I like the subscription model, especially if it has a free tier, because passionate customers can support the developer team and subsidize less passionate users
That doesn't require a subscription. Plenty of companies offer a permanent purchase that comes with a year of updates or all minor-version updates or similar.
The option is there to treat it similarly to a subscription, but importantly you never have to pay and what you already own can never be changed or taken away.
- A year of support on our forums (real company-provided support, not just peer-provided).
- All minor releases and bug-fix builds within the year.
- After the subscription has expired, you still keep everything that you purchased forever, including being able to download anything you own at any time (we keep track of all of that for you).
We do have some "catches" to prevent free-riders at the expense of customers that maintain subscriptions, notably that you can only renew a subscription at the normal price within 2 years of your last renewal. After that, we start to ratchet up the renewal costs until, at the 5-year mark, you'll need to (effectively) purchase a new license.
Also, we offer inexpensive direct phone/email support through a separate "support session" method that is not tied to your subscription. So, even after a subscription expires, you still have direct support options.
The key is that any arrangement be fair and beneficial to both parties. In our case, we get a steady, predictable stream of revenue, and the customers get support, enhancements, and bug fixes quicker and at less cost.
But you do realize that the subscription model is exactly the thing that removes the incentive to do that, right?
With the subscription model, the company is still going to make that income regardless if they have a new product. As long as no other competitor has developed a competing product, there's no reason to innovate. (and there's lots of ways to deal with competitors besides innovating)
I'm not particularly happy about moving to what is effectively a rent society, but I think this is one of the few silver linings of the subscription model.
It's almost impossible to keep mature products going without a subscription model. Mature products eventually only need:
a) support and b) compatibility/stability/performance updates.
But, these types of updates can be very expensive to develop and are very difficult to market as a new release (works with XXXX now isn't a very compelling proposition for upgrades).
It's kind of the same problem that open source software faces after it matures. Nobody wants to just sit and do support/incremental changes on old software, at least not for free.
From the development side of the business, the more frequent release cycle has allowed the product teams to be much more responsive. Under the old model, with major updates every 18-24 months, I might receive a feature request which is implemented in a few weeks, but which the user doesn't have access to for a year or more. This was hugely frustrating as we want to make features and products our customers want to use, and to have it ready and waiting for so long was not a great experience for anyone. Now, we can have that feature in users hands in weeks or months.
I don't understand this idea that there will be reduced incentive to release updates under a subscription or membership model. If anything, frequency and responsiveness feels more important than before, and I don't know of anyone here who feels differently.
edit: I was more on the fence about subscriptions than unsupportive. It was a drastic change that required either gradual transition or a rip-off-the-bandaid approach.
Buying a license today is investing in future development. I wouldn't pay to use software that's not actively being maintained. Nor would I expect my customers to either.
What is discussed here is the case where you lose the right to use the software if you don't continue to pay, completely independently from what that money is used for, which is why it removes one important incentive to improve the software.
And if your skillset and your data is locked up in some software, it's questionable whether you really would stop paying, and thus stop using the software that you depend on.
"...only reason they'll buy a new copy is if the new one is substantially better than the old..."
The obvious, intuitive cause & effect isn't always the case.
I bought software to encourage future development, vs wait for new release then decide to upgrade. Push vs pull.
2. That people are willing to effectively pay in advance for a future release without any guarantees what they will get for it is irrelevant to the question of whether you have the lever to shut off that cash flow if they continue to not deliver any updates of value to you, while still using the existing version.
In other words: You are simply missing the point.
What does change is there isn't the incentive to pile in dubious features to justify charging for an upgrade every other year.
Can you name a single case where this has happened with subscription software, though? The big named examples in the article (as far as I could stand to read it, at least) are Adobe Creative Cloud and Microsoft Office 365.
Here's the What's New page for Photoshop CC 2017, along with links to the changes in various bugfix releases that have occurred since release:
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/whats-new.html
You can find the release notes for the past few releases of Photoshop:
https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/photoshop-releasenotes.htm...
They aren't sitting on their laurels. And Office hasn't stagnated, either. If the subscription model removes the incentive to do that, why are they still doing that? You get new features in Office 365 sooner than you do on shrinkwrap Office releases. Adobe products have been subscription only for over four years now. The incentive seems to be in place.
There are other examples as well. Do you own Visio or Project and use Citrix? You can't use it unless you convert to a subscription.
Most of the office apps changes have been around supporting other office components. Stuff like federated login and not crashing. :)
> Can you name a single case where this has happened with subscription software, though?
Every single one of them. It's just a matter of logic that that incentive is removed. There might be other incentives that still keep them innovating or whatever (like, say, competition, if it's reasonably possible to migrate away), but that one just logically isn't.
Yes, of course, essentially nothing is monocausal, but that doesn't mean my point was fundamentally wrong: The subscription model (and by that I don't mean the setup where you have a contract for regular updates that you could just cancel and keep using the version you have now) removes the old version you already have as a competitor to the new version that you could pay for. That is most likely not going to be to the advantage of the customer, whichever form that disadvantage may take.
With the model where you can just keep using the old version without any further payments, you as the customer have at least two options two choose from: keep using the old version (doesn't cost anything), or buy the new version (you have to pay). Those two options effectively compete for marketshare, and as such, the latter option has to convince you with something that you consider valuable enough for you to pay the higher price. There might be further options in the marketplace, but that's not guaranteed, and also, migrating to a different solution usually has costs associated with it (learning the new software, lower productivity in the beginning, downtime, paying for the export/conversion/import of the data, ...), while the migration costs between versions of the same software tend to minimal, in particular lower than migrating to a different product altogether.
Now, with the subcription model, the first option is removed from the market. You only can buy the new version, or pay the migration costs of switching to a new product. Which is also not lost on the company selling you the software: If their market research people are any good, they'll set prices such that it's a bit cheaper than the competition plus migration costs, effectively turning a large part of your potential migration costs into their profit.
A real update would be better live editing. When they launched lightroom I was hopefull some of that workflow would make it to Photoshop. Nope. When they bought speedgrade I thought "amazing, I hope they make a print version." Nope.
The same is true for Illustrator, inDesign and Acrobat Pro.