[zingar]

It’s interesting to see my industry described from a different point of view.

It misses the key point of the economics of subscriptions: a single up front fee is a disincentive to the constant maintenance that delivers the single biggest piece of value to the customer, that being the continued existence of the software. Instead it creates an incentive to add lines to the marketing BS on this year’s release and prioritises new customers over existing.

[adrian_b]

A subscription fee required for receiving updates for an application that you own seems fine.

A subscription fee required to avoid that the application you are using will be disabled remotely seems unacceptable.

The latter certainly does not create any incentive for the software vendor to improve the quality of their product and to fix its bugs.

On the contrary, the latter business model provides a stream of revenue for no work, so the vendor is encouraged to stop any maintenance work for their product, much more than when the customer makes a one-time payment. This has been amply demonstrated by the behavior of Adobe, Broadcom and the like.

[Closi]

The second point just strands parts of customers on outdated versions - remember that time when loads of companies were running Excel 1997 or 2003 to their deaths to save costs?

Then anyone on Excel 2013 couldn't use any new features because they weren't backwards-compatible 10 years to some public sector organizations that refused to update.

Office 365 is so much better, I can actually send someone a file that uses LAMBDAs or uses PowerQuery and expect them to be able to open it.

[troyvit]

> The second point just strands parts of customers on outdated versions - remember that time when loads of companies were running Excel 1997 or 2003 to their deaths to save costs?

I do fondly remember keeping a floppy (!) of Word 5.1 in a safe place over the summer in college because Word 6.0 was such a steaming pile of crap.

[layer8]

You can’t expect that. A significant number of people are still using Office 2016/2019/2021 (and there is a 2024 upcoming). Personally I don’t plan to switch to Microsoft 365.

People in general don’t want their software to change continuously.

[Closi]

I agree that people probably don't want to pay continuously, but i'm not convinced that people in general don't want automatic/ongoing product updates.