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?
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
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.
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.