Reminds me of subscription heated seats in bmw cars. The hardware is already there, you paid for it and you can’t use it unless you give the automaker a revenue stream on top of the tens of thousands you already paid for the car.
I really don’t understand the subscription model applied to a physical piece of equipment that has no digital maintenance overhead.
It isn't double dipping, in no scenario does it make sense to physically make two models, it is more expensive for no gain. The question is just how you charge people for it.
(Now subscription seems like an awful model, but a paid upgrade for some people makes sense to me)
A subscription fee = Drake no, that’s totally ridiculous and unholy.
I don’t know what the fee is but it’s have to be lower when aggregated over the car’s lifetime than what the one-time unlock would cost to make sense - and I’m fairly sure it’s not lower.
Second, your argument kind of holds if it’s a one-time unlock fee, but falls apart under the subscription model. That’s a total revenue stream cash grab.
Other software you run is billed relative to your MSU tier. So, if you run z/OS then your cost will be higher if your machine has more MSUs. A weird quirk of this is that there is thing called "IFLs" (Integrated Facility for Linux) which, when I when I first heard of them, I thought was a separate processor designed for for linux. However, it is not. It is actually the same as the regular processors that run z/OS etc, the difference is that is is licensed exclusively for running Linux (or like z/VM to run linux counts too). The reason for this is to enable shops that want to run linux and needed extra horsepower to do so, but didn't want their z/OS bills to go up because they purchased more MSUs. So, despite buying more of the processor capacity within the mainframe, it doesn't count towards the "MSU" number that impacts the cost of various software because you are using with one type of software vs another type of software.
so I'm saying it's even WORSE than being able to pay to upgrade. as it's more wasteful