Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

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It is also surprising how much other subscriptions cost compared with Office 365. Office 365 contains the most complete office suite in existence, probably larger than many operating systems. It also includes 1TB of OneDrive, and free monthly Skype minutes. And the 99 Euros that you quote are for five persons.

Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison. I have tried to avoid subscription software as much as possible. But we have a family subscription for 1Password because $REASONS. We pay $60 per year for (in comparison to Office) a small software product, with small cloud storage, of which we only need a couple of megabytes for storing encrypted passwords.

Also, I wonder whether this will lead to a slower development of the software.

Most likely. Once you are locked into some proprietary data format, it is often more expensive to move to an alternative, and it is easier to subscribe. Once a substantial part of the user base has a subscription, there is no more need to entice users with a new version.

Subscription software does not benefit the user.

There was some low hanging fruit for companies to create subscription plans who shouldn’t have been adding them. The more subscriptions your target customer has, the harder it is to convert them on the new one. For the business side the ceiling is a lot higher, but for consumers there is a very low limit.

Each market is different, but when I look at an area like Photoshop or Illustrator, the competition keeps getting better. In some areas they aren’t even competing.

The workflow of a game artist will have them going through a bunch of different products to get to an end result. A lot of those steps can have alternatives. If a vendor has some proprietary format that doesn’t work with anything else they never even get a user base.

If a subscription is funding continuous development, and th company is doing a good job, and I use the software daily it doesn’t bother me. If I use it twice a year, I’m going to be looking hard at alternatives.

Its going to be a real problem for Adobe. Their biggest apps (PS/AI/IND) haven’t had real upgrade worthy updates in years. Competing apps like Affinity Photo are pretty much 1 to 1 replacements. Eventually some significant portion of Adobe’s core users are going to go elsewhere.

It's not even that - they basically are back to just the isolated professional market now as the majority of built-in apps do many of the enhancements that the cheaper subscription licensees would have sought out Adobe for. No one except aspiring professionals really needs the majority of Adobe projects to do competent looking amateur work anymore.

Subscriptions from Adobe were meant to soften the initial sale, but Adobe's own rigidity with the subscription schemes on release shot them in the foot, as organizations had to wait a long time for a model to come out that met the needs of small/medium businesses who previously could have made due with a few perpetual licenses. The storage was pretty sad even at the time of the switch, so that wasn't a compelling sales point either.

I think Adobe just didn't pull the numbers they were expecting when they switched, and now they're stuck with this model and infrastructure they don't know what to do with.

Maybe subscriptions will start going down, but Adobe's most recent quarterly earnings report [https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/investor-re...] says:

>Creative revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2018 was $1.23 billion, up from $942.2 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 and representing 30% year-over-year growth.

So not only are they still selling, but subscriptions increased 30% over the past year. Clearly it's working for them so much that they're finding success doing the same thing for the document cloud:

>Document Cloud revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2018 was $231.0 million, up from $195.9 million in the first quarter of fiscal 2017 as we continue to transition Document Cloud to a subscription-based model.

> Most subscription software is a terrible deal in comparison.

This is actually my way of making decision to buy a subscription-based product. It must provide comparable service. Office 365 single user license costs around 70$/year. Now:

- Evernote is asking 60$/year. Seriously? One note is already offering same service with 1TB storage.

- Pocket is asking 45$/year. WTF? It is just a bookmarking service which is already offered by one note web clipper.

- Proton mail is asking 50$/year for 5GB mail box. Dude, Office 365 offers 50GB add-free mail box. However NSA is able to read your emails, which is not the problem here. At least MS is not selling my information to advertisers.

Other than streaming services, It is getting really difficult to find any subscription-based product that gets close to Office 365.

> Subscription software does not benefit the user.

Depends on software, subscription and benefits...

I think Office and Jetbrains are softwares done "right". They continually release updates - quarterly?... continually add new features...

I think more companies get it "wrong" than get it "right"... but done right, the company has reasons to keep developing - no new stuff? no continued monies. no new monies.

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