For services, it might make sense. Even so, what exactly is "getting better all the time" about Spotify the software? It's been the same for like 5 years now.
As for the rest: 1Password declined (turned to Electron shit), Creative Cloud keeps adding bloat while not adressing decades standing issues, IntelliJ is, I guess OK, Figma I don't use so can't tell.
And I know (even use) many more software that turned into subscriptions and now sit on their asses or deliver minimum value - and of course will stop working the moment you had enough with their lack of progress end your subscription.
The most glaring one: search. Which is verifiably worse UX now.
Other text entry fields don't seem to suffer from this problem. AFAIK this wasn't a problem before the switch to Electron.
Whoa, I didn't know that one. Was that functionality around in earlier version?
If Adobe worked like that I’d be like 75% pissed off at their products and pricing.
Recently they started to add more cloud/collaboration services/a web app and switched to a regular old subscription model, but you can bet your ass i'm staying on the legacy model for as long as I can.
The one reason why I tolerate IntelliJ's subscription/pricing model is that unlike Adobe, they actually do deliver constant and worthwhile updates. Their software also rarely crashes, and their universal workflow (across different languages, themes, key bindings, plugins) also works as promised.
If not for the above the subscription would be a very hard sell for me.
There’s also an unspoken but important accounting detail here - if you run an online software business and offer a one-time, lifetime purchase for your product, you are now contractually on the hook to provide that service to customers forever, even if your business stops growing, which means that the liabilities of your business are not capped. This is bad if you operate with a lot of cloud expenses, and it means that these businesses are unsustainable unless new customers keep coming in, whereas a subscription model scales with utilization.
The real rule is not pissing off your customer base by taking important services offline while they still use that particular product. Doing so would be a PR blunder, and obviously effect sales of future products.
You are paying for both the content and the software bundled together. And no, you don't get it "for free".
Ever-growing my ass. I've had lots of songs on my playlists removed because they were taken off the platform. And not some obscure acts, for example Westbam's Götterstrasse (which features anybody, from Brian Molko and Iggy Pop to Kanye and Lil' Wayne).
But I guess you have to keep in mind they are in an ongoing pivot to cloud and that understandably disgruntles those of their customers who have a strong aversion to cloudy products. If you look at 1Password as a standalone app for managing local vaults synced via dropbox, I guess you could argue it's kinda shitty by now and getting worse, and every cloud feature is a net-negative in that view. If I had to guess I'd say most people want a cloud solution these days, but I guess that may be what's behind a lot of the negative sentiment. Or maybe not, but as someone who buys 1Password Family for the cloudy features, has used it a lot at work and doesn't have a single local vault, I'm a very happy customer and I've yet to run into a non-trivial bug with v8.
Excel today is way better than the Excel I used in the 90s. I wouldn't trade it for a moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Wi...
Support for Android apps sounds nice, but you can't even reposition the taskbar anymore.
https://winaero.com/classic-calculator-windows-10-creators/
How can you f* up a simple calculator on a very complex one?
Still can't organise songs in any meaningful way, can't rate songs, playlists suck, shuffle is broken, and they keep pushing podcast content when I never listen to podcasts.
1Password also used to sync to Dropbox for free and even had an HTML version that could serve from Dropbox.
I think lyrics was a bit of legal hurdle so Spotify had to get rid of it. I imagine they brought it back recently as they worked out a legal way to provide them again.
In either case, I do think some of the points the other comment made are prescient. Spotify Connect is definitely a killer feature and I think Spotify Wrapped is one of those cultural phenomenon that you can't reliably predict the impact of. Network effects definitely seem to be quite powerful.
I keep looking at Deezer for its cheap hi-def support (the premium plan now has FLAC, for the same price as Spotify). But integrations with non-officially sanctioned devices seem janky, at best.
Maybe things have improved, but at one point I had a Yamaha receiver, officially supported, which basically replicated the Deezer interface inside the receiver's app. I couldn't control it from my computer. IIRC Tidal was the same. With Spotify, this just works. Bonus points for supporting the use case of "having friends over who can play their music on my stereo".
I also use multiple "devices" to play music: phone, personal laptop, work laptop, personal desktops, media PC. I don't know how Deezer's "three registered device limit" is implemented, but I'd hate to have to log in again every time I change the computer.
Spotify Wrapped is also kind of a cultural phenomenon. People enjoy sharing and talking about it and I guess it's the default assumption that you're using Spotify so you can easily share playlists and stuff to other users. Spotify has the network that smaller services don't.
Unfortunately, something as basic as lyrics is rife with legal challenges, and you can't just slap it onto an app.
Also, arguably, shuffle is not broken, it is working as intended, as there is an intended method to shuffle the songs according to popularity, right? Unless they changed that.
FTFY
This is why I kept all of my old CDs, Mp3s, and DVDs... One day we're going to have to boycott everything and it will be painful for those who only had subscriptions on entertainment & productivity apps.
I'll load up windows 98 if I have to! I'll do it again!
Squeezebox Server was awesome, and these days it’s way easier and more accessible to host a media server and playback in ways you want.
I think what makes it worse is that they've got a section of their community site where you can 'vote' for features and bugs to be fixed - why on earth you need a voting system for bugs is beyond me. But overall its pointless, theres feature requests going back nearly a decade with thousands of votes and all they keep saying is "keep voting". How about no, how about you actually update your damn platform.
Windows, as an example, is an interesting one in that you’re paying once for a license and it’s good more or less indefinitely (or until things stop working and are no longer supported), but Microsoft does still have an obligation to be pushing out updates, whether security or QoL, so I’m not sure that it being worse over time has any reflection on the license model.
p.s.: Nope, no viruses or things like that. Windows 7 is so old that it's not supported by botnets anymore.
I've lost so much more time to work computers where I'm forced to use retail Win 10/11 and have to deal with intrusive update policies than I have due to malware.
Having to nuke a few computers from orbit once a decade is a small price to pay for having systems that I can trust to work the same as they did yesterday, systems that never interrupt my flow.
EDIT: to expand on this a little bit, I think a lot of cybersecurity concerns are basically forced upon us by SaaS as a model. Attack surfaces become much smaller if you can just block things from communicating with the outside entirely. Not to mention the wonderful technology known as a "hardware power switch" good luck remotely turning on my SSD full of tax documents and embarrassing photos.
I’ve lost more work to forced updates resetting my computer randomly and making operation less stable than I ever have to malware (the latter being never in my adult life).
When Windows Vista and Windows 8 released, people got mad, and enough of them stuck to Windows XP and Windows 7 that Microsoft had to address it, for example by going back on the Windows 8 start menu. Now that they're switching to this permanent license, free upgrade, model, that is going away. Thankfully Windows 11 is very boring, but if they pulled off another 8 start menu, there'll be no real way for people to avoid it or have their voice heard now.
The biggest threats haven't come from direct external assaults on the OS for years. I expect a typical consumer device is more at risk from an out of date browser than any other type of vulnerability now. The biggest risk for most of us as personal users is someone stealing our data via a hack, which often doesn't require root/administrator access to the host system anyway if you can compromise something already Internet-connected like a browser or messaging app.
Of course old versions of Windows not getting updates from Microsoft any more is a concern on some level but it's probably a long way down the list for anyone who actually has a good reason to still be using the old versions. I know quite a few people with quite a few different and entirely rational reasons for doing so, though many of those reasons involve some other form of predatory business model by some other big company that makes hardware and/or software. (Hardware that was declared EOL and doesn't have drivers for newer Windows versions, software with some sort of DRM that ties it to running on a specific system, that kind of thing.)
As I said before this kind of vulnerability is still a concern. Obviously it's a much greater concern if you're talking about something like a laptop that might be connected to an untrusted network, which would be crazy with an unsupported or unpatched OS. But for a home user who stays on their own network it's probably quite a long way down the list of things to be worried about.
So I get it, they bought the hardware with a one-time purchase. The maker moved on. One day the OS moves on.
But the hardware company is predatory for not writing a (free?) driver for their obsolete hardware on a new OS?
Surely if the model is "buy once" then there's no expectation to return to the well for "software updates"?
The solution is, as you noted, to freeze the OS. Which is perfectly fine, as long as you are happy doing that.
The rest of the world deals with this problem by adopting standards. There are plenty of peripheral makers in the PC world who could perfectly well have followed or established standards too and then their equipment might be useful indefinitely through generic, long-lived drivers. In reality many of them chose to use proprietary protocols with no public documentation available instead. Building in artificial obsolescence is certainly a predatory business model.
Likewise, new CPU and/or chipset generations might require not just new drivers, but dedicated OS support, which in all likelihood won't be backported to the LTSB versions, either.
IntelliJ - JetBrains actually offers perpetual model along with subscription. That is the reason I use their product.
Postman - I use free version to play with the APIs. It costs me nothing and if it disappears tomorrow my development is not going to get disrupted at all as for anything serious I just use plain old scripts that are free.
Meanwhile, Sublime Text and Procreate hold up and I’m not paying monthly.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1password-7-password-manager/i... and https://apps.apple.com/us/app/1password-8-password-manager/i...
That assumes that iOS 15 requires a new phone... which isn't the case. Apple generally has an excellent track record of supporting older devices when they release new major OS versions.
Taking a look at the devices that support iOS 15[0], the oldest one appears to be the iPhone 6S... which was released in 2015. So you could theoretically use the new 1Password 8 on iOS 15 on a phone that is 7 years old. No need to pay for a new phone.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...
Except on the desktop which was updated to be crippled (can't edit items) and it advertises for the SAAS version with every other click. Which, fuck them. Their move to SAAS has done nothing but corrupt what was a good software company.
Spotify is more of a content provider, but even there, a few year ago I found it to be one of the best software out there and their Spotify connect was just magic. Not hey seem to be everywhere: soundbars, watches, the apps are a bloated mess that I need to restart Spotify desktop in order to update the like of a song that I liked on my phone. But this is the natural lifecycle of software products, something starts off as a great product coming to replace some sort of legacy monster, only to end up becoming the monster that they replaced.
Companies ruining their product lines is not really a good argument against subscriptions unless the company has monopoly like power and customers have no choice but to stick with inferior (these exist). If it's a sticky product, it would've been sticky either way owned or subscribed. Password managers are commodities even if it takes effort to move.
Main problem here is bosses want to go with incumbent big dog or has a relationship with sales, sticking the company to products that are subpar or going downhill. If anything subscriptions make it so that there are competitors chasing those dollars while being willing to help you migrate
To be fair, I sampled some passwords, not all of them.
For attachments, it took me almost a day, I found an official command line tool called lpass and modified the existing script to do what I needed, then I had to manually re-attach every attachment to the right passwords. A giant pain overall.
Apparently there is a PR to export password history on their lpass tool, but it was never merged.
I may be an atypical user—I'm definitely sub-power user in this domain—but everything Adobe has got worse for me since moving to "Creative Cloud".
Fair enough. I didn't mean to claim that everyone had a negative experience, just that it was far from a one-sided thing where these apps could be said unambiguously to improve. ("In summary, Adobe Creative Cloud is a land of contrasts.")
You can use the version you buy forever.
I think it took the wrong turn around a year ago at the same they changed the splash screen (that is why I remember it), after that the updates have been worse.
Done. Everything else is meaningless.
Also the mandatory syncing across devices is annoying. I sometimes listen on my PC, and don't want my phone to lose it's place where I paused it previously.
Also finding playlists by "humans" not algorithms seems deliberately blurred. Spotify wants to push certain content, so they've designed their service to make it unclear or unintuitive if you want to find playlists curated by people only.
Im also quite worried about privacy with their shit tastic hosted vaults and still use my own local Copies.
1password is always my first example of what goes wrong for the user when companies decide they should subscribe for $50/year to a product they once bought for $40.