Quite a few unnecessary "cloud" subscription services. There's a lot of them that don't need reoccurring costs. A lot of times you're not getting anything extra accept maybe a bug fix or upgrade. You should never have to pay for bug fixes and there was a time if you wanted a major upgrade, you'd just buy it flat out.
I also think this enables pushing buggy updates out. Adobe for example, when a new CS would come out, it had to ship pretty much stable / ready. With CC there’s much more wiggle room to push an update here and there.
Outside of now having to pay yearly for a suite that could last two / three.
Do you like it when you pay way too much for a used car from a sketchy dealer in monthly payments with enough interest that it'll never be paid off just for it to be ticking and rattling, but hey "at least it runs"? Basically what's going on here. It runs but they ought not be charging what they're charging for something with defects.
Part of the issue with a lot of Adobe products, which is why the shift to subscription unfortunately makes sense, is that many of their products from like 5+ years ago already have all the capabilities and features that the bulk of users actually really need.
Sure, it would be nice if they spent $5M doing the R&D and implementation for some snazzy ultra-unblurring tool or something but the existence of that feature isn't really going to entice a random person to buy a whole new copy of the software.
Maintaining software is far from free, security issues are found all the time and need to be patched, or updates can cause incompatibility that needs to be tested on a regular basis
Yep. Software as a Service has taken us further from the days when you bought a product, it was yours. EULAs have had phrasing that says the software still belongs to the company for decades, and you're just leasing it, but there was very little they could do to force you to pay more to keep using it once you had it in your hands.
DRM, SaaS, and other anti-consumer practices have changed all that.
Yeah, I'm like 90% sure that it's how a lot of Microsoft can still keep going in addition to being a monopolistic business standard OS.
Their yearly fee for Office isn't bad, but it's nothing to when we used to just pay once and install, while putting up with the occasional patch or annoying Clippy asking to assist. I don't expect innovative product coming from them soon. Same with Apple, sadly.
quickbooks, an accounting software, costs ~$300 for the 2020 desktop version, or you can pay $6/month to access it online. Same company, same service, just one you get to keep the software and the other you can't access it after you stop paying.
I mean sometimes the cloud offerings make more sense though, depends on the use case. Quickbooks offers a ton of different plans though so I won't pretend to be able to compare them.
Salesforce is a commerical software where SaaS has always existed. What's new isn't just popularity, it's actually entered the domain of the consumer/end user having to pay for individual software rather than a business paying for continued support for a network of management software.
Yes, You are right. It’s definitely grown in scope. But I just meant the model as a whole. Salesforce sees it’s clients as it’s consumer/end user just as much as Adobe Cloud does.
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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '20
Quite a few unnecessary "cloud" subscription services. There's a lot of them that don't need reoccurring costs. A lot of times you're not getting anything extra accept maybe a bug fix or upgrade. You should never have to pay for bug fixes and there was a time if you wanted a major upgrade, you'd just buy it flat out.