But it looks like for the average consumer, they wouldn't really care as long as their needs are met, even if those machines are becoming more and more like appliances.
Tech companies are turning everything that you can put software on into something you rent. And you can put software on everything.
Software companies are becoming the ultimate rent seekers. The endgame of anyone/any company, it seems :-)
This isn't glib doublespeak. There's probably a better way to articulate this for people who were formally educated in business (not me). Basically customer lifetime value is variable on a monthly fee, meaning you can always add upgrades and provide support. But if you just sell it one-and-done then depending on the price it can be difficult to find the motivation to provide any meaningful long-term support.
as a customer, i don't have the choice to not pay for such upgrades but continue using the old one.
And yet, the SaaS subscription cost is charged continuously whether the customer likes the upgrades or not.
So no, i don't agree with the SaaS business model. It's more extractive. The point of buying a piece of software is the same as buying capital equipment - purchase once, and have it work "forever" (and since software doesn't rot like real equipment, this should be even more true).
What i would pay a subscription for is live/in-person support.
It's the same with hardware. At one company we used to operate a 3-year hardware refresh cycle and this used to make a lot of sense, 3 years was a long time in hardware, and this assumption was true for a long time. But the pace slowed as manufacturers stopped making big improvements and just started eking out marginal gains. We looked at our kit and our workloads and realised that we had plenty of capacity and instead of refreshing proactively we should stretch it out to a 5 year or longer cycle and replace failed equipment with new rather than disposing of things that still worked perfectly well after 3 years. Saved a ton of money doing this, both in buying hardware and in the effort taken to move applications around. Of course manufacturers got wise to this and looked for ways to get you back on that treadmill.
And while you may still have a perfectly valid use case for hardware, I think the growth of IaaS speaks for itself in showing that variable pricing is popular.
I disagree with that to a degree. Sure the bits that make up your software don't "rot", the compute environment under which it operates is always changing and will lead to it no longer working.
Try taking any PC, whether it's Windows 10 running IE or it's Ubuntu running Firefox, and just stop updating it. How many years will you feel comfortable using it? _Eventually_ you're going to need security updates, interface with new protocols, support/function on replacement hardware when it dies, etc.
I'll acknowledge that in reality, there are internet routers, industrial machines, and the like that can probably run for decades on the same software revision given enough babysitting and like-replacement of the hardware. But even the security software around those like firewalls are going to need to be refreshed and upgraded which costs money. In the grand scheme of things, somewhere in the stack, something is constantly being upgraded and refreshed, and SaaS fits perfectly into that model.
Don't forget every medical lab machine ever made.... some of that stuff is still running windows 95
If I find I actually need any kind of support with any service/product and I can't "just use it" then I start looking for an alternative product/service.
There's something rotten at the core of everything-as-a-service and continuous-improvement and growth-hacking and everything that comes with it... Most people actually like things that are done and stay done, most stuff doesn't need to need to be fixed, and it doesn't need to evolve or improve beyond the glacial pace needed to keep up working on the infrastructure it uses...
For the user however, it means lock-in and their data being held ransom.
A good SaaS manages to remedy the downsides to enable the upsides to shine, i.e. data export, open formats, open core, open source + hosting business, ... and hopefully more diverse and better ideas to cover more markets, use and business cases.
It also seems to work for business customers, who have many tools available to handle logistics of subscription, a more equal position in the relationship, and more ways to deal with cashflow problems.
It's much less beneficial for individuals, though. Some problems:
- Even if the monthly subscription is 10% of its would-be box price, I'm likely going to pay more than I would if I could buy it.
- By subscribing, I gain a new relationship to manage. Managing relationships is cognitively taxing, there's only so many an individual can handle[1]. I don't want that relationship with you, I want to use a software products, no strings attached. Much like when I buy bread, I don't enter into relationships with the bakery, the mall, the flour plant or the wheat farmer[2].
- As a part of being in a relationship with you, I'm bound by your ToC, which limits what I can do with the product. It's not a noticeable problem when dealing with web applications, as limits are often enforced technically - but as more physical, household products become wrapped in services, this is going to become a bigger problem. Right now, the manufacturer doesn't care if I use my dishwasher for steam-cooking[3]; in a service model, this would be disallowed by ToS.
- The modern means of enforcing the core of our relationship - me paying you for access - usually revolve around the software being hosted on your servers. This limits the long-term utility of the product over a version I could keep on my computer, and poke inside if needed.
- If our relationship ends for any reason, I lose the goods. It may be because of me violating the ToS, but it also may be because your company decides to shut down the service, or gets acquired, or goes bust. It's particularly annoying with physical products, which then get taken away or become expensive paperweights. It's a risk I have to keep in mind as part of managing our relationship (and which realistically I won't, and then wake up one day with few days or weeks for figuring out how to replace your service with something else).
- It may seem that incentives of SaaS are better aligned with their customers - I pay, you deliver improvements. But another way of looking at it is, you release an incomplete product, while I pay in hope it'll get improved. Much like "one-and-done" sales have their perverse incentives, so do services (worst case that sometimes happen: making switching costs high on purpose, to ensure I keep paying).
Personally, I'm particularly tired of the relationship angle. I want to exchange stuff for artifacts that give me powers - not bind myself to ever growing number of ephemeral business entities.
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[0] - Not 100% passive because you have to keep the infra running and offer some kind of support, but passive enough that quite a lot of companies seem focused primarily on growing their userbase, not catering for the existing users.
[1] - Rich people and businesses handle this by paying someone to deal with it.
[2] - Actually, I do enter into a relationship with the bakery, but it's entirely handled by consumer protection laws, so the only thing I need to manage about it is knowing what government branch to e-mail with the receipt. And that management cost is shared across all my purchases.
[3] - Worst that can happen is I lose warranty over some more peculiar use cases or tweaks.
Modern appliances aren't really like this. The control panel will start registering false presses or no longer accept keypresses after a few years (especially if it's a heating appliance and the control panel is not engineered to be in a hot environment), and replacement control panels will be discontinued and unavailable.
Most people never change anything in their system, and know little more than exactly what they need to do the specific tasks they want to do (writing documents, photo storage, e.t.c) An appliance like system where "it just works" and you never need to understand any of the structure or fiddle with the computer in any way is probably exactly what a lot of people want.
Even the systems that should most "just work" still leak abstractions like sieves.
It's true that the average person doesn't want to spend time tinkering with tech and take the risk of breaking things. But that's not the same thing as being happy with how things work, and it's not the same thing as using tech as productively as possible.
When I write software or talk to people about how they use software, they always want it to work somewhat differently. They do want customisation for entirely sensible and very specific reasons. They just don't want to do it themselves. That's why consulting and support is a huge global industry.
The problem with "just works" is that it only has meaning where the requirements are specified in great detail with very little variability. That's always trivially the case for single purpose household appliances. It's also the case for things like making phone calls or for device drivers. No one wants to "customise" a device driver to stop it from draining the battery.
But computers are not single purpose devices. They are used for a million different things in a million different situations. "Just works" is largely undefined outside of core OS functionality. And that's why the appliance metaphor just doesn't work.
If productivity of end-users was the goal then we wouldn't see random changes to interfaces that people had learnt, for no other reason than some graphic designer thinks it doesn't look "fresh".
The truth is for most of what most people do, computing was solved around 2010-ish and all anyone wants now is for things to be more reliable, faster and cheaper. But that's much harder work for companies that a new flat interface style, or some animated emojis.
Make the number go up. All hail the number.
After tens of millions of people are harmed by this, laws will be passed, or knowledge will be passed down never to do this again.
They were one of the first to do that, and have been doing for more than a decade, while profits only increase.
Then Google, Apple and Amazon.
Windows, on the other hand is worse of both worlds - Nothing works from the start, and it's not easily configurable. (Before you bring your pitch-forks I use Windows on daily basis)
I know it's still a fashionable meme on HN to hate Windows and Microsoft for telemetry and Candy Crush, but saying nothing works is a bit of an exaggeration at this point.
Using both Windows 10 and Linux at home and work I can say that while linux is the de facto OS for the server/cloud/embedded system, Windows 10 is the rock solid go-to for the laptop/gaming station, especially on laptops with nvidia cards where very few linux distros and desktop environments would not shit the bed on, especially with thunderbolt docks, with multiple displays and various scaling. Authentication via fingerprint readers or IR-cameras on Linux? Good luck with that.
Granted, that's not linux's fault that driver support from hardware vendors is absolute dog shit, but as a user/employee/consumer I'm gonna use whatever just-works™ to get my work/entertainment needs fulfilled with minimal friction, and at this point, outside the Apple ecosystem, Windows 10 has the best driver support by hardware vendors by a long shot with linux sadly still relying on reverse engineered drivers by the community or binary blobs which are ignored by the FLOSS community, which turns linux into this dumpster fire on the more "fancy" laptops that use anything more than an intel chip with integrated graphics that are nothing more than ssh terminals.
It's just clicking the snip button in the action center by the clock or pressing "WinKey + Shift + S" then draw the rectangle for the area you want captured. How much simpler is screenshotting on the Mac?
You not liking some of the default apps that come with the OS(which is understandable) does not make an OS bad.
I also hate some of the apps that come with most linux distros but that doesn't make linux terrible.
Windows isn't easily configurable? By what metric? There's a dozen ways to enter the same settings and most of the time you can just search for what it is about the operating system you want to change - in the operating system itself, with the OS's own search bar.
And "nothing works"? What the fuck are you even doing on Windows 10, where you and apparently only you, manage to break all functionality after the initial install?
I can't even remember the last time I've had a problem with Windows 10... a blue screen, hell, even an application crash.
What's the point of having any operating system of you can't install applications on it that work for you.
I want my Amiga appliance back, computers that have a soul of how hardware and software are designed together.
The IBM PC lineage of putting unrelated components together by yourself is an anomaly in the history of home computers, or computers in general. Selling computers as a whole, with set hardware and software, is what used to be the norm, and it worked well for everyone involved. We are to some extent returning to what things used to be.
Anyway, "general computing" doesn't necessarily mean mixing and mashing hardware. But it definitely means executing arbitrary software with full control over installed hardware. The trend line here is definitely from "more" to "less" of "general computing". We've started with raw metal and hardware diagrams being included in the instruction manuals; then diagrams disappeared, CPUs gained abstraction layers - but it was still fine, computing-wise. But now we're in era of OSes and even CPUs limiting what users can do with them, and multiple parties owning various pieces of a computer, with nothing left to own for the user who actually buys the machine.
Is it though? Apple has innovated a whole lot more with the non-modular Macs and iPads than any generic x86 vendor has managed in years and years.
Modularity means software has to be designed for the lowest common denominator. And that in turn means that there is nothing to gain by innovating in hardware, because the software won't support it anyway.
Somebody who controls every part of both hardware and software can innovate much more freely than you can in a modular market. x86 PCs have been stagnant for decades now.
Sure we have things like Thunderbolt today, but there's a lot to be said for putting the specialized stuff inside the case where it isn't cluttering up the desk and nobody can just unplug it and pocket it.