A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.
I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?
Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.
In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."
Only “Premium Connectivity” aka the internet data plan (streaming media, live traffic, and live sentry video feeds) is exclusively a subscription.
Tesla has always offered the option purchase the Full Self Driving upgrade outright. The option to subscribe monthly to FSD was added later.
Maybe you’re thinking of the free trial of FSD that new vehicles come with?
There is a lot of criticize Tesla for, but they aren’t locking features behind subscriptions.
In the past, BMW has locked heated seats, wireless Apple CarPlay, even software updates behind their ConnectedDrive subscription.
https://electrek.co/2022/07/26/tesla-ransom-customer-over-80...
> Later, Tesla started to offer owners of those software-locked vehicles the option to unlock the capacity for an additional cost. Tesla phased out the practice over the years, but the company still used software-locked battery packs when doing warranty replacements of battery packs of certain capacities that it doesn’t produce anymore.
Upgrading the head unit for a 2013 Model S triggered an error and reverted this old generation battery to software lock.
This clearly was a software bug and Tesla reverted it for all customers using these older batteries.
This has literally nothing to do with subscriptions (the word subscribe isn’t even in the article once). I don’t even think you read the article.
> He has the car for a few months, goes in and does a paid MCU2 upgrade at Tesla after the 3G shutdown.
> ...
> Tesla told him that he had to pay $4,500 to unlock the capability:
It's all in the article.
You can get all stuck-up about the word "subscription" but guy goes into Tesla for a non-battery related service and loses 2/3 thirds of the range the car claimed it had unless he forks over 5k.
InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.
Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.
That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.