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by yabudemada 1932 days ago
MS Office is a great example of this because they squeeze money out of folks when it seems the features added are minimal. The only interesting aspect is cloud-collaboration, but that could be P2P instead. I'm willing to wager most folks still use the same subset of office functionality: page layouts and fonts and such have been around for a while; financial formulas rarely change; etc. But yet, they are charged an arm-and-a-leg for the "cloud."

And then there's Amazon with their lambdas—trying to convince people that they should forget how to program and rely on a plethora of beautiful, shiny one-liners.
3 comments
deckard1 1932 days ago
MS Office is a good example, and like you mentioned Word is pretty much Word from 10 years ago.

But you know who else does this? Book publishers. Specifically, textbook publishers. Every year there is a new edition of a calculus or algebra book. So this is a business model that has been around for awhile, and takes a variety of shapes. Such as planned obsolescence.

Software has it easy today, though. They can just cry "security updates" and instantly have a solid case for the subscription model. Even if it is nonsense.

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mgkimsal 1932 days ago
> They can just cry "security updates" and instantly have a solid case for the subscription model

or they can cry "changes in browser and OS!" stuff that worked 5 years ago may not work the same today, or at all. Having a business model around it to help keep up with changes that are largely outside the control of that vendor helps ensure the value still stands. Or... new value can be unlocked - want your useful service to be able to handle that new video format, or compression, or audio format? I seem to remember something as 'trivial' as Apple moving MacBooks to "retina" displays caused a lot of problems and non-trivial amount of work for a lot of tools and services to be able to work 'correctly' with the new formats.

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potta_coffee 1932 days ago
Lambda is absolutely the worst thing to happen to software engineering in recent memory, IMO. I've seen it used well, but only a tiny percentage of the time. The rest of the time it's tortured and abused and the project turns into a sadistic exercise in forcing the problem to fit the desired solution, instead of the other way around.
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cratermoon 1932 days ago
Three words: Adobe Creative Cloud
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