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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

The typical answer is it funds ongoing development, support, and maintenance. The alternative is new versions requiring repurchase of a new license to fund ongoing development. As a developer I would much prefer reoccurring revenue as an incentive to keep developing vs having to build large shrink wrapped releases and managing LTS etc.

Whether $120/year is reasonable or not is debatable though. Seems steep for the casual user but for people that professionally do presentations, these sorts of things can be extremely pricey even on purchased licenses.

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There are lots of pieces of software where that makes sense, but presentation software is not one of them. Specifically, adoption of new features in presentation software is rare and slow because you don't want to be fiddling with unfamiliar things while trying to give a presentation.

I would be extra upset if a feature changed or the interface changed between practicing and giving a presentation for example.

I want my presentation software to have a set of features and then never change until I make a very deliberate act of upgrading to a new version while still having the old one around in case I get stuck.

A subscription to auto-updating software is about the worst thing I can think of presentation software in particular.

These are excellent arguments.

This is probably underused in user interface: the new version can include new features but give the user the choice of when to add the new feature as a new control on their screen or when to replace an old behavior with a new behavior. That would be a useful feature in itself.

By contrast usually, the publisher acts like they know better - all the way to auto-updating (with a new user interface, sure, why not) at the exact wrong moment. For example, you launch Zoom to join a meeting that started 3 minutes ago and what do you get: minutes of auto-update which you can't even override.

“Hold tight! We’re optimizing your experience!”

I don’t remember which online meeting software told me that once in the “oh shit I’m 5 minutes late” situation you’re describing but… man did that not sit well.

> I want my presentation software to have a set of features and then never change until I make a very deliberate act of upgrading to a new version while still having the old one around in case I get stuck.

Note that I'm not using the App Store for distribution, I'm using Sparkle, which means that it never updates without you allowing it to.

Also , if it's a dealbreaker for a lot of people, it would be trivial for me to make older versions available for download! (I keep them all, and this has come in very useful on some recent support calls).

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