it and drove it abroad.
You can see it clearly in things like tool and machinery quality. 60's stuff is nigh on indestructible and still in use today, 70's stuff is gone as if it never existed.
Hmm. 1960s was a particularly fashionable decade so less of it was thrown away. Lots of Art Deco stuff survives (1920s) for the same reason although the manufacture was quite poor.
Also Plastics technology improved and started to be widely used during the 1960s. This took into the 1970s to be widespread.
This sounds very plausible to me. The world is uncertain enough that it's safer to pay for it month by month rather than risk a stranded investment in the wrong thing. The only "stable" investment is real estate, which has therefore shot up in price. Physical "durable" goods are by comparison very cheap.
That's flawed reasoning. The uncertainty should cause you to save before you spend and to own rather than rent on a contract that you can't get out of. After all, even if you have a stranded investment it will not cost you more for the next x months. But a rental agreement will usually have termination conditions that need to be met and if you can't get out of it then you're much worse off than if you owned the item outright.
The biggest money maker for such subscription type purchases are impulse purchases. Buy now on cheap credit, pay a premium for a long time on top of the value of the item. And for those type of purchases if you were to do them with money saved over time you probably wouldn't buy them at all. (And your life would be better, not worse, all this stuff is really owning us.)
I suspect we also need to look at carrying costs. Let's go back to the list from the comment above:
car ownership => leases => Uber
suburban homes => urban apartments
vacation homes => timeshares => prepackaged "experiences"
careers => gig economy
pay for printers => pay for ink
books => the Internet
videos & DVDs => Netflix
CDs => Spotify
exercise bikes => gym membership
building companies to last => hitting quarterly numbers.
Gig economy and short-term companies are arguably not a choice but exogenous. The job for life has been replaced by "at will" redundancies.
Home downsizing is clearly down to rising cost; saving up gets less and less feasible. But the move from suburbs into the centre is cultural.
Home gym => gym membership I suspect is also down to increasing real estate cost. A gym is much cheaper than the incremental mortgage cost of an extra room.
Media libraries => Spotify/Netflix is about increasing choice. They're not entirely replacing the library (people are buying more vinyl for totemic ownership), but replacing the radio and TV channels. Replacing someone else's limited range of choices with a much wider one. It then gets put on in the background as wallpaper.
(dear god this site needs a formatting reminder and preview button)
You can resize the input box, that goes a long way towards keeping an overview over what you wrote for larger comments. Hover over the lower right hand corner of the edge of the box, then a resize mouse pointer should appear.
I think the problem with owning is because prices have been very unstable over the last 15 years. Nominal inflation has been very low, but in certain categories of goods (housing, education, consumer electronics, even cars) prices vary wildly. There's no guarantee that you'll be able to sell a good for anywhere close to what you paid for it.
When I bought my Honda Fit in early 2009, for example, new cars were selling for less than used cars. Many of the new car owners had bought at inflated prices in 2007, sometimes $2000 over MSRP, and with Hondas holding their value well, they were hoping to get something close to what they paid for it. Meanwhile, the economy had cratered, and dealers were trying to move the inventory off their lots ASAP because nobody was buying. I ended up buying my car for under invoice price, about $3-4K off of the inflated prices that buyers a couple years before had paid and a good $500-1000 under what used car sellers were asking. Needless to say, the used cars weren't selling.
Similarly, I have several friends who bought houses a couple years out of college who ended up taking a $50-100K capital loss on them when they went to sell them. The high end of that is close to what I've paid in rent over my entire life, and doesn't take into account interest payments on the mortgage, which themselves were close to my rent.
It only takes a couple incidents like this to turn people off of owning things forever.
On the otherside, as a consumer (and if you have the money and your interest is longterm), why not just buy it? Why rent/lease something? In the long term you are better of buying it. Renting/Leases are always more expensive in the long run.
I don't see how you can say that is the case for everything. Look at Netflix. Most stuff people watch only once. Why buy a bunch of discs to collect dust on your shelf?
But they wouldn't and that's exactly the rub. You'd trade them or re-sell them. Ever tried to re-sell a once-viewed netflix movie? No? That's because you can't. The doctrine of first sale does not apply to services, only to goods. And a movie packaged as a service is a lower cost to deliver and a bigger chance of another sale.
Sure, but I also don't try to re-sell a chewed stick of gum. Netflix is <$10/mo. For that you can watch hundreds of hours of TV and movies. Are you saying you would buy all of that content individually and later resell it all? Who has time for that? Never mind the losses you take in the process; you'd likely lose way more than $10 anyway.
Do you use a flat-rate meal delivery service or eat everyday at the same all-you-you-can-eat restaurant?
Instead of buying ingredients to cook a meal at home or going to different restaurants?
Consuming a flat-rate service from a single vendor is alright for the internet connection, but for many other things it asks for troubles in the long term.
Back to movies:
DVD/BlueRay gives a lot better experience than streaming. The movie is in higher resolution, with many more audio options and not forget the bonus/extra content that alone is worth something and often quite interesting and funny.
Yes - Blue Apron. Although not exclusively. But I don't exclusively consume media content from Netflix either.
> DVD/BlueRay gives a lot better experience than streaming
First, I often don't care about the video quality of the content I'm consuming. Sure if it is a sci-fi action film I want surround sound and 4k or whatever. But most the time, a degraded qualify for a standup act or period drama doesn't really matter nor is it noticeable to me. Also I can't really tell the difference as much on a tablet or phone rather than my big screen.
Second, the streaming services are cost constrained right now on the quality front, but it seems like that is improving and likely to change at some point in the not too distant future. And some of the services let you get higher quality, right now, just with additional cost.
Third, streaming is right now much more convenient in meaningful ways. It doesn't have the hassle of dealing with physical media (acquiring it, storing it, sorting through it, loading it, discarding/reselling). It provides access to a larger library of content on demand. It allows for seamless resumption of paused or interrupted viewings on different devices. Access if available for any internet connected location. Content is often available faster, such as within minutes of broadcast, rather than waiting for a delivery or next day to head to a store.
Fourth, with the exception of a few beloved films, most the content I watch isn't something I ever intend to watch again. Purchase just doens't make sense in that context.
The thought's started occurring to me that a world in which money changes hand but title doesn't, in which the provider always has a hand in how product is used, or may or may not be resold, or must be re-updated, you no longer have a capitalist market society. Money changes hands, but goods don't.
>The "Internet of Rentiers" argument is exactly right. Things are made unnecessarily cloud-y for monetisation reasons.
Yeah, well there is also the argument that I can run an environment of literally thousands of machines and a very complex stack with a crew of literally four OPs guys.
To what extent is that because of price increases? I used to work in higher ed; I think we were able to negotiate a not-as-heart-attack-inducing increase over what we used to pay for the number of licenses we had, but since leaving there I have no idea if there have been further increases. I know the increase at one school was substantial enough that they threw the Adobe rep off of campus.
I teach Maths and don't make much use of Adobe CS but at one centre I teach in they are hanging onto CS v6 on the network.
The UK student monthly fee for a student for their own use at home is a tad under £16. Probably ok for an undergrad but a little steep for a 16 year old in an FE College who needs access to Illustrator now and again at home...
Adobe (and others) are in a tight spot called "how do we keep selling our product when we've achieved almost-100% market saturation".
A sort of silver lining is that with the rentier model companies will have an interest to produce more reliable products, rather than ones which break exactly one day after the warranty ends.
Not just 100% market saturation, but often "no real reason to upgrade". Adobe CS2 is actually offered for free download off Adobe's website, and it does 98% of what anyone needs Creative Suite for anyways. The biggest problem is it doesn't recognize some features of newer Creative Suite files, like folders of layers in Photoshop.
I have a Photoshop CS5 license, and I can't ever conceive of any reason I'd pay for CC. I have gotten my money's worth out of Photoshop CS5, and I'll continue to get that value, but I don't use Photoshop nearly enough to ever justify a monthly cost.
I think that they host CS2 for the sake of letting existing license holders continue using the software, and public access is just an obvious side effect iirc.
Hopefully you are right, certainly previously the incentive was to add new features to drive upgrades, often to the detriment of the product as a whole.
You're preaching to the choir. I've been involved in professional graphic design for over a decade. The vast majority of professionals get a better deal using Adobe CC.
As consumers we don't have any right to demand software at whatever price point we want.
Only non-professionals have a hard time justifying the low monthly price. For them there are plenty of other competitive options. No one is forcing you to buy Photoshop -- use one of the other tools available.
As software developers we should all be able to understand: pay the price for the professional software, or if you think you can do it better, write a competitor.
Those things usually have quite a long "grace period" which, while not removing the problem of such DRM measures, should at least help with the traveling.
Can't check currently as I'm not home.
All three major commercial OS vendors: Microsoft, Apple, and Google. MS and Apple push it not only for their mobile OS, but for desktop as well.
Microsoft is pushing it now with their development tooling (e.g. Visual Studio). First, it was "sign in" to synchronize your settings across instances. Now they're encouraging monthly subscription based licensing, which requires you to be "signed in", instead of the traditional perceptual license.
Funny, I feel that some interesting online tools have little business being online:
Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.
There are many such examples of services which don't really need to be online, but they want that monthly payment.
Furthermore, I remember buying SpaceMonkey. It was a great idea, except that I had this 2tb hard drive that was just sitting around being unable to be used because I refused to pay a yearly $50 fee. I ended up just prying it open and using the hard drive (mind you, you pay for the drive too).
One positive one is WesternDigital's NAS drive (my cloud). It has a feature you can turn on to use it as a "cloud storage device", but that is an optional feature which you don't have to use, instead you can have it 100% local NAS, or turn it on (granted from a security perspective, I'd rather NOT have it open to the open internet)
Have you ever used sendwithus to grow a startup? They are an invaluable service that does far more than A/B emails. WYSIWYG email composer, comprehensive metrics, great deliverability, super easy API. There is no way we could have spent the labor at anywhere near the low cost.
Companies who don't understand the value of these services are quickly left behind by those who do. Sure, there are some overpriced SaaS, but the rest are successful because they are correctly priced.
> Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.
I have only experimented a bit with these services and am not actively marketing, but it is my understanding that there are several reasons to use them:
> you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.
* You can run your own git/github repo, make your own irc setup and write your own javascript framework but you can get to market faster using React, github and slack.
* Mail is annoying from what I understand. You can have your servers blacklisted pretty quickly even if you are simply trying to do casual email, this is abstracted away.
* I have build email templates, and it is pretty annoying because cross compatibility is hell. The assumptions and basic template I used to put together my email was from a service like this, I think mailgun. They keep updated info on compatibility and provide free templates and inline tooling to get this done quick even if you don;t use the service. However, if no one used the service these resources would have to be found from various blogs, etc. More time not developing.
* Building tracking and programatic email generation and transactional logic is probably not so trivial that the free for < 10K email limit most providers have would make the engineering spend worth it.
So the point is, some services are useful because they provide more value than building them in house. I have never used spacemonkey but the value prop is you can keep your data locally and back it up yourself. If you didn't want to pay the fees you could just buy 1 (or if you wanted redundancey) 2 drives and do it yourself.
The value propositions are presented up front. The real issue is when these services pivot or change and you are left in the lurch.
It really irks me that I can't find a high end television set that isn't Smart. I'd rather not have a bunch of features baked into my TV that are going to stop working in months or years. I received an email from Roku just the other day telling me about buttons on my remote that will no longer work, I doubt TV manufacturers would even be bothered to give you that courtesy.
I agree with you, but this particular issue can at least be worked around by never hooking the thing up to the Internet in the first place. Given the massive security concerns about Internet-enabled devices not created by software firms, I think this is just the right decision anyway even if you'd find those features useful.
There are some higher end no-name china TVs that are simple dumb TVs. Or mid range. Mine was 150€ and reviews compared it to smart TVs of more than double that price in build, audio and video quality.
I just bought one - I planned to get a non-smart TV, but found a Smart TV on sale for the same price. I expected to use my Chromecast for everything, but instead I'm using all the built-in Smart apps and the Chromecast very rarely. The usability of controlling everything from one remote (and even having a remote) is better, and means everyone can watch Netflix etc regardless of whether they brought a phone with a Netflix account or not.
Well if it was the same price, then you could just add a chromecast or such later, and it wouldn't be a big deal. I definitely agree under normal circumstances where smart TVs are way more expensive.
I'm likely not the target consumer, but I bought my smart TV almost exactly a year ago (12/26/2014). Most of the apps that came with it don't function anymore. It seemed like every other day I would turn it on and have a message stating "Support for [feature X] will be discontinued on [date]". It's not even hooked up to the internet anymore.
It, along with my phone that continues crashing and the useless smartwatch I sold, have convinced me to never buy another Samsung product.
OUYA + Older (non-smart) Flatscreen = Win! I can hack the OUYA at will and watch shows, movies and stream music. All the while the TV does what it does best : show me a pretty, clear picture.
> In the case of the TV the service component wasn’t even mentioned at all until well after installing the bloody thing
Yap same here. Bought a TV (Vizio). Without agree-ing to their "we'll monitor everything about you" disclaimer couldn't connect it to the wifi, couldn't start any of the apps. So agreed to it. Then had set up rules in the router's firewall to block it and have to un-block it if I want to watch Netflix for example. What a pain. Supposedly I could make a more complicated rule to allow only netflix traffic and no other traffic from it...
There was no, "let me connect to Netflix" but don't auto-update anything, don't phone home, don't send metrics etc. It was all or nothing. And then of course the apps are slow, crappy, and buggy.
Wow, that makes me never want to buy a Vizio, ever. Although from what I hear, their apps are pretty bad anyway, so you'd probably be better off using an external box (Roku or AppleTV or Chromecast) for your Netflix et cetera. This assumes that said devices are not phoning back to their home, which might be a slippery assumption.
"Phone home" is default for both Roku and AppleTV. Roku requires a username/password to enable the box. Same goes for AppleTV - you need to be signed into iTunes to even get anything to work.
Of course they are. But it's interesting that you and I care about who phones back home - why do we trust Roku more than Vizio? Is it that it feels "unnatural" for an existing object like a TV to change the relationship?
And of course, most people actually don't care about this.
That is a good point, I have Roku as well in another room (connected to a "dumb" older TV). And yeah, I trust Roku more. And I trust Google -- I have a Gmail. Heck old work trusted Google with their internal discussion and files!
Thinking about it, I guess I made a (perhaps bad) bargain -- you can have my data if you give me something useful and working that I want back. Roku works and gives me something useful, working apps and I expected I had to do it when I bought it. Google gives me Gmail, so it can spy on me. Vizio gave me a TV, but I paid for it, and I didn't expect that it would need an invasive home phoning agreement to be usable.
Samsung gives you a bunch of different agreements to agree to or dismiss. I chose not to agree to sending my media information to Samsung, nor voice data. The remainder of the TV's features work fine.
Ignoring the fact that a lot of software/hardware with cloud components is about lock-in, lately I've been on a quest to replace as many cloud components as I can with sandstorm.io apps.
Some things just work better with centralized cloud-based storage, but there's no reason users shouldn't be in control of that data. Social networks are the big exception. People are working on decentralized social networks, but it's a much harder problem. Many cloud services are just data storage, though.
You would have said the exact same thing about schematic capture and layout not that long ago, about compilers and operating systems a while longer ago than that.
The thing I don't really understand is why not just opensource it at that point? Keep the rights to the source, but let customers audit, modify, and distribute those modifications to the community. Being able to audit the calculations your software is doing seems like it would bring a lot of confidence to engineers even if a small minority actually look, privacy and FOSS advocates would tolerate it, and they get bug reports and possibly a few free patches.
Businesses and professionals would still pay for valid licenses and enthusiasts get a 'community edition' to get them hooked. It seems like it's a win-win.
Try FreeCAD. It's a true solid modeler, like Autodesk Inventor. The solid modelling has roughly the same functionality as Inventor or SolidWorks, but the user interface is far worse. It's so open source. There's a pane which shows you the standard output from Python, in case something happens to print something. (This is mostly useful for people writing extensions to the program in Python, and, in typical open-source style, it's far too prominent.) There are panes in which dialogs appear, but they don't fit properly; they may be higher or wider than the pane. They're all QT-ugly, of course. There's no visibility in the UI of what's important and what isn't. Everything has a large number of properties, most of which are irrelevant unless you're developing. And, of course, the program has a huge number of modal hotkeys.
Basically, someone slapped the UI of an integrated development environment onto a CAD program. That's so open source.
This is a rather good program, too. The underlying solid modeler seems to have all the right stuff. That's the hard part. Then they blew the UI.
3D content generation UIs are very hard. Some of the issues:
- Things may be very cluttered. Selecting can be difficult.
- Some systems allow you to select volumes, faces, edges, or vertices. In tight spots, selection needs smarts.
- For some operations, you need to select a subject and an object. But you may need to pan, zoom, or rotate between those two selections. Exactly when thing get deselected is a big issue.
- Most GUIs are subject-verb. (Select something, then do operation.) That follows Macintosh and Windows practice. This doesn't always work out for CAD, where you may need to select multiple things, multiple kinds of things, deselect mistakes, and perhaps perform other operations while selecting. Bad solutions involve holding down SHIFT or CTRL or two mouse buttons at once.
I agree, but only mostly: there will always be companies that 'get it' and offer both a cloud and a standalone version.
For example (plug), we offer a product called Userify (ssh key management for the cloud) but we also offer a (rather expensive) enterprise version for people to deploy it on-site. In fact, we recommend that, since it's more secure for you to deploy and lock down your own version in your own VPC or DC.
And this is good for us, since the cloud version is free in its base form, and the enterprise version is currently the only way we're driving any revenue.
As time goes on, these models will stabilize and companies will go back to giving people what they actually want. You can't optimize for yourself forever; at some point, you lose customers.
So, as a counterpoint, large mobile providers have largely stopped subsidizing phones (which was blatant lock-in) in order to give people what they really want, which is choice. It makes more sense for the customer, and therefore automatically makes more sense for the company. Unless they have absolute market power, they can't throw their weight around that much.
So I'm not worried about TV manufacturers that require a monthly subscription. Those will get returned to the store fairly quickly and the ones that hide their costs will have a growing black stain on their brand and eventually fade into oblivion. It's said that customers are fickle, but customers as a whole are really quite rational.
(Counterpoint to this counterpoint: Apple and everything they make.)
> All this of course to ‘better serve you’ and ‘for your convenience’, those two sentence fragments are like little alarm bells that you’re about to be screwed.
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks this way when I see those words.
I've taken to looking at marketing statements in general as from "opposite-world". If a sales-blurb is about how great their customer-service is, I'm guessing they are trying to clean up a bad reputation, without fixing the problem. Same thing when they say their product is "reliable".
When I see "to better serve you", all I can think of is: "we found a way to make things better for us"
I offer two version of my software - a system that can be run offline at your faculty and a version that is basically cloud based. The two versions are aimed at different types of users. It works well as an approach.
The cause of Jacques complaint is that it is very hard to sell a perpetual offline version at the true economic value of the software. In my case the customer would need to pay 72x the monthly cost for the value to me to be equivalent. Everytime I discuss this with a customer they don't want to pay anywhere near this amount. I know much more about how likely a customer is to keep using a product long term than the customer :)
The worst offenders, in my opinion are operating systems. Every time I start my computer I get an annoying prompt to sign into iCloud, which will reappear immediately on cancel, so I end up having to close it about five times. Apple is trying to browbeat me into using their service by being as annoying as possible. At this point, even if iCloud was great I wouldn't use it on principal.
Microsoft is even worse, not only do they have their own annoying cloud "features" they opt you into, now they've decided to administer your computer for you from afar. I had to wait an hour yesterday for Windows to install a giant update that requires multiple reboots because they tried to install it overnight. Worse, it was applying it at the boot screen, so I couldn't even pause it or read the web while I waited. If Microsoft can just put my laptop out of commission for hours on a whim, with no warning, I can't trust their os for anything important. I'm not a Linux fanboy in the least, but since both major os's make me feel like I'm just renting my own computer I might make the switch.
I bought omnigraffle several years ago, and have been using it a lot ever since. But really, it works for me. I know it. There is a new version, which adds some needed features, but I just don't need them enough to upgrade for $100 or so.
So, they only ever made the original $120 off of me, years ago. But they obviously still need to be making money in the meantime; but short of incompatibility in some way, i doubt i'll ever upgrade. So, I'm a huge fan of their software, but they could go out of business for being so good, if nobody ever upgrades. But if they went to a cloud solution, I wouldn't pay for that either, because I don't use it THAT much, and already have the app which works fine.
Same goes for Sublime Text; I paid for 2, but I doubt I'll buy 3; or even use it. But yet there's a company behind it that obviously needs to keep making money.
The answer, classically, seems to be new users, and new versions. If your software is really good, different products. Or just target Enterprise and charge a ton.
It's a tricky situation if you're trying to make money in software.
But on the web, you can build one thing, and people can pay you every month to use it. You don't even have to change anything, just keep it running. That's a pretty attractive model in contrast.
I don't like office in the cloud, and I don't like adobe in the cloud. I think there is probably a market of people who do, and that's great. But for those things, I prefer them on the desktop.
Same goes for music. I like having it with me; not tied to a music service.
But movies and TV shows are often watch-once for me, so a service like Netflix works well for something like that.
But as someone launching a collaborative SaaS, I can appreciate both sides. For me, the immediate need is SaaS, and secondary to that is offering buy once, use forever, once the economics are in place. I think there will always be some people who just want to pay for a SaaS, and others who refuse to but will pay for onsite. So, I think the best thing you can do is target both. People usually want to pay for something, if its worth it and fair. But what's fair and reasonable is different for everyone, so cast a wider net and you'll catch more fish.
And maybe one day, I'll buy that new version of Omnigraffle.
Great article, it expresses my own thoughts and attitude very well.
I understand why companies aim for this lock-in, but I believe that the question to ask is: why are such companies successful with such lock-in based products? I believe that they are successful with such strategies because of the lack of matching alternatives that offer the same usability for the majority of users. And when talking about usability I explicitly include the aspect of operation management. With cloud-based solutions, operation management is effectively zero from a user perspective.
During the past 10-20 years, the web has evolved significantly w.r.t. content rendering, content authoring, and content transport solutions. Today people can very easily watch movies, read articles, listen to music, or write articles, upload movies, and share music themselves. At the same time, the web did not (or only slightly) evolve in its underlying architecture. It does not provide the primitives required to bring content producers and consumers directly together. If you are a content producer, you either need to use a centralized service operated by a third party, or you need to have the technical skills to setup and operate your own IT-infrastructure.
The effect of this gap is even more significant if you look at todays users. Since they have multiple devices, the become content producers on one device, and their own content consumer on the next device. While technically skilled people could easily implement own alternatives (that run on their desktop) in the past to get away from online services and protect their privacy, they are faced with the challenge that such an application needs to feature smart synchronization among multiple devices in order to provide the same level of usability.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 296 ms ] threadIn europe there's a seven day money back no question answered right to protect consumers from hardware trying to pull these tricks. Won't last forever, but I could recently return a digital camera trying to pull this very trick.
Vote with the wallet, educate those who don't etc etc. It wont ultimately work, but if we can postpone it enough it'll become a next generation problem.
In some ways this is the end of the software piracy wars. Software as a single purchase that you buy once and use forever without restriction is basically over. Besides, it needs updating to cope with both security threats and changing ecosystems. So that requires ongoing effort. But users don't want to pay for it in the first place.
So the solution we've arrived at by default is for the software to remain inside the datacentre fortress where the user can't pirate it, and make the user bring their data inside the fortress instead where it can be ransomed. Quite a lot of SaaS is "free!" but with monetised privacy invasion or the questionable gimmicks of free2play games.
IoT makes it possible for this untransparent renting business model to be brought to physical objects. If you buy an appliance once and then use it for 20 years, to the capitalist you're a bad customer. Why do that when you can pay for annual fridge software updates and a new fridge every 5 years when it stops being "smart"?
The subscription business model is the end result of piracy. For some applications, it's a legitimately better model. For most...it's basically just a business decision.
This isn't made any easier by component suppliers, such as chip makers, which also tend to support their chips for very little time. Last I checked, even Qualcomm, the dominant player in the mobile chip maker, was supporting its SKUs for only 18 months. Basically, the whole ecosystem has decided to support their hardware as little as possible.
I agree with your point though. I wish tech was more "recyclable/upgrade-able" than "disposable".
I recently bought a Volkswagen 2013 model and have been playing around with its bluetooth. Unfortunately the good stuff is only available in this years models - which is a hardware upgrade as well as a software upgrade. (Think Android Auto, automatic mirroring of the smartphone onto the car console, etc)
The only situations in which the Internet of Things will work is where it is acceptable to replace the Things on the same cycle as we replace phones - every year or every other year. For the vast majority of appliances, this is not the case.
Will it become as annoying as my printer that tells me when it's time to order genuine non-warranty voiding ink (just click here!)?
Or detect if I haven't used OEM parts or a factory certified repair service?
Edit: Wait, I thought of one. A Weight Watchers tie in that detects how many times I've cheated and locks the door.
I'm afraid that the only way it's going to happen is if the government wades in. But first enough people have to give a shit about these systems, and that'll require them actually being useful to a majority of consumers.
Unfortunately, I have no idea. Obviously I can say "only buy systems that are open", but it'll take a lot of people to make a significant impact. Hopefully, when things die, we can say "I never had that problem with $vendor because their systems are open!"
It's kinda ironic - during the Bush II presidency everyone was talking about the "ownership society", but the trend today has been toward the "renters' society", where consumers own nothing, the means of production are increasingly centralized in a few specialized producers, and everybody pays out of pocket for momentary needs. It's accelerating, too: car ownership => leases => Uber, suburban homes => urban apartments, vacation homes => timeshares => prepackaged "experiences", careers => gig economy, pay for printers => pay for ink, books => the Internet, videos & DVDs => Netflix, CDs => Spotify, exercise bikes => gym membership, building companies to last => hitting quarterly numbers.
I wonder sometimes why consumers put up with it, but most seem to actually prefer renting things for the short term rather than buying them for the long term. It's like the time preferences of society have compressed radically, and where people would used to think about investing in things that last for 30 years, they now focus on what they need in the next 30 minutes.
The main problem with this trend is not that it's happening, but the way that a few companies are able to position themselves as gatekeepers. This will lead to abuse or at least monopoly pricing. Unfortunately, competition isn't really a good solution. I don't want a second Spotify.
When you sell a physical product, there are inherent inefficiencies in distribution & usage that allow for some differentiation; this allows multiple firms to exist in the same market. When you sell a service, your distribution goes straight to the consumer at the moment they have a need, and you have the opportunity to tailor your service directly to the customer. It becomes more efficient to buy up small companies that offer slightly-differentiated variants of your service and incorporate them into your own offering than to maintain separate firms.
Interesting. This seems like a tradeoff of efficiency vs. freedom: the more you outsource a task, the more convenient things become for yourself, but the less agency you have over the terms under which that task is conducted.
Another factor is that selling physical products often results in a market for lemons, where the buyers can't figure out which product will last longest and so purchase based on other more visible factors. Buyers can try to trust brands, but many brands will cash in on their brand by switching to greatly reduced quality at the same cost.
Replacing a product with a service can better align the incentives. If, instead of a refrigerator, you purchased a service contract for refrigeration for X years, then the supplier will want to provide a refrigerator that doesn't break.
There's something, I don't know, honest about building something that works, and works well, and just selling it to people who then own it.
The audio quality of streams are often sub par.
What about Youtube and then buying MP3 files from Amazon/etc? And Audio-CDs are still the best for lossless audio.
I understand that companies prefer to rent or lease because of tax avoidance and/or lowering overhead (fixed costs) (because of inflexible accounting programs, blabla).
On the otherside, as a consumer (and if you have the money and your interest is longterm), why not just buy it? Why rent/lease something? In the long term you are better of buying it. Renting/Leases are always more expensive in the long run.
Also owning something is a lot more rewarding, relaxing, (and it can be used many years later) than handling some leased/rented subject with utmost care.
Of course they get burned but that won't stop them from repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Because in the short term all these things are convenient and attractive.
The generations that grew up in the 50s-80s could be reasonably confident that the world a decade later would be more or less what it was before. Fashions would change, social movements would get started, more home appliances would be introduced, but as long as nuclear war never happened, the basic economic underpinnings of society wouldn't change too much. And so it made sense for them to buy things for the long term, because the purchase they made now would still be relevant & useful in 20 years.
Starting with the Netscape's IPO in 1995 and perhaps exacerbated by the fall of communism in the early 90s, that changed. Even before they came of age, Millenials had witnessed the dot-com boom & crash (in which many of their elders lost their life savings); obsolescence of PCs every 2-4 years; 9/11; the rise of MP3 sharing and then its clampdown; the rise of cellphones, their replacement by smartphones, and then the 1-2 year upgrade cycle of continually getting a new smartphone; the 2008 financial crisis; manufacturing jobs moving from the U.S. to Japan to India to Bangladesh to China to Southeast Asia; and the rise of sharing-economy companies providing services that you previously needed to buy a product for. Many have also been personally burned by investments in skills that were supposed to be a sure thing, like taking on $100K in student loan debt and not being able to get a job afterwards or landing your dream job and then being fired or laid off 3 months later.
The combined effect of all these is to send the message that the future is not worth planning for. There will be better products on the market in 2 years. There will be new services. That skillset that's so hot right now may be completely obsolete. The education that everyone says is crucial to your future won't get you a damn thing. The financial investment that's up 400% now may crash to zero tomorrow. You may have to move to a new city to find work, or to follow a significant other who needs to find work.
When the future becomes radically unpredictable, it makes sense to buy for the here-and-now, because the durable product you carefully invested in may be useless anyway.
You can see it clearly in things like tool and machinery quality. 60's stuff is nigh on indestructible and still in use today, 70's stuff is gone as if it never existed.
Also Plastics technology improved and started to be widely used during the 1960s. This took into the 1970s to be widespread.
The biggest money maker for such subscription type purchases are impulse purchases. Buy now on cheap credit, pay a premium for a long time on top of the value of the item. And for those type of purchases if you were to do them with money saved over time you probably wouldn't buy them at all. (And your life would be better, not worse, all this stuff is really owning us.)
car ownership => leases => Uber suburban homes => urban apartments vacation homes => timeshares => prepackaged "experiences" careers => gig economy pay for printers => pay for ink books => the Internet videos & DVDs => Netflix CDs => Spotify exercise bikes => gym membership building companies to last => hitting quarterly numbers.
Gig economy and short-term companies are arguably not a choice but exogenous. The job for life has been replaced by "at will" redundancies.
Home downsizing is clearly down to rising cost; saving up gets less and less feasible. But the move from suburbs into the centre is cultural.
Home gym => gym membership I suspect is also down to increasing real estate cost. A gym is much cheaper than the incremental mortgage cost of an extra room.
Media libraries => Spotify/Netflix is about increasing choice. They're not entirely replacing the library (people are buying more vinyl for totemic ownership), but replacing the radio and TV channels. Replacing someone else's limited range of choices with a much wider one. It then gets put on in the background as wallpaper.
(dear god this site needs a formatting reminder and preview button)
When I bought my Honda Fit in early 2009, for example, new cars were selling for less than used cars. Many of the new car owners had bought at inflated prices in 2007, sometimes $2000 over MSRP, and with Hondas holding their value well, they were hoping to get something close to what they paid for it. Meanwhile, the economy had cratered, and dealers were trying to move the inventory off their lots ASAP because nobody was buying. I ended up buying my car for under invoice price, about $3-4K off of the inflated prices that buyers a couple years before had paid and a good $500-1000 under what used car sellers were asking. Needless to say, the used cars weren't selling.
Similarly, I have several friends who bought houses a couple years out of college who ended up taking a $50-100K capital loss on them when they went to sell them. The high end of that is close to what I've paid in rent over my entire life, and doesn't take into account interest payments on the mortgage, which themselves were close to my rent.
It only takes a couple incidents like this to turn people off of owning things forever.
I don't see how you can say that is the case for everything. Look at Netflix. Most stuff people watch only once. Why buy a bunch of discs to collect dust on your shelf?
Do you use a flat-rate meal delivery service or eat everyday at the same all-you-you-can-eat restaurant?
Instead of buying ingredients to cook a meal at home or going to different restaurants?
Consuming a flat-rate service from a single vendor is alright for the internet connection, but for many other things it asks for troubles in the long term.
Back to movies:
DVD/BlueRay gives a lot better experience than streaming. The movie is in higher resolution, with many more audio options and not forget the bonus/extra content that alone is worth something and often quite interesting and funny.
Yes - Blue Apron. Although not exclusively. But I don't exclusively consume media content from Netflix either.
> DVD/BlueRay gives a lot better experience than streaming
First, I often don't care about the video quality of the content I'm consuming. Sure if it is a sci-fi action film I want surround sound and 4k or whatever. But most the time, a degraded qualify for a standup act or period drama doesn't really matter nor is it noticeable to me. Also I can't really tell the difference as much on a tablet or phone rather than my big screen.
Second, the streaming services are cost constrained right now on the quality front, but it seems like that is improving and likely to change at some point in the not too distant future. And some of the services let you get higher quality, right now, just with additional cost.
Third, streaming is right now much more convenient in meaningful ways. It doesn't have the hassle of dealing with physical media (acquiring it, storing it, sorting through it, loading it, discarding/reselling). It provides access to a larger library of content on demand. It allows for seamless resumption of paused or interrupted viewings on different devices. Access if available for any internet connected location. Content is often available faster, such as within minutes of broadcast, rather than waiting for a delivery or next day to head to a store.
Fourth, with the exception of a few beloved films, most the content I watch isn't something I ever intend to watch again. Purchase just doens't make sense in that context.
Yeah, well there is also the argument that I can run an environment of literally thousands of machines and a very complex stack with a crew of literally four OPs guys.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/12/11/adobe_q4_fy2015_resu...
The UK student monthly fee for a student for their own use at home is a tad under £16. Probably ok for an undergrad but a little steep for a 16 year old in an FE College who needs access to Illustrator now and again at home...
A sort of silver lining is that with the rentier model companies will have an interest to produce more reliable products, rather than ones which break exactly one day after the warranty ends.
I have a Photoshop CS5 license, and I can't ever conceive of any reason I'd pay for CC. I have gotten my money's worth out of Photoshop CS5, and I'll continue to get that value, but I don't use Photoshop nearly enough to ever justify a monthly cost.
I have both and I get what I pay for in both cases.
Many people wouldn't buy the newest version that only included 1 or 2 extra "features". No longer can you buy Photoshop and use it for 5 years.
As consumers we don't have any right to demand software at whatever price point we want.
Only non-professionals have a hard time justifying the low monthly price. For them there are plenty of other competitive options. No one is forcing you to buy Photoshop -- use one of the other tools available.
As software developers we should all be able to understand: pay the price for the professional software, or if you think you can do it better, write a competitor.
Microsoft is pushing it now with their development tooling (e.g. Visual Studio). First, it was "sign in" to synchronize your settings across instances. Now they're encouraging monthly subscription based licensing, which requires you to be "signed in", instead of the traditional perceptual license.
Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.
There are many such examples of services which don't really need to be online, but they want that monthly payment.
Furthermore, I remember buying SpaceMonkey. It was a great idea, except that I had this 2tb hard drive that was just sitting around being unable to be used because I refused to pay a yearly $50 fee. I ended up just prying it open and using the hard drive (mind you, you pay for the drive too).
One positive one is WesternDigital's NAS drive (my cloud). It has a feature you can turn on to use it as a "cloud storage device", but that is an optional feature which you don't have to use, instead you can have it 100% local NAS, or turn it on (granted from a security perspective, I'd rather NOT have it open to the open internet)
Companies who don't understand the value of these services are quickly left behind by those who do. Sure, there are some overpriced SaaS, but the rest are successful because they are correctly priced.
I have only experimented a bit with these services and am not actively marketing, but it is my understanding that there are several reasons to use them:
> you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.
* You can run your own git/github repo, make your own irc setup and write your own javascript framework but you can get to market faster using React, github and slack.
* Mail is annoying from what I understand. You can have your servers blacklisted pretty quickly even if you are simply trying to do casual email, this is abstracted away.
* I have build email templates, and it is pretty annoying because cross compatibility is hell. The assumptions and basic template I used to put together my email was from a service like this, I think mailgun. They keep updated info on compatibility and provide free templates and inline tooling to get this done quick even if you don;t use the service. However, if no one used the service these resources would have to be found from various blogs, etc. More time not developing.
* Building tracking and programatic email generation and transactional logic is probably not so trivial that the free for < 10K email limit most providers have would make the engineering spend worth it.
So the point is, some services are useful because they provide more value than building them in house. I have never used spacemonkey but the value prop is you can keep your data locally and back it up yourself. If you didn't want to pay the fees you could just buy 1 (or if you wanted redundancey) 2 drives and do it yourself.
The value propositions are presented up front. The real issue is when these services pivot or change and you are left in the lurch.
It, along with my phone that continues crashing and the useless smartwatch I sold, have convinced me to never buy another Samsung product.
Yap same here. Bought a TV (Vizio). Without agree-ing to their "we'll monitor everything about you" disclaimer couldn't connect it to the wifi, couldn't start any of the apps. So agreed to it. Then had set up rules in the router's firewall to block it and have to un-block it if I want to watch Netflix for example. What a pain. Supposedly I could make a more complicated rule to allow only netflix traffic and no other traffic from it...
There was no, "let me connect to Netflix" but don't auto-update anything, don't phone home, don't send metrics etc. It was all or nothing. And then of course the apps are slow, crappy, and buggy.
At least Apple provides regular updates.
And of course, most people actually don't care about this.
Thinking about it, I guess I made a (perhaps bad) bargain -- you can have my data if you give me something useful and working that I want back. Roku works and gives me something useful, working apps and I expected I had to do it when I bought it. Google gives me Gmail, so it can spy on me. Vizio gave me a TV, but I paid for it, and I didn't expect that it would need an invasive home phoning agreement to be usable.
Some things just work better with centralized cloud-based storage, but there's no reason users shouldn't be in control of that data. Social networks are the big exception. People are working on decentralized social networks, but it's a much harder problem. Many cloud services are just data storage, though.
People pay $10K per license to Altium or Solidworks for a reason.
Businesses and professionals would still pay for valid licenses and enthusiasts get a 'community edition' to get them hooked. It seems like it's a win-win.
Basically, someone slapped the UI of an integrated development environment onto a CAD program. That's so open source.
This is a rather good program, too. The underlying solid modeler seems to have all the right stuff. That's the hard part. Then they blew the UI.
3D content generation UIs are very hard. Some of the issues:
- Things may be very cluttered. Selecting can be difficult.
- Some systems allow you to select volumes, faces, edges, or vertices. In tight spots, selection needs smarts.
- For some operations, you need to select a subject and an object. But you may need to pan, zoom, or rotate between those two selections. Exactly when thing get deselected is a big issue.
- Most GUIs are subject-verb. (Select something, then do operation.) That follows Macintosh and Windows practice. This doesn't always work out for CAD, where you may need to select multiple things, multiple kinds of things, deselect mistakes, and perhaps perform other operations while selecting. Bad solutions involve holding down SHIFT or CTRL or two mouse buttons at once.
For example (plug), we offer a product called Userify (ssh key management for the cloud) but we also offer a (rather expensive) enterprise version for people to deploy it on-site. In fact, we recommend that, since it's more secure for you to deploy and lock down your own version in your own VPC or DC.
And this is good for us, since the cloud version is free in its base form, and the enterprise version is currently the only way we're driving any revenue.
As time goes on, these models will stabilize and companies will go back to giving people what they actually want. You can't optimize for yourself forever; at some point, you lose customers.
So, as a counterpoint, large mobile providers have largely stopped subsidizing phones (which was blatant lock-in) in order to give people what they really want, which is choice. It makes more sense for the customer, and therefore automatically makes more sense for the company. Unless they have absolute market power, they can't throw their weight around that much.
So I'm not worried about TV manufacturers that require a monthly subscription. Those will get returned to the store fairly quickly and the ones that hide their costs will have a growing black stain on their brand and eventually fade into oblivion. It's said that customers are fickle, but customers as a whole are really quite rational.
(Counterpoint to this counterpoint: Apple and everything they make.)
I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks this way when I see those words.
When I see "to better serve you", all I can think of is: "we found a way to make things better for us"
The cause of Jacques complaint is that it is very hard to sell a perpetual offline version at the true economic value of the software. In my case the customer would need to pay 72x the monthly cost for the value to me to be equivalent. Everytime I discuss this with a customer they don't want to pay anywhere near this amount. I know much more about how likely a customer is to keep using a product long term than the customer :)
Microsoft is even worse, not only do they have their own annoying cloud "features" they opt you into, now they've decided to administer your computer for you from afar. I had to wait an hour yesterday for Windows to install a giant update that requires multiple reboots because they tried to install it overnight. Worse, it was applying it at the boot screen, so I couldn't even pause it or read the web while I waited. If Microsoft can just put my laptop out of commission for hours on a whim, with no warning, I can't trust their os for anything important. I'm not a Linux fanboy in the least, but since both major os's make me feel like I'm just renting my own computer I might make the switch.
So, they only ever made the original $120 off of me, years ago. But they obviously still need to be making money in the meantime; but short of incompatibility in some way, i doubt i'll ever upgrade. So, I'm a huge fan of their software, but they could go out of business for being so good, if nobody ever upgrades. But if they went to a cloud solution, I wouldn't pay for that either, because I don't use it THAT much, and already have the app which works fine.
Same goes for Sublime Text; I paid for 2, but I doubt I'll buy 3; or even use it. But yet there's a company behind it that obviously needs to keep making money.
The answer, classically, seems to be new users, and new versions. If your software is really good, different products. Or just target Enterprise and charge a ton.
It's a tricky situation if you're trying to make money in software.
But on the web, you can build one thing, and people can pay you every month to use it. You don't even have to change anything, just keep it running. That's a pretty attractive model in contrast.
I don't like office in the cloud, and I don't like adobe in the cloud. I think there is probably a market of people who do, and that's great. But for those things, I prefer them on the desktop.
Same goes for music. I like having it with me; not tied to a music service.
But movies and TV shows are often watch-once for me, so a service like Netflix works well for something like that.
But as someone launching a collaborative SaaS, I can appreciate both sides. For me, the immediate need is SaaS, and secondary to that is offering buy once, use forever, once the economics are in place. I think there will always be some people who just want to pay for a SaaS, and others who refuse to but will pay for onsite. So, I think the best thing you can do is target both. People usually want to pay for something, if its worth it and fair. But what's fair and reasonable is different for everyone, so cast a wider net and you'll catch more fish.
And maybe one day, I'll buy that new version of Omnigraffle.
I understand why companies aim for this lock-in, but I believe that the question to ask is: why are such companies successful with such lock-in based products? I believe that they are successful with such strategies because of the lack of matching alternatives that offer the same usability for the majority of users. And when talking about usability I explicitly include the aspect of operation management. With cloud-based solutions, operation management is effectively zero from a user perspective.
During the past 10-20 years, the web has evolved significantly w.r.t. content rendering, content authoring, and content transport solutions. Today people can very easily watch movies, read articles, listen to music, or write articles, upload movies, and share music themselves. At the same time, the web did not (or only slightly) evolve in its underlying architecture. It does not provide the primitives required to bring content producers and consumers directly together. If you are a content producer, you either need to use a centralized service operated by a third party, or you need to have the technical skills to setup and operate your own IT-infrastructure.
The effect of this gap is even more significant if you look at todays users. Since they have multiple devices, the become content producers on one device, and their own content consumer on the next device. While technically skilled people could easily implement own alternatives (that run on their desktop) in the past to get away from online services and protect their privacy, they are faced with the challenge that such an application needs to feature smart synchronization among multiple devices in order to provide the same level of usability.