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Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

Thing is, I don’t believe in owning software forever anymore. Things loose their value too quickly: what would an Office suite from 2005 yield me now, other than the need to run an ancient VM to produce files nobody else could work with? Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.

So using forever is off the table; which brings me back to regularly purchasing the new version. And if I agree to do that, I begrudgingly agree to the premise that I’d rather always have the current version than having to research whether the new creative suite actually contains Photoshop features I need.

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> what would an Office suite from 2005 yield me now

An office suite.

I occasionally write documents in Office 97. Yes, in emulation. And despite the emulation, it loads quicker and has no lag.

Some software does "rot" in time. But a lot doesn't. And we shouldn't be afraid of keeping things running.

Office 97 works on Win11. No emulation needed.

What a strange way to frame the issue. I am not afraid of keeping things running. Most of the time, it's simply not possible, specially when working with other systems and people, without ever increasing pain.

The world is progressing and software will be obsoleted. Yes, not all of it and not at the same speed (MS obviously being top of the line when it comes to compatibility and being able support it), but inevitably so.

It's not a strange take. It's recognizing that software goes to shit faster than it gains new features.

Continuing the Word example, enterprise users may indeed be better off with the most recent versions of MS Office suite, because of SharePoint and all other integrations in use. For a regular user, the best Word version to use is 20 years old.

FWIW, my wife stuck with ~15 year old Office version on her own computers, in spite - or rather, because - of having used more recent ones at work; it was only until this year that she was begrudgingly forced to update, as Windows 7 got EOL-ed and it was just simpler to download the current one than to dig out old disk images.

Enshittification is real. And so is the larger zeitgeist in software development and design, of declaring the users are idiots to justify disempowering them (whether through laziness or malice).

About the only new useful feature in the past decade, that became almost universal and that justifies subscriptions somewhat, is the "collaborative" aspect of syncing between devices. But note that the primary use of that is to be able to edit your work on multiple devices, which is effectively a per-application workaround over OS vendors being greedy and unable to get their collective shit together.

Some of the handy Excel functions (like XLOOKUP, LET, LAMBDA) are only available in the newer versions. Sure, they aren't universally used because of the inertia, but in my opinion useful enough to justify the upgrade.

You're right wrt. those new Excel functions, but I consider this to be an unusual exception - these all happened recently, so even if you want to upgrade for them now, you'd still be fine not upgrading for over a decade before :).

>Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.

Haven't played Dungeon siege specifically, but there's plenty of games from that era that still hold up, some even graphically. Be careful, or you're going invoke the wrath of the site's retro gaming community :)

Many, many people still enjoy Red Alert 2, which was released during the same time frame. The competitive scene is still active as well.

You know what is my favourite software license model? The one Bitwig uses:

I pay once and get $years of updates and the last version I am stuck with I can use as long as it runs on my system.

Updates then prolong/refresh the update period for another $years and cost something like a quarter to a third of the full price.

This way the manufacturer has incentives to deliver new things and I pay them when my live circumstances allow it without them locking in the work I made using their software.

Perpetual license. It is by far the best model imo. Allows the user control over the renewal cycle which is how it should be for apps that don’t need constant updates.

I bought 14 games last year from the early 2000's, racing simulator games. They absolutely suck compared to today's racing simulators, except that they don't because they did stuff differently that they don't do today and I miss some of those features and games for what they were.

I also routinely run tons of software that I paid once for, it works for me, and I never have need to upgrade. It rarely stops working with a new OS version, as far as Windows and Linux goes at least. Office 2005 will still export all types of formats, or I could print to a PDF, or I could even just send out an old school .doc file and most people can still open it in whatever program they use today, even if it isn't optimal.

Additionally, even if something only works for a limited time, I still got my use and money's worth out of most of that software. I don't expect physical things to last forever, so I also don't expect software to last forever. I'd rather pay once, twice, or more for "pay once" software that I use over 20 years than pay every single month, probably adding up to a lot more than the several copies of different programs over the years would.

> Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.

On the other hand, I fairly regularly fire up an emulator to play Space Invaders or Galaga. And there's no end of projects porting Doom to pretty much anything with a display and a microcontroller in it.

The graphics aren't always the point, sometimes it's the gameplay, or the nostalgia.

Why would software lose value? It's not a mechanical item that physically wears and rusts. What you're talking about is planned obsolescence. Those companies benefit from the software seemingly becoming less valuable. TeX is no less valuable today than it was decades ago. Why would it be?

Because „value“ is defined relative to the competition. If someone manages to sustainably build and sell a car for $100, a used beater suddenly isn’t worth $1000 anymore. The value decreases because I can get a better thing cheaper now. A Mainframe that was worth a million in 1980 would be worth about 10k as a museum piece now, because nobody would use it seriously anymore (even if it works exactly the same as in 1980).

Some software had a high value at some point but is pretty worthless now because there is cheaper or even open source competition now.

That's not the kind of value that matters to the user. Software is not supposed to have value, it's supposed to deliver value. And that is not subject to rot through competition. If some program from 2000 delivered me $100 of value yearly then, the existence of an enshittified competitor from 2020 that produces $100 of annual value for me today doesn't make the 24-year-old program suddenly deliver less value.

It can also become a liability and introduce cost, though: For example, if your old program requires emulation to run on a modern OS, or some file conversion process, or network isolation. All these things fall under maintenance costs that you probably don't factor into your calculation. Your "enshittified" competitor won't have these, and may very well deliver a higher net value, all considered.

In the point of the original comment, it absolutely is. They said:

> Thing is, I don’t believe in owning software forever anymore. Things loose their value too quickly: what would an Office suite from 2005 yield me now, other than the need to run an ancient VM to produce files nobody else could work with? Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.

The point as I understood it was: why would I pay a high fixed fee to own a software “forever” if I am not really going to use it forever? At some point, a subscription will be cheaper overall. Because people buying an office suite in 2005 for a fixed fee aren’t using it anymore, they can also use LibreOffice now. So if they had a choice between “one time $500” or “$5 per month”, the monthly option would have been better. Software not degrading because it’s digital doesn’t change that.

It's a mistake to conflate value with "market price" or liquidity. I have plenty of assets like books, kitchen equipment, and even electronics that would fetch a mighty sum of approximately zero on the market yet still provide me with enormous value (as much value as they did the day I acquired them).

If cars were like software then they wouldn't wear or rust, the only reason they'd "lose value" is if the roads or fuels changed. But the roads haven't changed fundamentally since the invention of the car and newer fuels can usually be used with minor tweaks rather than starting from scratch. It's completely irrelevant if I could buy a "better" car. I wouldn't be on the market for one because my current car continues to deliver value.

The "roads changing" can happen to software too, it's true. If the x86 platform became obsolete then clearly a bunch of software that is too intrinsically tried to that platform would be less valuable (because you can't run it). But that hasn't happened. In fact, we can't even seem to change the "roads" when we want to (see IPv4). Much of the change in software is artificial and created by those profit from it.

> If cars were like software then they wouldn't wear or rust, the only reason they'd "lose value" is if the roads or fuels changed.

No, and that’s exactly my point. A car with technical specs from 1970 wouldn’t be worth as much today as in 1970 because the standards are higher today. I wouldn’t want a perfectly restored house from 1600, just because it was the greatest way to live in 1600. Because I am used to stuff from now.

That sounds like the hedonic treadmill to me. The existence of something "better" does not reduce the value of what you already have. I have a 1080p projector. I enjoy it just as much as I always have done. You might have a 4K projector but that doesn't affect me at all.

This is not to say a newer model can't deliver more value than my current one. But that's not the same as saying my current model suddenly delivers less.

Well it is the hedonic treadmill, but that doesn’t make it wrong. It’s a real thing. Maybe you’re more modest than me but the standard of the time absolutely changes my value of things. Ten years ago the iPhone 5 was the greatest thing ever, today I wouldn’t want one for $100.

But nobody is asking you to pay anything. You already have the old one because you paid for it ten years ago.

Wasn’t the original comment about comparing „buying for a fixed price“ vs „subscription model“? Depending on the expected competition in the future, the subscription can be better because you expect to get a free alternative in a few years. So buying a software for a high price doesn’t make sense even if you get to own it forever, because you aren’t going to use it forever anyways.

Open Source software that enjoys continued development by the broader community obviously works differently; this is about proprietary software that will not be ported to new platforms, receives no security fixes over time, and will just stop evolving at a given point in the past.

TeX would not be as useful if the only version you had available would be one Knuth compiled himself in 1990, without the original source code; and the fact that TeX solves a contained problem, he intended it to be a „finished“ project, and was an exceptional developer makes this a good example to prove your point, but a bad one to counter mine: most software is just not like that.

To the contrary; a lot of software is highly contemporary, depends on other, external things, and requires a constant stream of security updates to cope with the rest of the world. This causes software to loose value rather quickly.

> this is about proprietary software that will not be ported to new platforms

Software being proprietary is entirely a choice of the vendor. There's nothing inherent in MS software that means it has to be proprietary. It's a pretty essential part of planned obsolescence.

As for new platforms, what new platforms? I can still buy a complete system that can execute x86 code that was written decades ago. And, in any case, we've been able to write platform agnostic code since before many programmers were born.

Not all software needs to care about the "rest of the world". There is a ton of software that doesn't need any kind of network support at all to deliver value. The only real reason for software to become less valuable is if the problem it solves goes away. This can happen, of course, but I don't think it happens as much as MS and other want us to believe.

Software that is designed well is able to be adapted and re-used for new purposes. TeX didn't have good support for separating style from content. But we didn't say "TeX isn't valuable any more", people simply built further tools on top of it like LaTeX and ConTeX etc. This is also why Unix remains just as valuable as it always has been. Unix surely delivers more value to more people today than it ever has done. It turns out the world really doesn't change as much as we sometimes think it does.

Even the best software has the world move on around it.

Has anyone documented the process of getting the original TeX82 source release to compile on a modern system? I imagine it would be an ordeal, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

> Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002?

On that note, the makers of the Eufloria series from back-in-the-day have started working on a sequel. :)

• https://store.steampowered.com/app/221180/Eufloria_HD/

They have a Discord channel too which people are welcome to join:

• https://discord.com/invite/unsbgkR23z

I guess you don't like the proverb "Old is gold".

I still play Virtua Cop 2, and many companies/individuals aren't tech savvy but still use windows XP/7 with Office 2007.

My point is that if we can't distinguish which things are our assets, liabilities, precious, interests and hobbies then we won't understand where we pay once or in subscriptions.

I'll choose to pay once and own software forever if those software are too good for the next 3 to 5 years (like how we buy a smartphone or other things in life) or are being updated regularly.

You would be surprised. When I still used Linux on the desktop, I stuck with Office 97 (IIRC) for a long time, because it was the only version that worked well with CrossOver Office (Wine-based). It worked well for a long time, opening other people's files etc., even as new versions of Office came out.

> Am I ever going to play the copy of Dungeon Siege again that I bought in ca. 2002? No. It looks unbearable today.

Funny, considering many games I play to this day are older than that.

In many ways, I think they look great still. Pixel art for example ages very gracefully.

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