Consumer software is expected to be next fast-growing segment (1994)
csmonitor.com
csmonitor.com
Both in terms of the number of homes with computers in them and what those computers were able to do things skyrocketed.
The software business went from primarily being targeted at businesses, schools, and hobbyists to being targeted at mainstream consumers in a once ever opportunity to establish a brand name with people who have literally never purchased anything in this class before.
It was the most dramatic shift certainly that I've seen in my life with the adoption of the internet being second and the adoption of mobile phones being third.
It's been more than a decade since we've seen anything like those shifts. The 2010s feel a lot like the 1980s to me. Lots of progress, lots of it incremental, but no inflection point. I do wonder if AI will be the next big paradigm shift like Windows 95, the internet, and the iPhone.
https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac... does a deep dive into the reasons for the choice, which seems more to do with backwards compatibility with DOS 1.0.
Win95 wasn't built on a base that had security in mind. And when the Win95 feature set was created, the world wide web wasn't in that list. TCP/IP wasn't either iirc. Dialup access was the main onramp to the internet. MSN was supposed to be Microsoft's main way to get users on to the internet (to fight against AOL).
If you don't have internet access, where is your malware coming from?
Floppies? No wifi to attack your printers.
Much easier to deal with a strange poisonous floppy the few times that you are given one than the 24/7 defenses needed when your box is ON the internet.
Well, Win95 was hobbled with the MSDOS base which was mainly concerned with CP/M familiarity when first designed. That's why Microsoft was working on windowsNT.
[citation needed]
I tried out Copilot for months and didn't get much value out of it. The majority of my time and effort is not writing code, which is about the only thing an LLM can generate semi-useful output for. It's not more useful than a tailored search engine experience and it doesn't replace deep dives into text books, code, and white papers. Where are you seeing major benefits?
Maybe it's sector dependent? Maybe systems programming doesn't have enough reference materials for them to learn from?
Certainly not the "Clearly obvious difference" some people seem to be claiming to see in some places online.
Maybe if you're slinging HTML and JS all day it helps more
Meanwhile, the stuff it is good at filling in - it was never that hard to google it and copy and paste it in the first place.
I've seen this like 20 times in tech before. We're peak hype cycle for LLMs and the trough of disillusionment has yet to set in. During peak hype cycle for any tech a lot of people defer to the crowd's excitable opinion, disbelieve the evidence in front of their own eyes and express a level of optimism over future developments that is ludicrous.
The advantage, that actually is a game changer[0], is that it can do languages I can't. I'm an iOS dev, I've technically been paid to write JavaScript at various points, but the best of that was about 20 years ago and just before jQuery got popular.
ChatGPT lets me turn my ideas for JavaScript projects into things that almost work and are usually close enough for me to fix — turning me from an iOS dev into a JS project manager.
Likewise Stable Diffusion: I've done some game artwork when I tried self employed for a bit, SD can act like a mostly amazing artist that does a few bits (mostly hands) like it was temporarily high on LSD, and I can just highlight those messed up regions and say "do again five times", and the actual images get to me faster than a real human would notice a message on slack or email or whatever, let alone be able to actually attempt a fix.
As for music… I actually made a procedural music generator back then (for the games while self-employed), and while neither the music nor the generator is going to win any awards, the output was sufficient for the games it went with. All the various new music AI are way better than what I did.
[0] and now I realise the cliché; ugh
Rather than spending potentially hours to sift through documentation or ask around on the forums to find the magic incantation I need, ChatGPT just spits it out instantly and I can move on to solving actual problems.
That said, in a team environment with experienced devs, it would probably be better for me to just ask someone more experienced. Learn faster and more in-depth.
Also worth pointing out that GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are completely different beasts. If you were getting the devs to use 3.5, you will get bad results no matter who is using it.
I did this as late as yesterday. Type in a case, type in a variant of the case that is more or less symmetric, it fills in what you would have typed. Or you add a member to your object, thus requiring it to be tested. It figures out that you need to check this new thing in all your tests.
Other thing it does well is syntax. Some weird c++ template parameter thing, it does it for you. Little things like "what's that thing that makes the sort go the other way" it will know, and save you a minute of googling.
What there doesn't seem to be is an interface for that I've found is any kind of refactoring. That's still a form of donkey work that a junior guy can do, but you'd think there would be some way for the AI to suggest DRY candidates and re-orgs.
It's just that boilerplate is usually an indication of a bad design or a bad/verbose language. Both of it are painpoints that should be fixed.
But if that's not possible then Copilot is a good helper.
For example, it's helpful to be able to see all the steps a test case is doing in the one function, so you can read that and see what's going wrong if it fails. If a lot of your test cases are similar you might be tempted to refactor and put common parts in separate methods, often with unhelpful names like "assertResult()", etc, but now the reader has to jump about to understand the logic. Whereas this allows you to write the more repetitive but also more readable code easier
The way I remember it, personal computers (initially called home computers) always had a market among individuals with those individuals initially being hobbyists, but becoming more consumer-ish fairly soon, certainly by the early 1980s when the video-game market became a large part of the market for software for personal computers--maybe for a year the major part. Once individuals owned personal computers, they started bringing them in to work, usually against the wishes of the IT department, and the enterprise PC software and professional PC software segments grew faster than consumer PC software--until about 1990.
Video and sound cards became popular around the same time as the CDROM drive, roughly starting in 1990, and the combination led to a "resurgence" in software for consumers--games certainly, but also things like Compton's Multimedia Encyclopedia (1989), The New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia (1992), Encarta (1993) and interactive fiction.
San Francisco was the center of the companies trying to reach this "multimedia" software market, and some writers started referring to SOMA and the Financial District as "Multimedia Gulch".
It boggles my mind that you think this "multimedia resurgence" I just described was anywhere as dramatic a shift as the Internet was!
Microsoft's main tag line during the marketing of Windows 95 was, "This way to the Internet." I must have heard that phrase a thousand time in Microsoft's ads. I don't recall Microsoft making any pitches to consumers to the effect that Windows 95 will allow them to take full advantage of their new graphics cards, sound cards or CD drives.
I kind of remember public interest in those things--and the"multimedia" software titles enabled by those things--having subsided by the time Windows 95 hit.
> ``You're going to see an economic model where software companies become giant incubators for good ideas,'' he says, likening it to the record business, which takes the creative product of an artist and markets it.
I feel the big tech companies should be expanding into many markets by their sheer programming prowess and complexity budgets/capacity. They should try run the cost of complexity to zero and make complexity a commodity.
Maybe I'm in a bubble but I don't see much new desktop software.
I feel it is difficult to get people in the world to pay for digital things. £10 for an iOS APP???
What software am I actually willing to pay for? Probably software that earns me something. I bought Sublime Text a long time ago but nowadays I just use notepad++ or IntelliJ or VS Code rarely. I bought Typora, a markdown editor because I write a lot of markdown.
The same problem also applies to the web. What websites would you pay for?
Would you pay $3 for a HN subscription? What about digital magazines? Are there any newspapers that are actually worth it, that enhance your life?
EDIT: it just occurred to me that the web IS a digital magazine. But I meant publications.
I feel if you want something to stay around then the market has to support its costs at a bare minimum. If you only charge lifetime licences/permanent licences traditional software then the software has a lifespan because the company can only support it while their costs are covered. SaaS is the outcome of web technology, browser technology and business needs.
I just don't like the duplication of effort, every SaaS has to implement authorisation and authentication, backup, security measures, billing, subscriptions, user management, account management, an Android app, an iOS app, dashboards and maybe a desktop client. It's such a waste of effort.
What about a SaaS dashboard SaaS, where all your SaaS are mangaed from one place?
Edit: Saas As Code?
It very much seems like developers have stopped trying. The app store for the iPhone/iPad is broken and I blame in-app purchases and subscriptions. I feel that Apple should be VERY restrictive about what is allowed to be an in-app purchase or subscription.
Try browsing the apps available, especially for children, it's all free, with in app purchases or in-app subscriptions. I was trying to find a coloring app on the iPad, there's like one that's reasonably priced. It's free for 5 - 10 coloring pages then you pay $5 - $6 to unlock everything. Completely reasonable in my mind. The rest: $30 per year as a subscription... well, now I'm not buying anything, that's not something that should be a subscription.
I really want the app stores to start very clearly advertising that the in-app purchase is an unreasonably priced subscription and preferably require that the price to unlock an every feature. Most of all I want in-app purchase and subscriptions to go away.
My life already have plenty of subscriptions, I refuse to sign up for more. I have four streaming subscriptions, two news sites, online storage, password managers, internet, phones, service contracts for my car... Just F-ing stop and let me pay up front for things that REALLY doesn't need to be subscriptions because I can't deal with anymore.
£10 is outrageous when AAA video games start at $70.
> Are there any newspapers that are actually worth it, that enhance your life?
New Yorker, Economist, The Atlantic, NYT are all fantastic- I order print editions and don't install their apps on my phone.
RIP Gamestop
Like, Google does not let you search their app store and filter by cost or spyware. It is hopeless to find some good utility tool without knowing its exact name.
A simple text-editor should be free. I don't want to give some dev reccuring revenue to unlock Notepad level features.
I strongly agree it shouldn't be this hard to find simple stuff.
Why would they? But Aurora Store does: https://auroraoss.com/
[1] https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/03/20/mac-assed-mac-a...
That's the trick though, SaaS just keeps you hostage to the vendor and they can extract more value out of you. There are only two ways out of this:
1. The Internet becomes dangerous and unreliable for some reason, and we need to go back to treating software as a product for sale, rather than service for rent.
2. Regulation.
Neither way is great. It suggests distress in the system and forcing behaviors which are not natural to it. On the other hand, what's natural to this system we've created is apparently massive centralization in the hands of corporations, and whenever anything in this network of dependencies breaks, the whole thing falls apart like a house of cards.
It was also a solution to the problem of updates. You can't pay for continuous improvement with a traditional software product.
The problem companies had would be someone buying their software and then never buying updates. That's a product problem not a system problem. SaaS keeps the consumer captive in a permanent rental situation. The "it gives the customers a better experience" non-sense is false. One of the best case studies on this is Jetbrains. Sublime Text is still around too. It works. It just doesn't sell very well to SV shareholders.
It'd be a lot easier if they just said "we're greedy assholes". Since that's what it actually is. Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD. Updates were paid and it was okay because they were usually major improvements. There's been a whole lot of propaganda made to make SaaS seem like a net win for the consumer but this is by-and-large not the case.
But you had to decide to pay. Many did not. Those are transaction costs. As is downloading and installing software, something software running on a server and delivered through a browser doesn't require. Those ongoing costs must be paid for with ads or subscription revenue.
> Software had to be made right the first time when released on CD
But it never was. Particularly in a networked world. Perfect is the enemy of good.
SaaS isn't a fit for all products. Some software can be written once and never updated. Most cannot, and for that, SaaS is a better business model fit.
Many did not, when the updates did not provide value. The false belief you seem to rely on here is that if companies get regular stream of revenue, they'll be compelled to work on updates. Why? They get the revenue anyway, they don't have to work on updates. They can in fact stop completely working on updates, except to match competitors, when their products get popular. But even that's not much of a problem when you have a closed file format, like say Adobe does with PSD.
It's about money. It's not about updates. It's taking away ownership from people in order to be able to drive up profits. Consider how normal software sales works. It's the same way. You lease enterprise-grade software to a company. Every year, as if by magic, something comes up and "prices need to increase". They just hacked off a zero or two and adapted this price model to the consumer. I fail to see how SaaS is not another variation of "Embrace, extend, extinguish" where the entrapment phase of extinguish is taken to it's natural conclusion: no ownership. Worse, you pay 5, 10, 20 times as much over time. Many companies capitalize on the subscription being priced such that you forget about it. Also known as the gym model.
The only acceptable SaaS model to me is JetBrain's. You pay a subscription and at the end of that term you own that version of the software permanently. You may continue to pay (because you find the product valuable) but you are not required to. At the end, you still own what you paid for. The truth is, SaaS provides very little value to people for what they pay.
An example: in 5 years you would've paid for a copy of AutoCAD inventor in full + some just leasing the worse Fusion360 over the same time period. If you are a sucker and buy into Inventor's SaaS pricing you would've paid for 5-8 copies at the previous model in the same time period. That type of capture is called theft in other modalities. 9/10 people would've never needed to pay for all the extra crap they saddle on in order to make the price seem "reasonable". They exist solely because the can extort (not capitalize) on the moat they have.
One day we'll look at this model of owning nothing as one of the greatest failings of our society. It's probably an unpopular opinion here at HN but SaaS is an awful anti-consumer model. We can hope that somehow we define what "providing sufficient utility" means and start cracking down on this.
It can be both. There is an ideological purity one tends towards when designing any system. Often times, that aesthetic sense of an engineer is right. Frequently, it's orthogonal to what customers need. SaaS isn't a fit in every case. But it's far from a universal money grab.
i give the example of Path Finder, which is a Finder replacement for mac. there’s not much to improve there, after a while it became bloated. they went with subscriptions after many years of owning the software (and rolled back that later with an alternative after the backslash).
i don’t use anything that came in the last few years, except the compatibility with the latest os. maybe it’s time to stop this madness and try to make every software do anything and extract money from the consumer for things that are really not needed (yes, i understand this is my opinion but i bet you all have a similar example).
Or put on your entrepreneur cap and realize this is an opportunity.
It's kind of like a lion. Sleeps most of the time. But don't get in its way.
With the traditional system the vendor has to work hard to put up an update that's worth it, and then you pay for it.
Adobe were clearly struggling to provide good updates to their software for years, creators were always kidding they just keep tweaking the UI skin because they're out of ideas, so there's no point buying the new updates. So when Adobe went subscription-only, they did it under the pretense they'll be able to ship new exciting features every month. And of course... in retrospect they didn't. In fact their updates are even more minor than before.
Except for security upgrades, I feel like most software rapidly hits a point where the upgrades aren't worth it.
Even with modern DRM, the cost, complexity, and inability to completely lock down software installed on a device under the control of the user puts some companies off.
So now we have software as a service, paid for with the user's attention (ads) or we have software that just stops working if the company's servers can't be reached. (Looking at you, VanMoof).
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copy_protection#Notable_payloa...
Neither do I, thus the cautionary tale of VanMoof. Software is now everywhere, in everything from your toaster to the electric grid. As a result, right-to-repair means right to reprogram. The owner needs to be able to fix bugs, change performance parameters, replace things that break. When my dad was working on cars, that meant put in a new carburetor, adjust the timing, clean the points - all physical parts. It's different today.
Fast forward 30 years, and many software developers and startups actually think that their skills are worth so much. Sigh?
Don’t worry, the past year taught at least a few of us the hard way. Unfortunately when I was younger, I drank a lot of the industry kool aid.
Custom software, or software for a small audience obviously is scarce, but a word processor or operating system with similar complexity that can be used by millions, if not billions of users, should not cost more in total.
Open source (free) software would not even be possible if it were as scarce as, say, oil or apples.
In what world is software comparable to apples or oil? We need a different analogy.
Note that I am referring to commodity software (because that is what this thread is about). The reproduction costs are negligible compared to the software development cost.
Perhaps for a better understanding of my point, consider book publishing, or limited edition prints of art. The scarcity is almost completely artificial.
Microsoft and Oracle, for example, have grown to be extremely large companies due to this possibility of selling the same thing at nearly no extra cost.
If you think this is normal, then that's fine, but commodity software is most certainly (as you hint at yourself) not a good fit for economic models based on scarcity.
An extreme example to make a point.
A less scarce, but still scarce software product is one that sells for $100 or $10 or even $1.
Software can be free (as in free beer) and not scarce. But many software products wouldn’t have existed without customers who pay for it, with the demand level and price setting the scarcity.
Books cost money because quality authorship is scarce and people are willing to pay for "ongoing support" (sequels and future works)
The same goes for television, limited edition fine art, and financial derivatives. It is quite obvious that these industries make some people extraordinarily rich.
I am sorry for lacking the knowledge about contemporary economics, because this is obviously not something new. I was merely remembering some mediocre high school lessons.
Supply < Demand.
That is why developers are paid well. When demand softens, or supply increases even more, what developers are paid will change. The difference between software developers and other highly paid positions is that there is not enforced, artificial scarcity, such as licenses, advanced education requirements or required tests.
Supply can be limited severely by an early mover advantage, as the cost of software development can become extremely high due to the even more extreme demand. In a way this results in artificial scarcity.
Add in open source (free) software as building blocks, and venture capital, and things become even more complicated. I am sure that we need better economic models to avoid some companies to grow excessively big.
It’s interesting that those price points are sticky, like detents on a slide.
> “It's not about technology anymore. It's about marketing, merchandising, brand management, and shelf space....”
Just, no.