Comment by sephoric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sephoric | Hacker News Reader

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Ethically I think the good old days of software products were superior to the current days of software services. Services are paid for by subscription or ads or selling data, so that they are forced to optimize for continued use. Products are sold as-is, with the hope that they are useful enough that enough people will buy them once and own it forever.

It should work this way: you spend N months making a useful product that fills a real need, start selling it, and ideally make just enough money to cover the time you spent working on it. As soon as you start selling it and money comes in, you start working on another product. This has flaws though. You have to have the cash up front to pay your own bills for the first N months. And you risk not making up the time you spent.

But what I see happening is worse: people make products that sell, get greedy over the money they can make, and milk that product to death, first by paid upgrades (which isn't inherently unethical) but then turning to subscriptions or free but selling you to ad- or data-companies.

Having worked on desktop software, I much prefer the services model.

There were endless conversations about a support matrix and patching older versions for customers who refused to upgrade. We were hamstrung by old design decisions and backporting fixes making any change onerous. We couldn’t add value for new customers as fast because we spent a majority of the time supporting older customers. Now those older customers probably preferred it that way. They had software that worked (until a new vulnerability was discovered at least) and that they had paid for and liked. But as the decades (literally software that old) dragged on they became like technical debt that we couldn’t detach.

As a developer, the incentives were clear. If I’m spending half my time supporting people who had already paid and weren’t likely to pay again, then I can be more productive elsewhere, creating more additional value at a company that had a services model. So I left.

Having worked on desktop software, I much prefer the services model.

I think that's one portion of how we ended up where we are now: The companies thinking more about what is easier for the company than the needs of the customer.

The companies will always think about their bottom line. They will think of the needs of the customer to the extent that actually affects said bottom line. But customers demonstrated, through their behavior in the marketplace, that they also prefer the service model - or at least they don't care enough to preserve the old model. And so, here we are.

Software tends to spread from person to person, and any given piece of software in context is usually non-substitutable - therefore I believe consumers weren't really given an option to voice their opinion on product vs. service. Companies started to migrate to service model, and customers had to follow suit, because they didn't have any choice.

Customers had a choice in many cases. For example, Office is still offered as both a boxed product, and as a subscription service. Every time I see a discussion on one versus the other online, most people prefer the service, because it's cheaper (even long term).

On the other hand I think subscriptions have vastly improved the quality of software.

Having to win your customer's business every month or year forces the product to continue improving. If the product doesn't get better, then customers leave.

I disagree. I think vendor lock-in is actually much worse with SaaS because you rarely control your own data or infrastructure. Quality can slowly erode over time and migrating from one SaaS provider to another is often more technically and contractually onerous than migrating between on-premises software products. SaaS apps are often data silos, where interoperability is no longer a necessity (or selling point).

We are a B2B SaaS, generally used by all employees of our client organisations, and there is truth to both sides.

We do continually improve the product which benefits all our clients: sometimes features for new sales, sometimes better responsiveness or error management, sometimes in response to competitors.

But our customers are quite locked in by momentum - it would cost them a lot to change and they wouldn't see much benefit, and certainly any costs in our area are pure overhead for their business (i.e. our product doesn't directly produce their product or service).

However there is a low bar below which our competitors would eat us.

We do strive to improve the product, and we actually really care about end user usability, partially because we believe happy users do influence sales to other organisations.

I applaud your user-centric philosophy, I really do. And I don't mean to insinuate that all SaaS providers are out to take advantage of users (I've worked at a few and feel that we've always looked out for our users).

That said, my concern is that users have little protection against a change of philosophy or business model at their supplier. If one of my SaaS vendors decides to double their price, impose restrictions on use or neglect their product to the point of it becoming unusable, I may have little choice but to conduct a costly migration.

If a traditional, product-model software supplier suddenly doubles upgrade prices or turns evil, generally I am able to stay on the last version I've purchased and simply not upgrade. I really appreciate Jetbrains' licensing model where you pay a subscription for continual upgrades but get a perpetual license for the last version (released at the start of your last 12-month term) should you decide to quit.

A timely comment, as i was notified today that my G-Suite subscription will be increasing in cost by 20%.

I think one of the clearest examples of this is "old Microsoft" vs "new Microsoft". Windows used to be something you bought (or pirated...), and then MS would just leave you alone. But Windows 10 is definitely headed towards the "service" model; despite being a product that can be bought, it's also full of deeply embedded nearly-impossible-to-remove telemetry and gives Microsoft power to arbitrarily disrupt you with forced updates and other unwanted changes.

What if we thought of software not as a product, or a service, but a utility or a public good? There doesn't seem to be any way to monetize software that isn't destructive to users, either through paywalls or tracking/advertising, so why not publicly subsidize its development and release it for free?

If you do that you still want to allocate money in a way that encourages constant improvement as well as rewarding successful radical new ideas. And that's not easy to do in a way that doesn't generate problems very similar to the free market.

For example if "time spent in application" would be one of the metrics you use to allocate money then every user interface will be redesigned to require as many clicks as possible for frequent tasks, with fake loading screens in between.

I think there are ways to measure public good. Not perfectly, but certainly better than the market does. Open source libraries create a tremendous amount of public good, yet their creators are paid next to nothing. Meanwhile malicious practices like vendor lock-in, proprietary software and tracking are rewarded.

There exist organizations that treat software as a public good -- Software for the Public Interest, GNU, the Linux foundation, etc. These are relatively small in terms of funding but have a disproportionately large positive impact. Imagine if an organization the size of Google or Microsoft existed like that with public money, or if one or more of the big 5 tech companies were nationalized? It sounds unimaginable because of the political climate in the United States, but I can't see how this would be anything but a good thing. Tech companies behave much more like infrastructure, and thus are in my mind a very reasonable target for public ownership.

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