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Sunset Clauses in Software
DaveAtFraud writes: "Ed Foster over at InfoWorld
has an interesting column on "sunset" clauses in commercial software. I don't have a problem with people who write, say, anti-virus software charging for a "subscription" to their virus signature update service. I am paying for something of value to me and it costs them something to maintain this data. I do have a problem with the same people extracting a little extra "squeeze" every couple of years and forcing me to learn yet another user interface just because they have decided that the old one looks little dated. Somehow, I don't buy (no pun intended) that their engine for scanning a byte stream has changed again."
I can't blame them. It takes effort to continually support old versions. This affects the bottom line. Companies(especially public ones) are all about making money. When it gets to a point where you are supporting people using old software and you are losing money, that's when you pull the cord. It's like Microsoft ending support for Win95. Can you blame them? It wasn't even that great when it first came out, 6 years ago. If I was them, I wouldn't have given people quite so long.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
A company can only be expected to support a prior version for so long. We develop vertical market apps, and support a single major revision back.
But what I'd also like to see is older versions being made free (as in beer) after a specfied time. DOS 6.0 and Win 3.11, old Amiga games, whatever. Since there's no real potential for those to ever make a profit again, why not help the handful of people who may still be able to make some use of them?
Is this trend to rent software actually a bad thing for companies? I work mostly in research/academia so a lot of our software is done in house and we dont have this problem (and the remainder's Linux etc) but I'd assume that both sides in business would benefit - the seller gets a constant revenue stream, no major bumps like the currently get with new releases (at least after Bug Fix 1 gets released *grin*) and the purchaser gets to see a fixed cost each quater rather than one off costs.
Ok, for the individual its not a good thing and don't get me started on the privacy issues of product activation but for a lot of things a continual rental model would be better and may stop quite the same level of boom & bust in the industry.
Well thats my $0.02 worth. Any opions from our corporate bretheran?
And the computer industry in general has demonstrated that the concept of ethics no longer applies when there is money at stake. Read the average EULA: you have to surrender fundamental rights, such as fair use. Worse than that, the developers generally absolve themselves of any responsibility or liability whatsoever -- they won't even guarantee that the software that you have just bought will do what they claim it does! What we're seeing is the culmination of an unfortunate trend. The creators of a piece of software for as long as they control it have a monopoly -- anyone committed to using their product is pretty much at their mercy. And that means money -- lots of money.
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This forced obsolescence is evil. If you collect old arcade machines you come across a similar problem - the suicide battery. Certain Japanese manufacturers had a small amount of battery powered RAM that held the decryption tables to decode the game ROMs - when the battery goes your cabinet is useless!
Why? Why? Why? If I buy something I expect it to work and I certainly don't expect the manufacturer to put a time bomb in it! Same goes for software. The problem boils down to the fact that you don't own the software - you just get a licence to use it under whatever restrictive clauses the vendor can dream up. There's certainly something to be said for genuinely free software - once you've got it it is your's to do with as you please.
--
Reverse outsourcing: it's the future
To be honest, I had not thought that much about "software licensing" up till this point, mainly because it seems to me that entrepreneurial hackers will always find a way around that type of thing. But when a piece of software actually requires connection to a corporate server to continue functioning (as with a virusscan program), this seems to fall only slightly short of blackmail.
Diablo II automatically updated software when you logged onto Battle.net. Imagine if one day, everyone who logged on recieved with their "update" a notice that from now on, all character classes but barbarian would be available on a subscription-based service only.
Ridiculous, yes... but the analogy is apt. People who bought something 4 years ago with a certain promise of functionality deserve to be able to keep that functionality.
What if car manufacturers randomly repo'ed our cars because they figured the engines were out of date?
I know all the arguments about how it's a corporation's responsibility to maximize profits for their shareholders, etc., but the only thing I see here is greed. I see people being laid off left and right while CEOs take home bonuses that would have paid all those salaries for another year. I see cuts made in quality and higher charges made for support while the price of the products go up. I see employees put on salary and threatened into working long hours for no extra consideration. When the fuck did money become more important than everything else?
I probably sound pollyannish saying that when I pay for something, I want to use it how I see fit. I know all the college kids are going to start whining that I should use Linux instead, but I don't like Linux, as much as I've tried, so I guess I just have to take whatever crap the corps feed me. I've been a victim of the PowerQuest upgrade cycle myself, and it pisses me off as much as it pisses the next guy off. The software isn't worth $50 per year, but that's what they manage to drag out of me because of their harsh policies.
But more than the sunset clauses, more than crappy software, the greed makes me shake my head. When is enough money enough? What is gained by adding another couple million to your own bank account when there are so many there already? In the end, you're going to die anyway, so at least make the world a better place rather than just stuffing your money chest fuller. Do these people care that no one likes them? Do they care that they're despised and all their plebs would ditch them at the first opportunity? Has greed outweighed every other thing in life? It looks to me like it has.
I bought a 1989 Honda Civic 12 years ago, and it's starting to get old. A bit of rust here and there, occasionally it has trouble starting... the sort of things you often hear about with old cars.
I wanted to replace it with a new car, but guess what? They don't make 1989 Honda Civics any more. If I want a new car, they tell me, I'll have to buy the latest model, which not only looks different and is more expensive, but would require me to learn an entirely new UI.
Somehow I don't buy (no pun intended) that the engine for building a car has changed again.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
As much as it pains me to point this out:
.01 added to the version number, I'm sure your competition has been working on better features in the meantime {evil grin}.
The days of buying a product for a fixed fee with which includes lifetime support and upgrades are over.
Even as cynical as I am it's obvious that particular business model wont work, even as much as I like it.
The purchase model is continually trying to be killed off and replaced with the subscription based model as this allows for much more consistent balance sheets - take the two cases:
you have X users each paying Y every year
you have X users who paid Y for our product and if they like it they might pay Z in the future, but only if they choose to upgrade.
Which one do you think sounds more palatable to the board - one off payments or regular payments?
Counter-arguements such as the model for products like WinZip spring to mind - they still provide a cheap registration with lifetime support and upgrades but I'd imagine their mission is to get at least some of that massive userbase to register.
Realistically I'd be happy to have a product that I buy then pay to upgrade every few years (cough cough windows) but i start to resent that upgrade cost when it is almost identical to the cost of buying a new copy (cough cough windows).
Also you have to bear in mind that whenever a new windows version comes along the UI changes and so there is a mad clamour to change your programs to make them feel like they too are part of this new UI. Products that look ugly don't sell well to the masses so it pays to keep your software looking neat, tidy and user-friendly.
If you will try to sell me a product and then a year or two along the line try to offer me a cheap upgrade (e.g. Paint Shop Pro) then fine, I'll buy if you've added new features - however if you haven't and it's the same product in a new bundle with a
What I really resent is this latest trend of having to buy a physical product AS WELL AS pay a subscription fee (most PVR's) - either choose one method or the other if you want me as a customer, as both simply leaves me to look at your competition.
It's a simple matter of focus. We cannot provide the high level of support we want to if we spread our support staff too thinly. Neither can we create new and better product if our engineering cycles are stuck frobbing and tweaking the old stuff.
Granted, by the time EoF is reached, the product pretty much just works. And no one is stopping anyone from using it forever. But a company can only keep its left foot so far behind its right foot before it falls on its ass. Ok, strained metaphore, but the point is still valid, IMHO.
On the other hand, sw or hw that just stops working (or starts extorting) after a period of time is just wrong . Again, dropping support (including things like anti-virus updates) after a while is just fine. Many products really do need to evolve. Using sw to hold your customer hostage, on the other hand ...
Imagine a word processor that, at the designated EoL, would only come up and say "I'm sorry, Dave. I don't think I can do that. Please see your software retailer for the latest version of WordFrob, which may well allow you to open your old files, if you hurry!". Or a mail server that, when EoL is reached, sends a message to the BSA when you try to send mail with it, resulting in jack-booted thugs at your door shortly later.
Anyway, though I think some of what was mentioned in the artical was iffy, most of it was perfectly understandable. Much of the whining, bitching and moaning here is just uninformed tripe. Though I concede that there are companies out there that really do their best to keep users on an upgrade treadmill, most companies just want to put out new and better product. I wish that at some point Intel would have grown a pair and pulled the plug on many of the crap in their processor design that's only there for backwards compatability. Not all at once, of course, but a sliding window of support makes perfect sense, both economically and technically.
#include // my opinions are my own, not my employer's and all that
I hope all closed source companies do this, hell I hope thay make it a 6 month cycle.
things like this will make OSS more and more attractive to the users out there.
I just love it when you see an entire industry slitting their own throats and bleeding to death slowly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Software companies from just about day one, have been doing this.
Call it what you want, a "sunset clause", a "bomb", etc. Basically the software expires and you must pay up for another.
The main cause of this isn't closed source software, but lack of competition.
It's the lack of competition that allows the companies to do this. Obviously if there was another software service you could buy from, you would, wouldn't you?
Even today there are a lot of small industries that buy software with these "expiration dates" in them because they have no where else to go, and can not afford to pay someone to write their own code.
To all you up and coming developers.... find these markets and make software for them. It won't make you rich, but it's a start....
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
I recently upgraded to Windows XP, hoping to get a stability boost from the NT engine in XP. I often work from home, and the multitasking required by my work had Win98 bluescreen as often as once an hour. I dreaded the upgrade because of what I knew was going to happen: I am now in the process of reloading my favorite applications one by one to see which ones are going to work and which ones are going to require upgrade in order to run under WinXP.
I couldn't even start the intall program for Easy CD Creator 4 before Windows XP itself told me that my version was out of date and I'd need to upgrade. Even the shrink-wrapped copies of ECDC at BestBuy touted a download you could get to make it XP-compliant (ie, it doesn't even work out of the box).
Music Match Jukebox 4 loads, but hangs my system the minute I try to rip am MP3. I can download the latest version, but in order for it to rip at 160K I have to pay for an upgrade.
I don't even feel the need to get the latest versions of these programs; they're jam-packed with extraneous features I won't use. I need to upgrade for the sole reason that I upgraded my OS.
All other apps combined, I'm running about 50/50 - half of my stable of frequently-used programs run under XP; half don't.
Granted, I could create a system partition for my old copy of Win98SE, load the program there, and keep going. I could cobble together a script of command-line utilities to do some of the same things under Linux (or maybe find a decent screen-driven app, but most are lacking in completeness and/or integration). Or I can knuckle under and ante up to maintain status quo.
*Sigh.* If I ever needed a kick in the pants to migrate more of my day-to-day functionality to my Linux partition, it arrived on my doorstep yesterday.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"
You have to look a little deeper for the real problem. As a society, we are used to selling *things*. *Things* eventually wear out, require repair, get consumed, etc. Then you have to go out and buy another *thing* to replace it. Some *things* last longer than others, but all are essentially ephemeral.
Even though the concepts embodied in a book are eternal, the book itself is ephemeral, so in the public mind it became a *thing*, just like any other *thing*.
Enter the electronic age, and the liberation of the idea from the containing physical medium.
Aside from all the copyright brou-ha-ha, look at the implications on a software industry. Simply put, bits don't wear out. They may become obsolete; their physical expression may wear out; but the bits themselves don't.
So how do you build a "Software Industry". Either you force obsolescence, so that what you just sold will 'wear out' after a while, and you can once again treat it like a *thing*, or you strive for a newer, more appropriate model.
From what I can tell, software actually began on a 'non-*thing*' model, with revenue largely derived through service. But once the dollar potential got big enough, the *thing* model came in and took over.
OTOH, now we're nearing the end of the exponential growth curve in many areas, and maybe there's a chance for a newer, more sane model to re-emerge. People are getting tired of the upgrade churn of forced obsolescence.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Posting as ac for a reason.
/. and become sophisticated enough to understand that.
The company I work for follows the support-subscription-and-charge-a-premium-to- upgrade-to-the-new-version business model . Since it was in the company's interest to increase revenue, they came out with a new whiz bang gui version of an old character based tool. The customer base ooed and aahed over the pretty screens and didn't realize they were being forced marched off of an ugly, functional and stable platform onto a pretty and unstable platform. Never mind that the new tool didn't support all the requisite customer functions - it was Pretty.
Pretty was worthless. During the last major migration, Pretty went down in flames. Pretty has been killed and now the company is saying "But wait! We've got Beautiful over here! Use that instead!"
During all of this, the customers have had two choices - stay with an old tool that works and the company has announced is dead or migrate. Since the company is about maximizing profits, the company didn't ever consider that it was in the customer's best interest to just incrementally revise the old stalwart tool.
As a result, our customers are pissed and our competitors are having a field day. However, even if the customers migrate to our competitors, they're not fundamentally better off. Our competitors use the same business model. Company knows that and the customer knows that.
Given what's happened over the past year, if I were the customer, I'd insist that the source be opened up. If the company says no, then migrate to a vendor that says yes. That way, if the old tool does 95% of what I want, I can pay someone to add the other 5%.
My guess is it'll be twenty years before the customers start reading
This is just my opinion as a software developer.
;) ) costs money, but hopefully the sale of the product makes up for that. The product will, most likely, change (hopefully for the better) over time but free support for the product should last no less than 6 months. 6 months should give a customer plenty of time to get familiar with the installation and use of the software.
I have never, nor will I willingly place a time bomb in software I create that forces a customer to buy another version of said software needlessly.
Having said that though, there is one approach along these lines that I don't necessarily disagree with. When the customer buys the product, part of what they, the customer, is expecting is support. Employing support people (What, you don't expect me to do this myself do you? I'm a programmer.
After the predesignated length of time - which, by the way, the customer should be made aware of from the start - support should cost money. Keeping your tech support knowledge base going, keeping knowledgeable, experienced people on your tech support staff and supporting older versions of your software all cost money. The more versions of your software you support, the more it will wind up costing you. Since these old versions don't reflect new sales, the costs have to be made up with charging for support.
Of course, you could go to another extreme and offer either free or significantly reduced-cost upgrades for life for your customers. That's always nice.
My sigs always suck.
-- Some people say they can tell the time by looking at the Sun, but I have trouble seeing the numbers.
"This guy was very insistent that if we did not buy renewals we would be sued [because] our current licenses would be expiring after two years,"
This example isn't a case of getting charged for tech support, or a company ending its support. Its a having software "expire" right from under you. And a long as software is "licensed" the customer is at the mercy of the vendor and that license. There was a similar attempted 'expiration' when a certain freeware video conferencing program was finally bought out by a company that had been licensing the technology. Problem is not long before this the buyout, the freewarwe guys released an upgraded program that was on par in key ways with the what the new company was planning to release.
Heres the rub. The new company tried to declare the freeware software that had already been released, "expired". They then began to try to pressure folks to delete, and pull from their websites software that was packaged with a freeware license.
Who know's whats lurking down in the bottom of those EULA's - I figure the big boys have inserted a legal ace or two in there EULA's for just such an thing, "This license may be terminated when we say so, and you must quit using it and burn your hard drive" and are just figuring out to keep Joe Customer from blowing chunks when they try to push it down his throat.
Think of a "group of people" brought together for one purpose. If that purpose is business, then making a profit is what they are all about. In the United States business schools probably teach as much ethics as they do in the computer science program I graduated from ( A 1 Semester hour course, as compared to 3 for normal classes ). Businesses do not exist to promote good ethics. They exist to make money.
This is so sad. "Hey, so we do bad things, we have no choice, we're a business!"
You do have a choice. Employees have a choice. Shareholders have a choice. Company managers have a choice.
I am Managing Director (that's CEO to you) of an IT company. A lot of my clients are reasonably ignorant about IT. It would be fairly easy for me to lie to them and sell them products and services that they don't really need, or deliberately lock them into solutions that it will be difficult for them to get out of again. It would probably make my company more profitable, and I know of companies that do it. But you know what? I don't do it. Why? Because it's wrong. When I deal with my clients, I am dealing with people. I don't think to myself "Hey, I can fuck these ignorant guys over and make lots of money." To me, and I would hope to most people, my personal values are more important than getting rich.
I imagine that Bill Gates rocks himself to sleep at night thinking "I've got all those suckers locked in and now I can raise prices and they can do nothing about it! What a bunch of losers! I'm the king of the world!" I know people like Bill Gates are highly respected in America, but they aren't so much in my corner of the world - they're seen as greedy, selfish ego-maniacs.
If a SW developer wants to change the rules, fine. But consider your "customers* " and what you owe them for your current prosperity.
Change the model all you want, but if you stop supporting/updating/selling a given SW product, release the old, functionally limited (by the developer's own definition, unless all the improvements are just window dressing) product as a free d/l.
Even Apple will let you d/l OS7.6 for free. No, it's not supported, but it is a perfectly decent OS. Users of old, probably free computers (read "the poor") can get into the game for nearly nothing. Apple reaps goodwill and potential customers.
It has got to be a big red flag if a developer won't release old, unsupported SW for fear that nobody will buy the new stuff. What's the good of your latest and greatest?
SW is different than a car or a TV. Users must invest time and greymatter to learn it's ins-and-outs; you compel them to invest time and money in your wares. It is economical to keep using your stuff; the money is just half the investment.
*customer- the guy who PAID you for a product, uses that product and is predisposed to support your future products with his MONEY. Alienate him at your peril.
I led a small, innovative Internet software company for six years -- long enough for several of our older products to be superceded by newer, different, or competing ones, and to ultimately be retired.
In most cases, when we finally discontinued all support for a product, especially a potentially mission-critical server product, we made a fully-functional perpetually-licensed version of the software available for free to anyone who wanted it, and who acknowledged that there was no warranty or support.
Our logic was simple: once there was no more money for us to make with a product, if people found it useful (in its completely unsupported state), then at least we were doing something good for our customer community, and hopefully generating a little goodwill.
I think for some kinds of software, making "retired" products available (unsupported) for free has the potential to be good for everyone involved.
-Mark Kriegsman
my mother has an IBM laptop with norton antivirus preinstalled. Thats good. You've paid for the software once. That was one of the motivators for her to buy the laptop. All she now need to do is to upgrade her access to the virus definition updates. Thats good. Now just recently her last subscription ran out and she wanted to renew this. She couldn't. There were nolonger an option to update order a new subscription to that version of Norton Antivirus. She have to upgrade the whole software package though all she need is the antivirus definition subscription to be updated. Something they did not say wasn't possible in the marketing. Now she can't and is running without antivirus.
She has lost her trust in the Antivirus company who's most important issue is trust in their service.
Similar cases are seen with small business clients of mine who were promised the same from the marketing of Norton.
They have been left out in the open as well.
Fact is that eg. the marketing of Norton antivirus have not lived up to its promises = false marketing in my book, and in law in Europe/Denmark it means a crime.
So I'm now wondering if we will see class action suits in America sooner or later knowing this is going on.
And just to finish it off.. Where are the companies strategy? it definately do not seem to be in quality when quality is defined by:
what is delivered / what is expected = 1
if the result is not 1, quality is questionable.
Once upon a time, software was primitive (PC, mainframe, makes no difference). Constant bugfixes and new/improved versions were a fact of life. No one ever thought the software companies were doing this just forose things would be free. In the PC world, you bought the base product once at full price and subsequent upgrades at a discount. In the mainframe world, you bought the product once and then paid 20% annually for "maintenance", which was essentially a subscription for any patches, new versions, and phone support. In this scenario, software companies had work to do, and a customer base willing to pay for it.
Then software "matured". Fewer bugs, more features than most people needed, not much of an incentive to keep upgrading. Y2K and excessive hardware/software costs put alot of mainframe systems into "legacy/do not upgrade" status. The few vendors who had mission-critical mainframe products really "milked" the customer base with whopper fees. Ask some of the IBM big-iron customers about CA (or IBM for that matter). It didn't take long for customers to revolt.
Today, we see this in the PC world. Many people are jumping off the upgrade bandwagon because they see insufficient benefits to justify the cost. Microsoft is a perfect example: they have a diminishing upgrade rate with each new release of Office. Why? Because the product is mature -- each new release is only a little better than the one before, and the customers are not really clamoring for new features.
Companies that have mission-critical PC products will no doubt use restrictive licensing to assure a revenue stream even if there isn't much of a demand for upgrades and bugfixes -- hence "Software Assurance (tm)" from Microsoft.
It always was and still is the responsiblity of the customer to figure out how to avoid getting painted into a corner and "milked". Look for competitive vendors, be willing to migrate to new products, consider open source alternatives. Plan an escape path for everything you do. The alternative is to get "milked" as a cash cow.