I don't think it's quite that straight forward. Software is undervalued - people are not prepared to pay a real sustainable price for it, while also expecting constant updates and maintance. Users who paid $5 for an app five years ago will expect an update for the new iOS to add widget support, for example.
Subscriptions better ensure incremental income for incremental updates.
The software us undervalued compared to what it costs to produce, but overvalued in terms of what it's worth to users.
Personally I hate the culture of incremental updates, shipping halfbroken beta versions, bolting on security as last measure because who gives a fuck about dataleaks. Everyone trying to build an everything app and sucking up all the data they can get their hands on.
The sad thing is nowadays most software „engineers“ or product „managers“ can’t even imagine an alternative to this.
Write a program that does one thing well and you don’t need to constantly update it.
It does though. Unless your software just play a perfect 440hz A. Even a simple homemade tuner (my first and only android app) can't run on new phones without having to be updated (sadly. I use an ad-riddled one now :/)
Constant here meant regular. Following android Api updates is constant work. It can also mean that the intensity of work needed is the same, but I don't think it's the idea there (if it is, I disagree with the idea too, for different reason).
I think his idea was that good software exists in a nutshell and does not need upgrade. Which is true for embedded, like the arduino that manage the doors of my father's chicken coop (ideally. The photoresistor disagree here when I think about it, but the software is bad so that kinda prove GGP's point). Not as true for software with complex human interfaces though.
I actually don't dislike the model that TablePlus etc use also, where my purchase grants me updates for a year. If I want more updates after that, I pay again. If not, I sit still on the version that I'm on forever more.
I do pay annually because there are real benefits with each release, but I'm not doing a subscription for your git client.
The auto-updater also needs to not notify me of updates that I can't get without paying. That's just spam at that point.
Apart from that, I generally agree that that's a decent model to follow.
I've paid for an MP3 player app six years ago and the APK still works fine, although the UI looks a bit wonky on a phone screen four times the size of what I had back in the day. I don't expect anything more than an update in case MP3 playback somehow breaks.
Maybe this is different in recent years, with iOS putting the burden of backwards compatibility more with the developers and Google now following suit in their attempts to add decent privacy restrictions to a previously unrestricted API, but I think consumers don't expect all that much from one-time purchases.
You'll lose market share if you don't add new features, as well as new customers if your app is falling behind others, but that's a separate problem.
On the other hand, the moment you ask just a single euro per year as a subscription, people expect to be up to date all the time. After all, you're still charging them even, so why wouldn't the app ever improve?
Everyone knows a software business does better with recurring revenue instead of single purchases, but customer expectations are also higher if they're still paying you five years down the line.
The best indicator of the value of a thing is the price at which free parties trade it.