Honestly this model of selling the consumer software in exchange for money that runs on their computer seems better than providing the software that only runs on the company’s servers in exchange for data and ads.
I agree. SaaS was supposed to be a model that was highly beneficial for vendors selling to corporations. Once it penetrated the consumer market it became death by 1,000 cuts. Now everyone's life is loaded down subscriptions for things that 20 years ago would've been bought once. I miss the days of owning software. I guess I can be thankful it pushed me towards open source.
Playstation Plus with the streaming package really changed my view on gaming once I got fiber optic piped into my building. The hardware fan doesn't spin up when I stream Ghosts of Tsushima instead of playing locally, essentially turning my PS4 into a thin client for Sony's services.
It also greatly exacerbates piracy. I'd be willing to bet movies, music, and certain software like CAD are seeing unprecedented levels of piracy after SaaS. Especially when SaaS enables companies like Netflix to betray their consumers.
Professional-level ‘CAD’ has always been susceptible to piracy as it has always been criminally expensive. Music services are at about the right price, and if anything offer pretty good value when one considers that album prices were reaching the $20 mark.
Ye. On my phone I used some half-bad text editor, Acode, to view a patch I meeded to review on the fly. It shows ads and does an ad popup when you try to exit.
Like, Google does not let you search their app store and filter by cost or spyware. It is hopeless to find some good utility tool without knowing its exact name.
A simple text-editor should be free. I don't want to give some dev reccuring revenue to unlock Notepad level features.
Try f droid store, all the apps there are required to be open source so there's fewer spy/malware. Or look for apps by secuso on the play store. Fwiw acode on f-droid doesn't seem to have ads.
I strongly agree it shouldn't be this hard to find simple stuff.
I don’t really care where it runs, or if it’s one-time purchase vs subscription. It’s just the “paying indirectly for ‘free’ software products” vs “paying for software” that I care about.
That's the trick though, SaaS just keeps you hostage to the vendor and they can extract more value out of you. There are only two ways out of this:
1. The Internet becomes dangerous and unreliable for some reason, and we need to go back to treating software as a product for sale, rather than service for rent.
2. Regulation.
Neither way is great. It suggests distress in the system and forcing behaviors which are not natural to it. On the other hand, what's natural to this system we've created is apparently massive centralization in the hands of corporations, and whenever anything in this network of dependencies breaks, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.
The problem companies had would be someone buying their software and then never buying updates. That's a product problem not a system problem. SaaS keeps the consumer captive in a permanent rental situation. The "it gives the customers a better experience" non-sense is false. One of the best case studies on this is Jetbrains. Sublime Text is still around too. It works. It just doesn't sell very well to SV shareholders.
It'd be a lot easier if they just said "we're greedy assholes". Since that's what it actually is. Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD. Updates were paid and it was okay because they were usually major improvements. There's been a whole lot of propaganda made to make SaaS seem like a net win for the consumer but this is by-and-large not the case.
> I never had problem paying a company for patches
But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Those are transaction costs. As is downloading and installing software, something software running on a server and delivered through a browser doesn't require. Those ongoing costs must be paid for with ads or subscription revenue.
> Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD
But it never was. Particularly in a networked world. Perfect is the enemy of good.
SaaS isn't a fit for all products. Some software can be written once and never updated. Most cannot, and for that, SaaS is a better business model fit.
Many did not, when the updates did not provide value. The false belief you seem to rely on here is that if companies get regular stream of revenue, they'll be compelled to work on updates. Why? They get the revenue anyway, they don't have to work on updates. They can in fact stop completely working on updates, except to match competitors, when their products get popular. But even that's not much of a problem when you have a closed file format, like say Adobe does with PSD.
I can tell you having worked at a majority SaaS-type of companies my entire career the amount of "updates" we put out is as frequent, or less, than the previous model. Despite working in the industry (it's impossible to avoid as you likely know) I encourage nearly everyone I know to find other options before paying for software subscriptions.
It's about money. It's not about updates. It's taking away ownership from people in order to be able to drive up profits. Consider how normal software sales works. It's the same way. You lease enterprise-grade software to a company. Every year, as if by magic, something comes up and "prices need to increase". They just hacked off a zero or two and adapted this price model to the consumer. I fail to see how SaaS is not another variation of "Embrace, extend, extinguish" where the entrapment phase of extinguish is taken to it's natural conclusion: no ownership. Worse, you pay 5, 10, 20 times as much over time. Many companies capitalize on the subscription being priced such that you forget about it. Also known as the gym model.
The only acceptable SaaS model to me is JetBrain's. You pay a subscription and at the end of that term you own that version of the software permanently. You may continue to pay (because you find the product valuable) but you are not required to. At the end, you still own what you paid for. The truth is, SaaS provides very little value to people for what they pay.
An example: in 5 years you would've paid for a copy of AutoCAD inventor in full + some just leasing the worse Fusion360 over the same time period. If you are a sucker and buy into Inventor's SaaS pricing you would've paid for 5-8 copies at the previous model in the same time period. That type of capture is called theft in other modalities. 9/10 people would've never needed to pay for all the extra crap they saddle on in order to make the price seem "reasonable". They exist solely because the can extort (not capitalize) on the moat they have.
One day we'll look at this model of owning nothing as one of the greatest failings of our society. It's probably an unpopular opinion here at HN but SaaS is an awful anti-consumer model. We can hope that somehow we define what "providing sufficient utility" means and start cracking down on this.
It can be both. There is an ideological purity one tends towards when designing any system. Often times, that aesthetic sense of an engineer is right. Frequently, it's orthogonal to what customers need. SaaS isn't a fit in every case. But it's far from a universal money grab.
how is that a problem for the consumer? just provide paid updates for the next major version. who wants it, pays for it.
i give the example of Path Finder, which is a Finder replacement for mac. there’s not much to improve there, after a while it became bloated. they went with subscriptions after many years of owning the software (and rolled back that later with an alternative after the backslash).
i don’t use anything that came in the last few years, except the compatibility with the latest os. maybe it’s time to stop this madness and try to make every software do anything and extract money from the consumer for things that are really not needed (yes, i understand this is my opinion but i bet you all have a similar example).
> maybe it’s time to stop this madness and try to make every software do anything and extract money from the consumer for things that are really not needed
Or put on your entrepreneur cap and realize this is an opportunity.
It's not, because if you try to fight an empire that has billions under its belt, you'll find out you can't compete. They're lazy when not provoked, but can get vicious when you show up.
It's kind of like a lion. Sleeps most of the time. But don't get in its way.
As a counterpoint, subscription means you pay even if the updates are subpar. So in fact subscription encourages lack of updates. Would you work hard if your boss can't fire you?
With the traditional system the vendor has to work hard to put up an update that's worth it, and then you pay for it.
Adobe were clearly struggling to provide good updates to their software for years, creators were always kidding they just keep tweaking the UI skin because they're out of ideas, so there's no point buying the new updates. So when Adobe went subscription-only, they did it under the pretense they'll be able to ship new exciting features every month. And of course... in retrospect they didn't. In fact their updates are even more minor than before.
This model still exists, somewhat. One factor that worked against it, from the standpoint of the software companies, was that there was no effective way to prevent copying and sharing (aka 'piracy'). Software companies put a lot of money and effort into trying to stop it, but every technical scheme was eventually cracked. The elaborate schemes that involved having a physical copy of the game's packaging annoyed users. Some schemes were downright abusive[1].
Even with modern DRM, the cost, complexity, and inability to completely lock down software installed on a device under the control of the user puts some companies off.
So now we have software as a service, paid for with the user's attention (ads) or we have software that just stops working if the company's servers can't be reached. (Looking at you, VanMoof).
> I don't want companies to be able to lock down a user's device
Neither do I, thus the cautionary tale of VanMoof. Software is now everywhere, in everything from your toaster to the electric grid. As a result, right-to-repair means right to reprogram. The owner needs to be able to fix bugs, change performance parameters, replace things that break. When my dad was working on cars, that meant put in a new carburetor, adjust the timing, clean the points - all physical parts. It's different today.
Also, if you wanted on-prem software, open source alternatives increasingly became an option. (As in the case of office suites, SaaS also allows for some collaboration and other options that couldn't really be done with desktop software installs. I never want to go back to mailing around copies of files and merging changes again.
In 1993 in high school economics, our teacher explained that economics was based on scarcity. Even the most dimwitted individual would have to conclude that something is horribly wrong with economic models if governments would not soon make exceptions for the software industry.
Fast forward 30 years, and many software developers and startups actually think that their skills are worth so much. Sigh?
Copying software that was built and saying there is no scarcity is like saying you should be able to spend the millions of dollars you made by copying a $100 bill multiple times on an inkjet.
No, I am implying that software reproduction is so easy, that it is not a scarce good, and classical economical models are a (very) bad fit.
Custom software, or software for a small audience obviously is scarce, but a word processor or operating system with similar complexity that can be used by millions, if not billions of users, should not cost more in total.
Open source (free) software would not even be possible if it were as scarce as, say, oil or apples.
Software is comparable to apples or oil, because they are all economic goods.
Note that I am referring to commodity software (because that is what this thread is about). The reproduction costs are negligible compared to the software development cost.
Perhaps for a better understanding of my point, consider book publishing, or limited edition prints of art. The scarcity is almost completely artificial.
Microsoft and Oracle, for example, have grown to be extremely large companies due to this possibility of selling the same thing at nearly no extra cost.
If you think this is normal, then that's fine, but commodity software is most certainly (as you hint at yourself) not a good fit for economic models based on scarcity.
If someone writes a program and won’t sell a license for under $1,000,000, it is going to be scarce.
An extreme example to make a point.
A less scarce, but still scarce software product is one that sells for $100 or $10 or even $1.
Software can be free (as in free beer) and not scarce. But many software products wouldn’t have existed without customers who pay for it, with the demand level and price setting the scarcity.
Book publishing is indeed quite similar. Note also that some book publishers have become extremely wealthy.
The same goes for television, limited edition fine art, and financial derivatives. It is quite obvious that these industries make some people extraordinarily rich.
I am sorry for lacking the knowledge about contemporary economics, because this is obviously not something new. I was merely remembering some mediocre high school lessons.
> and many software developers and startups actually think that their skills are worth so much. Sigh?
Supply < Demand.
That is why developers are paid well. When demand softens, or supply increases even more, what developers are paid will change. The difference between software developers and other highly paid positions is that there is not enforced, artificial scarcity, such as licenses, advanced education requirements or required tests.
I agree completely, but note that demand can grow extremely high due to the very low cost of reproducing (and recently also distributing and marketing) software.
Supply can be limited severely by an early mover advantage, as the cost of software development can become extremely high due to the even more extreme demand. In a way this results in artificial scarcity.
Add in open source (free) software as building blocks, and venture capital, and things become even more complicated. I am sure that we need better economic models to avoid some companies to grow excessively big.
From the 2000s onwards (given my age) I remember permanent licenced software being very expensive and out of reach: Photoshop, Visual Studio, Macromedia Flash, Visual Basic.
> ``You're going to see an economic model where software companies become giant incubators for good ideas,'' he says, likening it to the record business, which takes the creative product of an artist and markets it.
I feel the big tech companies should be expanding into many markets by their sheer programming prowess and complexity budgets/capacity. They should try run the cost of complexity to zero and make complexity a commodity.
Maybe I'm in a bubble but I don't see much new desktop software.
I feel it is difficult to get people in the world to pay for digital things. £10 for an iOS APP???
What software am I actually willing to pay for? Probably software that earns me something. I bought Sublime Text a long time ago but nowadays I just use notepad++ or IntelliJ or VS Code rarely. I bought Typora, a markdown editor because I write a lot of markdown.
The same problem also applies to the web. What websites would you pay for?
Would you pay $3 for a HN subscription? What about digital magazines? Are there any newspapers that are actually worth it, that enhance your life?
EDIT: it just occurred to me that the web IS a digital magazine. But I meant publications.
I feel if you want something to stay around then the market has to support its costs at a bare minimum. If you only charge lifetime licences/permanent licences traditional software then the software has a lifespan because the company can only support it while their costs are covered. SaaS is the outcome of web technology, browser technology and business needs.
I just don't like the duplication of effort, every SaaS has to implement authorisation and authentication, backup, security measures, billing, subscriptions, user management, account management, an Android app, an iOS app, dashboards and maybe a desktop client. It's such a waste of effort.
What about a SaaS dashboard SaaS, where all your SaaS are mangaed from one place?
> I feel it is difficult to get people in the world to pay for digital things. £10 for an iOS APP???
It very much seems like developers have stopped trying. The app store for the iPhone/iPad is broken and I blame in-app purchases and subscriptions. I feel that Apple should be VERY restrictive about what is allowed to be an in-app purchase or subscription.
Try browsing the apps available, especially for children, it's all free, with in app purchases or in-app subscriptions. I was trying to find a coloring app on the iPad, there's like one that's reasonably priced. It's free for 5 - 10 coloring pages then you pay $5 - $6 to unlock everything. Completely reasonable in my mind. The rest: $30 per year as a subscription... well, now I'm not buying anything, that's not something that should be a subscription.
I really want the app stores to start very clearly advertising that the in-app purchase is an unreasonably priced subscription and preferably require that the price to unlock an every feature. Most of all I want in-app purchase and subscriptions to go away.
My life already have plenty of subscriptions, I refuse to sign up for more. I have four streaming subscriptions, two news sites, online storage, password managers, internet, phones, service contracts for my car... Just F-ing stop and let me pay up front for things that REALLY doesn't need to be subscriptions because I can't deal with anymore.
Procreate (one time purchase) + pictures of real coloring books might work. You can also get PDF coloring books and load them as layers. As far as I know Procreate has nothing in it that should cause problems. It can access the file browser, but that might be controllable in parental control settings.
For those who weren't alive at the time it's probably hard to understand what an inflection point Windows 95 was.
Both in terms of the number of homes with computers in them and what those computers were able to do things skyrocketed.
The software business went from primarily being targeted at businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at mainstream consumers in a once ever opportunity to establish a brand name with people who have literally never purchased anything in this class before.
It was the most dramatic shift certainly that I've seen in my life with the adoption of the internet being second and the adoption of mobile phones being third.
It's been more than a decade since we've seen anything like those shifts. The 2010s feel a lot like the 1980s to me. Lots of progress, lots of it incremental, but no inflection point. I do wonder if AI will be the next big paradigm shift like Windows 95, the internet, and the iPhone.
Windows 95 was years behind the state-of-the-art on the day "Chicago" shipped. The technical choice of the backslash for file system paths, and hiding the real disk contents from the user view, caused years of headaches. The architectural design choices for extensibility ended up as a swiss-cheese architecture for malware. MSFT-chairman literally saw himself as the new savior. glad you see this as important?
None of your assessment matters regarding how big a deal it actually was. My mom didn’t give a damn about backslashes and my dad had zero use for seeing hidden files. The “state of the art” in 1995 was for nerds doing nerd stuff, Windows 95 was for regular people who couldn’t afford a Macintosh.
Win95 wasn't built on a base that had security in mind. And when the Win95 feature set was created, the world wide web wasn't in that list. TCP/IP wasn't either iirc. Dialup access was the main onramp to the internet. MSN was supposed to be Microsoft's main way to get users on to the internet (to fight against AOL).
If you don't have internet access, where is your malware coming from?
Floppies? No wifi to attack your printers.
Much easier to deal with a strange poisonous floppy the few times that you are given one than the 24/7 defenses needed when your box is ON the internet.
Well, Win95 was hobbled with the MSDOS base which was mainly concerned with CP/M familiarity when first designed. That's why Microsoft was working on windowsNT.
I think AI finally is at point where it is. It’s peak hype right now but there is definitely a difference between knowledge workers that use it and one’s that don’t. It’s only going to grow wider in the coming years.
> there is definitely a difference between knowledge workers that use it and one’s that don’t
[citation needed]
I tried out Copilot for months and didn't get much value out of it. The majority of my time and effort is not writing code, which is about the only thing an LLM can generate semi-useful output for. It's not more useful than a tailored search engine experience and it doesn't replace deep dives into text books, code, and white papers. Where are you seeing major benefits?
I've watched people who claim it is a game changer try to use it and I can see routinely leading them down rabbit holes in real time which they struggle to get out of.
Meanwhile, the stuff it is good at filling in - it was never that hard to google it and copy and paste it in the first place.
I've seen this like 20 times in tech before. We're peak hype cycle for LLMs and the trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. During peak hype cycle for any tech a lot of people defer to the crowd's excitable opinion, disbelieve the evidence in front of their own eyes and express a level of optimism over future developments that is ludicrous.
My experiments with 3.5 say that it does the easy 80% solution that takes 20% of my time.
The advantage, that actually is a game changer[0], is that it can do languages I can't. I'm an iOS dev, I've technically been paid to write JavaScript at various points, but the best of that was about 20 years ago and just before jQuery got popular.
ChatGPT lets me turn my ideas for JavaScript projects into things that almost work and are usually close enough for me to fix — turning me from an iOS dev into a JS project manager.
Likewise Stable Diffusion: I've done some game artwork when I tried self employed for a bit, SD can act like a mostly amazing artist that does a few bits (mostly hands) like it was temporarily high on LSD, and I can just highlight those messed up regions and say "do again five times", and the actual images get to me faster than a real human would notice a message on slack or email or whatever, let alone be able to actually attempt a fix.
As for music… I actually made a procedural music generator back then (for the games while self-employed), and while neither the music nor the generator is going to win any awards, the output was sufficient for the games it went with. All the various new music AI are way better than what I did.
This really speaks to me and my experience. It’s not AI’s ability to beat me in my own domain, it’s the ability for me to extend my domain to a different style to achieve the results I want. I think folks that underrate the technology are evaluating on “is it better than me (or the person I know who is great) at this” when what you point out is more: “can it help me do this, like that” — that’s where it shines. Further, I think folks under appreciate how being able to extend what you “know” to a different format (ie different language) enables you to determine the next set of problems that help you either: (a) find the right partners with the right skills or (b) ask the deeper harder questions about your gaps.
For me (solo dev, doing both a project in an unfamiliar framework and a project in on an unfamiliar new microcontroller), GPT-4 has been a lifesaver.
Rather than spending potentially hours to sift through documentation or ask around on the forums to find the magic incantation I need, ChatGPT just spits it out instantly and I can move on to solving actual problems.
That said, in a team environment with experienced devs, it would probably be better for me to just ask someone more experienced. Learn faster and more in-depth.
Also worth pointing out that GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are completely different beasts. If you were getting the devs to use 3.5, you will get bad results no matter who is using it.
Main benefit is it does boilerplate really well. You type a few letters and then hit tab, and now your test case is done.
I did this as late as yesterday. Type in a case, type in a variant of the case that is more or less symmetric, it fills in what you would have typed. Or you add a member to your object, thus requiring it to be tested. It figures out that you need to check this new thing in all your tests.
Other thing it does well is syntax. Some weird c++ template parameter thing, it does it for you. Little things like "what's that thing that makes the sort go the other way" it will know, and save you a minute of googling.
What there doesn't seem to be is an interface for that I've found is any kind of refactoring. That's still a form of donkey work that a junior guy can do, but you'd think there would be some way for the AI to suggest DRY candidates and re-orgs.
An alternative idea is that some types of "boilerplate" can be annoying to write but actually helpful for people to read, and these tools might make that type of code more acceptable.
For example, it's helpful to be able to see all the steps a test case is doing in the one function, so you can read that and see what's going wrong if it fails. If a lot of your test cases are similar you might be tempted to refactor and put common parts in separate methods, often with unhelpful names like "assertResult()", etc, but now the reader has to jump about to understand the logic. Whereas this allows you to write the more repetitive but also more readable code easier
It's early days on the product applications, but the fundamental power is being able to find correlations and connections across a huge corpus and output a large variety of rough ideas that can then be selected and polished by humans. It doesn't replace human expertise and creativity, but it will chip away at the bottom where many jobs are essentially rote tasks with very little human-level judgement needed, and more apropos to the GP, it will provide an increasingly powerful assist to human experts who learn how to harness it.
I don't see how that's a better position than general automation, which software has been chipping away at the bottom rung of for decades. Most jobs outside of mass produced SEO Buzzfeed garbage are not about generating large amounts of believable sounding prose. I could see it chipping away at the bottom rung of customer support, but that very quickly turns into work where real decisions have to be made and an 80% correct output is not acceptable. I'd be extremely surprised if any half serious company lets an LLM decide whether a refund should be processed or rejected, for example.
Or, how hard it is to predict future markets. I remember when I started making games (on CD-ROMS!) and I met a guy who had a "multimedia" company. It sounds so funny now. He felt that soon their would be huge stores, like record stores(!) that had aisles and aisles of CD-ROMs for every need and interest. It didn't sound unreasonable at the time. And now I can't even explain to my kids what record store were like when I was a kid.
"The App Store" is like a record store that extends for hundreds of miles in every direction. He was right about the concept; but the store is in cyberspace and the media is a file instead of a disc.
>The software business went from primarily being targeted at businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at mainstream consumers
The way I remember it, personal computers (initially called home computers) always had a market among individuals with those individuals initially being hobbyists, but becoming more consumer-ish fairly soon, certainly by the early 1980s when the video-game market became a large part of the market for software for personal computers--maybe for a year the major part. Once individuals owned personal computers, they started bringing them in to work, usually against the wishes of the IT department, and the enterprise PC software and professional PC software segments grew faster than consumer PC software--until about 1990.
Video and sound cards became popular around the same time as the CDROM drive, roughly starting in 1990, and the combination led to a "resurgence" in software for consumers--games certainly, but also things like Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia (1989), The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (1992), Encarta (1993) and interactive fiction.
San Francisco was the center of the companies trying to reach this "multimedia" software market, and some writers started referring to SOMA and the Financial District as "Multimedia Gulch".
It boggles my mind that you think this "multimedia resurgence" I just described was anywhere as dramatic a shift as the Internet was!
Microsoft's main tag line during the marketing of Windows 95 was, "This way to the Internet." I must have heard that phrase a thousand time in Microsoft's ads. I don't recall Microsoft making any pitches to consumers to the effect that Windows 95 will allow them to take full advantage of their new graphics cards, sound cards or CD drives.
I kind of remember public interest in those things--and the"multimedia" software titles enabled by those things--having subsided by the time Windows 95 hit.
Looking at my phone and laptop, I have a lot of open source code, some $0 apps, some $50-$100 apps, and a couple of annual subscriptions for roughly $25/yr.
It’s interesting that those price points are sticky, like detents on a slide.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadRIP Gamestop
Like, Google does not let you search their app store and filter by cost or spyware. It is hopeless to find some good utility tool without knowing its exact name.
A simple text-editor should be free. I don't want to give some dev reccuring revenue to unlock Notepad level features.
I strongly agree it shouldn't be this hard to find simple stuff.
Why would they? But Aurora Store does: https://auroraoss.com/
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...
That's the trick though, SaaS just keeps you hostage to the vendor and they can extract more value out of you. There are only two ways out of this:
1. The Internet becomes dangerous and unreliable for some reason, and we need to go back to treating software as a product for sale, rather than service for rent.
2. Regulation.
Neither way is great. It suggests distress in the system and forcing behaviors which are not natural to it. On the other hand, what's natural to this system we've created is apparently massive centralization in the hands of corporations, and whenever anything in this network of dependencies breaks, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.
It was also a solution to the problem of updates. You can't pay for continuous improvement with a traditional software product.
The problem companies had would be someone buying their software and then never buying updates. That's a product problem not a system problem. SaaS keeps the consumer captive in a permanent rental situation. The "it gives the customers a better experience" non-sense is false. One of the best case studies on this is Jetbrains. Sublime Text is still around too. It works. It just doesn't sell very well to SV shareholders.
It'd be a lot easier if they just said "we're greedy assholes". Since that's what it actually is. Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD. Updates were paid and it was okay because they were usually major improvements. There's been a whole lot of propaganda made to make SaaS seem like a net win for the consumer but this is by-and-large not the case.
But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Those are transaction costs. As is downloading and installing software, something software running on a server and delivered through a browser doesn't require. Those ongoing costs must be paid for with ads or subscription revenue.
> Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD
But it never was. Particularly in a networked world. Perfect is the enemy of good.
SaaS isn't a fit for all products. Some software can be written once and never updated. Most cannot, and for that, SaaS is a better business model fit.
Many did not, when the updates did not provide value. The false belief you seem to rely on here is that if companies get regular stream of revenue, they'll be compelled to work on updates. Why? They get the revenue anyway, they don't have to work on updates. They can in fact stop completely working on updates, except to match competitors, when their products get popular. But even that's not much of a problem when you have a closed file format, like say Adobe does with PSD.
It's about money. It's not about updates. It's taking away ownership from people in order to be able to drive up profits. Consider how normal software sales works. It's the same way. You lease enterprise-grade software to a company. Every year, as if by magic, something comes up and "prices need to increase". They just hacked off a zero or two and adapted this price model to the consumer. I fail to see how SaaS is not another variation of "Embrace, extend, extinguish" where the entrapment phase of extinguish is taken to it's natural conclusion: no ownership. Worse, you pay 5, 10, 20 times as much over time. Many companies capitalize on the subscription being priced such that you forget about it. Also known as the gym model.
The only acceptable SaaS model to me is JetBrain's. You pay a subscription and at the end of that term you own that version of the software permanently. You may continue to pay (because you find the product valuable) but you are not required to. At the end, you still own what you paid for. The truth is, SaaS provides very little value to people for what they pay.
An example: in 5 years you would've paid for a copy of AutoCAD inventor in full + some just leasing the worse Fusion360 over the same time period. If you are a sucker and buy into Inventor's SaaS pricing you would've paid for 5-8 copies at the previous model in the same time period. That type of capture is called theft in other modalities. 9/10 people would've never needed to pay for all the extra crap they saddle on in order to make the price seem "reasonable". They exist solely because the can extort (not capitalize) on the moat they have.
One day we'll look at this model of owning nothing as one of the greatest failings of our society. It's probably an unpopular opinion here at HN but SaaS is an awful anti-consumer model. We can hope that somehow we define what "providing sufficient utility" means and start cracking down on this.
It can be both. There is an ideological purity one tends towards when designing any system. Often times, that aesthetic sense of an engineer is right. Frequently, it's orthogonal to what customers need. SaaS isn't a fit in every case. But it's far from a universal money grab.
i give the example of Path Finder, which is a Finder replacement for mac. there’s not much to improve there, after a while it became bloated. they went with subscriptions after many years of owning the software (and rolled back that later with an alternative after the backslash).
i don’t use anything that came in the last few years, except the compatibility with the latest os. maybe it’s time to stop this madness and try to make every software do anything and extract money from the consumer for things that are really not needed (yes, i understand this is my opinion but i bet you all have a similar example).
Or put on your entrepreneur cap and realize this is an opportunity.
It's kind of like a lion. Sleeps most of the time. But don't get in its way.
With the traditional system the vendor has to work hard to put up an update that's worth it, and then you pay for it.
Adobe were clearly struggling to provide good updates to their software for years, creators were always kidding they just keep tweaking the UI skin because they're out of ideas, so there's no point buying the new updates. So when Adobe went subscription-only, they did it under the pretense they'll be able to ship new exciting features every month. And of course... in retrospect they didn't. In fact their updates are even more minor than before.
Except for security upgrades, I feel like most software rapidly hits a point where the upgrades aren't worth it.
Even with modern DRM, the cost, complexity, and inability to completely lock down software installed on a device under the control of the user puts some companies off.
So now we have software as a service, paid for with the user's attention (ads) or we have software that just stops working if the company's servers can't be reached. (Looking at you, VanMoof).
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Notable_payloa...
Neither do I, thus the cautionary tale of VanMoof. Software is now everywhere, in everything from your toaster to the electric grid. As a result, right-to-repair means right to reprogram. The owner needs to be able to fix bugs, change performance parameters, replace things that break. When my dad was working on cars, that meant put in a new carburetor, adjust the timing, clean the points - all physical parts. It's different today.
Fast forward 30 years, and many software developers and startups actually think that their skills are worth so much. Sigh?
Don’t worry, the past year taught at least a few of us the hard way. Unfortunately when I was younger, I drank a lot of the industry kool aid.
Custom software, or software for a small audience obviously is scarce, but a word processor or operating system with similar complexity that can be used by millions, if not billions of users, should not cost more in total.
Open source (free) software would not even be possible if it were as scarce as, say, oil or apples.
In what world is software comparable to apples or oil? We need a different analogy.
Note that I am referring to commodity software (because that is what this thread is about). The reproduction costs are negligible compared to the software development cost.
Perhaps for a better understanding of my point, consider book publishing, or limited edition prints of art. The scarcity is almost completely artificial.
Microsoft and Oracle, for example, have grown to be extremely large companies due to this possibility of selling the same thing at nearly no extra cost.
If you think this is normal, then that's fine, but commodity software is most certainly (as you hint at yourself) not a good fit for economic models based on scarcity.
An extreme example to make a point.
A less scarce, but still scarce software product is one that sells for $100 or $10 or even $1.
Software can be free (as in free beer) and not scarce. But many software products wouldn’t have existed without customers who pay for it, with the demand level and price setting the scarcity.
Books cost money because quality authorship is scarce and people are willing to pay for "ongoing support" (sequels and future works)
The same goes for television, limited edition fine art, and financial derivatives. It is quite obvious that these industries make some people extraordinarily rich.
I am sorry for lacking the knowledge about contemporary economics, because this is obviously not something new. I was merely remembering some mediocre high school lessons.
Supply < Demand.
That is why developers are paid well. When demand softens, or supply increases even more, what developers are paid will change. The difference between software developers and other highly paid positions is that there is not enforced, artificial scarcity, such as licenses, advanced education requirements or required tests.
Supply can be limited severely by an early mover advantage, as the cost of software development can become extremely high due to the even more extreme demand. In a way this results in artificial scarcity.
Add in open source (free) software as building blocks, and venture capital, and things become even more complicated. I am sure that we need better economic models to avoid some companies to grow excessively big.
> ``You're going to see an economic model where software companies become giant incubators for good ideas,'' he says, likening it to the record business, which takes the creative product of an artist and markets it.
I feel the big tech companies should be expanding into many markets by their sheer programming prowess and complexity budgets/capacity. They should try run the cost of complexity to zero and make complexity a commodity.
Maybe I'm in a bubble but I don't see much new desktop software.
I feel it is difficult to get people in the world to pay for digital things. £10 for an iOS APP???
What software am I actually willing to pay for? Probably software that earns me something. I bought Sublime Text a long time ago but nowadays I just use notepad++ or IntelliJ or VS Code rarely. I bought Typora, a markdown editor because I write a lot of markdown.
The same problem also applies to the web. What websites would you pay for?
Would you pay $3 for a HN subscription? What about digital magazines? Are there any newspapers that are actually worth it, that enhance your life?
EDIT: it just occurred to me that the web IS a digital magazine. But I meant publications.
I feel if you want something to stay around then the market has to support its costs at a bare minimum. If you only charge lifetime licences/permanent licences traditional software then the software has a lifespan because the company can only support it while their costs are covered. SaaS is the outcome of web technology, browser technology and business needs.
I just don't like the duplication of effort, every SaaS has to implement authorisation and authentication, backup, security measures, billing, subscriptions, user management, account management, an Android app, an iOS app, dashboards and maybe a desktop client. It's such a waste of effort.
What about a SaaS dashboard SaaS, where all your SaaS are mangaed from one place?
Edit: Saas As Code?
It very much seems like developers have stopped trying. The app store for the iPhone/iPad is broken and I blame in-app purchases and subscriptions. I feel that Apple should be VERY restrictive about what is allowed to be an in-app purchase or subscription.
Try browsing the apps available, especially for children, it's all free, with in app purchases or in-app subscriptions. I was trying to find a coloring app on the iPad, there's like one that's reasonably priced. It's free for 5 - 10 coloring pages then you pay $5 - $6 to unlock everything. Completely reasonable in my mind. The rest: $30 per year as a subscription... well, now I'm not buying anything, that's not something that should be a subscription.
I really want the app stores to start very clearly advertising that the in-app purchase is an unreasonably priced subscription and preferably require that the price to unlock an every feature. Most of all I want in-app purchase and subscriptions to go away.
My life already have plenty of subscriptions, I refuse to sign up for more. I have four streaming subscriptions, two news sites, online storage, password managers, internet, phones, service contracts for my car... Just F-ing stop and let me pay up front for things that REALLY doesn't need to be subscriptions because I can't deal with anymore.
£10 is outrageous when AAA video games start at $70.
> Are there any newspapers that are actually worth it, that enhance your life?
New Yorker, Economist, The Atlantic, NYT are all fantastic- I order print editions and don't install their apps on my phone.
Both in terms of the number of homes with computers in them and what those computers were able to do things skyrocketed.
The software business went from primarily being targeted at businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at mainstream consumers in a once ever opportunity to establish a brand name with people who have literally never purchased anything in this class before.
It was the most dramatic shift certainly that I've seen in my life with the adoption of the internet being second and the adoption of mobile phones being third.
It's been more than a decade since we've seen anything like those shifts. The 2010s feel a lot like the 1980s to me. Lots of progress, lots of it incremental, but no inflection point. I do wonder if AI will be the next big paradigm shift like Windows 95, the internet, and the iPhone.
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac... does a deep dive into the reasons for the choice, which seems more to do with backwards compatibility with DOS 1.0.
Win95 wasn't built on a base that had security in mind. And when the Win95 feature set was created, the world wide web wasn't in that list. TCP/IP wasn't either iirc. Dialup access was the main onramp to the internet. MSN was supposed to be Microsoft's main way to get users on to the internet (to fight against AOL).
If you don't have internet access, where is your malware coming from?
Floppies? No wifi to attack your printers.
Much easier to deal with a strange poisonous floppy the few times that you are given one than the 24/7 defenses needed when your box is ON the internet.
Well, Win95 was hobbled with the MSDOS base which was mainly concerned with CP/M familiarity when first designed. That's why Microsoft was working on windowsNT.
[citation needed]
I tried out Copilot for months and didn't get much value out of it. The majority of my time and effort is not writing code, which is about the only thing an LLM can generate semi-useful output for. It's not more useful than a tailored search engine experience and it doesn't replace deep dives into text books, code, and white papers. Where are you seeing major benefits?
Maybe it's sector dependent? Maybe systems programming doesn't have enough reference materials for them to learn from?
Certainly not the "Clearly obvious difference" some people seem to be claiming to see in some places online.
Maybe if you're slinging HTML and JS all day it helps more
Meanwhile, the stuff it is good at filling in - it was never that hard to google it and copy and paste it in the first place.
I've seen this like 20 times in tech before. We're peak hype cycle for LLMs and the trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. During peak hype cycle for any tech a lot of people defer to the crowd's excitable opinion, disbelieve the evidence in front of their own eyes and express a level of optimism over future developments that is ludicrous.
The advantage, that actually is a game changer[0], is that it can do languages I can't. I'm an iOS dev, I've technically been paid to write JavaScript at various points, but the best of that was about 20 years ago and just before jQuery got popular.
ChatGPT lets me turn my ideas for JavaScript projects into things that almost work and are usually close enough for me to fix — turning me from an iOS dev into a JS project manager.
Likewise Stable Diffusion: I've done some game artwork when I tried self employed for a bit, SD can act like a mostly amazing artist that does a few bits (mostly hands) like it was temporarily high on LSD, and I can just highlight those messed up regions and say "do again five times", and the actual images get to me faster than a real human would notice a message on slack or email or whatever, let alone be able to actually attempt a fix.
As for music… I actually made a procedural music generator back then (for the games while self-employed), and while neither the music nor the generator is going to win any awards, the output was sufficient for the games it went with. All the various new music AI are way better than what I did.
[0] and now I realise the cliché; ugh
Rather than spending potentially hours to sift through documentation or ask around on the forums to find the magic incantation I need, ChatGPT just spits it out instantly and I can move on to solving actual problems.
That said, in a team environment with experienced devs, it would probably be better for me to just ask someone more experienced. Learn faster and more in-depth.
Also worth pointing out that GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are completely different beasts. If you were getting the devs to use 3.5, you will get bad results no matter who is using it.
I did this as late as yesterday. Type in a case, type in a variant of the case that is more or less symmetric, it fills in what you would have typed. Or you add a member to your object, thus requiring it to be tested. It figures out that you need to check this new thing in all your tests.
Other thing it does well is syntax. Some weird c++ template parameter thing, it does it for you. Little things like "what's that thing that makes the sort go the other way" it will know, and save you a minute of googling.
What there doesn't seem to be is an interface for that I've found is any kind of refactoring. That's still a form of donkey work that a junior guy can do, but you'd think there would be some way for the AI to suggest DRY candidates and re-orgs.
It's just that boilerplate is usually an indication of a bad design or a bad/verbose language. Both of it are painpoints that should be fixed.
But if that's not possible then Copilot is a good helper.
For example, it's helpful to be able to see all the steps a test case is doing in the one function, so you can read that and see what's going wrong if it fails. If a lot of your test cases are similar you might be tempted to refactor and put common parts in separate methods, often with unhelpful names like "assertResult()", etc, but now the reader has to jump about to understand the logic. Whereas this allows you to write the more repetitive but also more readable code easier
The way I remember it, personal computers (initially called home computers) always had a market among individuals with those individuals initially being hobbyists, but becoming more consumer-ish fairly soon, certainly by the early 1980s when the video-game market became a large part of the market for software for personal computers--maybe for a year the major part. Once individuals owned personal computers, they started bringing them in to work, usually against the wishes of the IT department, and the enterprise PC software and professional PC software segments grew faster than consumer PC software--until about 1990.
Video and sound cards became popular around the same time as the CDROM drive, roughly starting in 1990, and the combination led to a "resurgence" in software for consumers--games certainly, but also things like Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia (1989), The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (1992), Encarta (1993) and interactive fiction.
San Francisco was the center of the companies trying to reach this "multimedia" software market, and some writers started referring to SOMA and the Financial District as "Multimedia Gulch".
It boggles my mind that you think this "multimedia resurgence" I just described was anywhere as dramatic a shift as the Internet was!
Microsoft's main tag line during the marketing of Windows 95 was, "This way to the Internet." I must have heard that phrase a thousand time in Microsoft's ads. I don't recall Microsoft making any pitches to consumers to the effect that Windows 95 will allow them to take full advantage of their new graphics cards, sound cards or CD drives.
I kind of remember public interest in those things--and the"multimedia" software titles enabled by those things--having subsided by the time Windows 95 hit.
It’s interesting that those price points are sticky, like detents on a slide.
> “It's not about technology anymore. It's about marketing, merchandising, brand management, and shelf space....”
Just, no.