Slashdot Mirror
How Many Times Should We Pay For Our Software?
An anonymous reader writes "An editorial at ZDNet talks about the concept of subscription licensing for software." From the article: "But the software industry is greedy enough to want to go even further. Ignoring the subtleties of DRM -- which snares users by glossing over the unseen ties between content and format -- vendors from BEA to Microsoft are eager to take up the blunt cudgel of subscription licensing, which merely asserts that, if you don't pay up again at the end of the year, your software stops working. The best way to deploy the mechanism of subscription licensing, of course, is as a hosted service, because it gives the software vendor the ability to instantly turn off the software-on-tap if the renewal is not forthcoming. Perhaps this explains Microsoft's new-found attraction to 'hosted everything' (whether or not it can work)."
I'm not deeply opposed to the concept of subscriptions. Disregarding operating systems for a second (I'm an OSX, Linux, Solaris guy), I think that people will have to wrap their mind around the new concept. We are used to paying for an item and owning it rather than paying for the function and service performed. If the price is reasonable . . . why the hell not?
Forgetting that OpenOffice is free, let's say you had the option of paying $350 for each copy of each release of your office software (word processor and spreadsheet program) every couple of years or so. Why not pay $5/mo for the same functionality and never have to worry about upgrades or new releases? Same with games and everything else. Why should software be so different than any other delivered service?
My main concerns would be:
+ What if the service stops being offered or the company goes out of business?
+ What are the security and privacy ramifications?
+ What are my options if I don't want to use a net connection?
+ What will happen to my documents/material when I stop subscribing to the software?
+ Will others have to subscribe to the software service to make use of the content/items I made?
+ Will I be forced into using an "application server" style arrangement or will I still be able to download and install the fully functional software on my actual computer? I don't want to be tethered to the internet for all functionality.
+ Will you charge me per-seat/user even in a household? Or can I still just have one subscription and let everyone who comes to my house or lives with me use my software as if it were not a subscription? I don't want to have to pay $20/mo for four people in my home to access something when I could just buy the software and they could use it for "free" without additional costs.
+ Am I going to have to allow a credit check and offer up my credit card number, social security number, home address, full name and other private data to secure an account with the software subscription service? Won't this make me easy to track in relation to anything I ever read, access, view or create/author? Do I really want this?
Anti-virus, yes. I see how you should pay yearly for continual virus definitions and things like that. It's constantly being changed and upgraded, and that takes work. But on the other side of that, your anti-virus shouldn't just stop working alltogether if you don't pay for the nth year.
Some screen capture, system diagnostics, file compression, etc., programs nag you every year, or even every month, as well even though absolutely nothing changes. Now, obviously there's almost always a free alternative, but someone has gotta be using this stuff or it wouldn't stay up for years on end.
Exactly. Software subscriptions can provide more control to the customer, and I've considered them for my own software for exactly that reason.
Simple thought experiment: I assert that my software will provide enormous value for a customer for six years, but my customer only believes that he'll get three years of utility from it. If I'm willing to offer a subscription where the customer pays 10% of the negotiated total price every six months, the customer will pay substantially less if their analysis is better than mine. And if their analysis is wrong, they are getting more utility than they thought they would, which makes the continuing subscription fee easier to justify on an ROI basis.
The difficulty comes with how the price is set and explained. For personal use, the price will need to appear substantially below the best retail price (spread over at least 3-4 years) before it will stop feeling like I'm getting torn a new one. Would I pay $10/month for a personal subscription to MSOffice? Probabaly. $20/month? Probably not. MS site licenses pretty much are subscriptions already, so they've already got a lot of data on what companies can tolerate. Now they need to see if they can figure out what consumers will tolerate in the way of rental costs.
Regards,
Ross
If you want free info on bugs subscribe to bugtraq. I don't know about Redhat or SuSe, but if there's a security bug in mysql is will be reported on bugtraq with work arounds if any or recommendation to upgrade to more recent version. Since moving from Mandriva to Fedora, I don't have any subscriptions or 'club memberships', and don't feel as though I'm missing anything.
Loose lips lose spit.
Subscription based licensing will encourage the release of products that don't suck.
Because if the product sucks, nobody will renew the subscription.
In the gaming realm, companies will be encouraged to continually add new content and improve things to keep the game from falling out of favor.
1: Bandwidth, it takes a lot of network to pull a CD image accross a LAN if you are deploying, say a new version of Office on a network, divide the lan speed by ~200 and that is a good average measurment of "cloud" speed (the speed at which your network head end talks to that of Microsoft or whoever over the public internetwork) and I doubt that the prices of OC3s will fall anytime soon.
2: Lack of access: It it bad enough NOW when the fiber between your small-to-medium size community from the backbone is cut, now imagine that on top of missing the important conferance call because the t-1 for the phones is down, you cant even type out the reports you need to do in Word! this would cause the business world to converge on redond with pitchforks in hand (when the managers realise that it isnt the techies fault)
3: Common logic: "We only pay for computers once, why should we pay for software 3-5 times over the 3-5 year lifecycle"
4: Road warrior -- Broadband isnt everywhere yet -- 'nuff said
5: Security concious people do not ever want their secure documents touching a server they dont controll -- even if it is "just" a temp cache.
Subscriptions would essentially force all users to upgrade to each new release whether they want to or not. Am I the only one who refused to upgrade programs like AIM--or, for that matter, my old cellular phone--because they kept adding crap features I didn't want? Please let us keep the choice of whether to upgrade or not in our own hands.
I think too you need to look at what the value proposition is. For an enterprise Linux, it's understood that it is a work in progress and that, to a certain extent, money in represents value out. In effect, Linux is a clever way for competing companies to cooperate on core infrastructure without having to reveal what they are doing to the competition. It has the benefits of socialism (large resources focussed on a task) with the benefits of capitalism (market driven progress.) A subscription model fuels that by providing a market for people to demonstrate their demand for the product in hard cash.
For Windows, the understood background is that a company has developed a product that is expected to work properly first time (this is written quite seriously, I'm not judging whether or not Microsoft achieves this.) For this reason, companies are expected to pay a lot for it up front. A subscription model allows Microsoft to screw up royally and still get cash while the problems are fixed, i.e. it destroys the Microsoft value proposition. If I buy a car and it fails within warranty, I expect it to be fixed FOC. In fact, nowadays I don't expect it will fail during warranty at all. The last car I bought (VW group) survived its first 4 years with only routine servicing - which is largely why I still have it. When cars were unreliable heaps of junk - i.e. until the 1990s unless there was a 3-pointed star on it somewhere - leasing made a certain amount of sense because the thing was really unfit for use after just a few years of company driving. There was no sense of owing a valuable capital asset with many years of good service in it, it was a case of having a service on tap.
By that analogy, I expect software that comes with a capital asset to be largely subscription free. I would not be happy if there was an annual licence for software to use a digital camera. I would not be at all happy to have to pay an annual licence to boot my PC or read my own archives. But I accept that I need to subscribe for FUTURE services - email, internet connectivity, to deal with new viruses and worms.
To cut the inevitable long story short, I once worked for a company that had one of those MRP systems that had an annual contract and a licence key. One year they screwed up delivering the new licence keys. For three days at a busy time of year, not only could we not enter new business, we could not read old business data. The pain was such that I made it a primary objective to win over the board and replace the system with one which did not stop working under these conditions.
Pining for the fjords
Like in everything, some suckers will gladly fork-over their dough for overpriced, under-achieving closed-source proprietary crap, and others will simply use open-source free software for the same result.
Solutions That Suck(tm) will simply go the way of the dodo.
The market will decide who will be the winner, thanks to the level playing field.
Well, I think the question is what did you actually pay for?
Software?
Software + support?
Software + support + updates?
Or another way to ask the question might be: Should we require the software companies to include the price of technical support and updates within the price of the software or should we let the consumer be able to pick and choose the level of service?
My concern is that if you start requiring software companies to include technical support and continous updates for free, the price of software will increase. (I guess this is what supporters of FOSS probably want to happen anyway)
In regards to your concern, I guess one possible to your solution might be requiring software companies to honor return requests if there are serious flaws in their software and if they require people to pay for the fixes.
Phinneas T. Barnum, Circus Ringmaster, had a point: There really is a sucker born every minute. So long as there are idiots willing to pay whatever is asked for the same software over and over again (warts and all), they will patiently stand in line, and will even beg the seller for a used, scratched demo copy (at full price of course). Since (in the world of computers) there are so many people with a 'wheeeeee lets go down and get the new computer kit!!!' mentality, their money is soon parted. Even when confronted with alternatives that offer all or more of the functionality at wildly lower prices, and without the bugs, they will rant and snort about 'well it can't be any good if I don't pay a million dollars a copy for it'. They equate quality with artificially inflated prices. At some point, you have to quit blaming monopolistic companies who artifically inflate their prices, and start blaming the clueless-idiot repeat-buyers. I wish it weren't so, but some people really need to be smacked upside the head with a clue-by-4 before they will listen (and even then, some will stay in denial, not willing to accept the shocking news that they have willingly allowed themselves to be taken for thousands of dollars over the years).
Couldn't you say the same thing about... Linux? How about all those free linux apps, or even some of the free windows "firewalls" ...wait, maybe that's a bad example, what with sygate's proxy hole, Kerio's fragment vulnerability, and zonealarm's dde problems that are only fixed on the PRO version. Yeah. Windows firewalls are bad example. Nevermind. :P
Slashdot - where to disagree, is to be a troll
Of course there's no guarantee that paying for something will gain you any better service, but at least THAT'S THEIR JOB. That's what they're SUPPOSED to be doing.
To bad they do everything BUT their job.
Why spend time fixing a problem the moment it is found when you can save it for a "Monthly" update?
Why spend time creating a monthly update when you can do bi-monthly?
Why do bi-monthly when you can do twice a year?
Why bother supporting it when you can suck another $200 out of people?
and to the first poster, when you lease a car it is YOUR responsability to make sure that car is in perfect working condition when you give it back. If something goes wrong with it you have to fork over the cash to get it fixed, Apply that mentality to computer. Windows suddenly has a new massive flaw, Microsoft doesn't have to do shit, it's not their problem it's your's. You are the one who bought the program (car), so repair, maintenance and upkeep fall in your lap.
Seeing as how Microsoft doesn't release the source code no one can make patches properly to fix their fuck ups. So how exactly can one legally fix this? basically you can't, so you get the joy of living with an OS that you can't fix and Microsoft doesn't have to fix (cause you are the temp owner, you have to take care of it). Also in the end if someone breaks it...does that mean Microsoft can sue every single person with a copy? after all we are returning damaged goods back to the owner of the product once out time is up.
I wouldn't pay anyobody more than $1.99 for a filet mignon. Sure it's tender, but it's also flavorless. It's the blandest cut on the cow. Filet mignon is a choice cut of beef for people that don't like beef, but do like to cook it too long.
more seriously though. I don't want to buy a subscription because I don't want every new version as soon as it comes out. If you bought a porche last year, do you really need another porche this year?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
That was the attitude of the US car makers in the 50s and 60s. The Japanese wiped the floor with them. You can make a profit that way, just not the ridiculous monopoly billions that Microsoft have.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Work as advertised? How much software do you know that comes with a full specification of how it is supposed to work? The only thing I can think of is OSS because you have the software and even then you're not getting a specification of how it is supposed to work, but only how it actually works. Software is just too complex to give a full specification of how it'll work to a consumer -- and most of the time for the developers too.
The point being that software may very well do what's promised on the box and still require a whole lot of bugfixing.