[eterm]

Just as consumers don't want to pay the "true" price of food or the "true" price of clothing, we don't want to pay the "true" price of software.

You might grumble about $30/mo for something like Postman, and it's true that "back in the day" it might have been a $40 one-off, but that's closer to $90 with inflation now, and there's a good chance that would have only bought you version 4.

Then next year version 5 comes out, and you face a dilemma. Do you pay all over again? Do you end up staying on version 4 until eventually there's a compelling reason to upgrade?

SaaS solves that problem by keeping everyone on the latest version.

Software is economically expensive to produce, we don't do enough to recognise that, in part because of how much free work is contributed by open source contributors and how little we recognise how much work they really do.

[Nextgrid]

Counterpoint: what if version 4 is just fine?

> Software is economically expensive to produce

Maybe we just produce too much of it in an effort to justify our salaries and stock prices?

For all the software that's been produced over the last 2 decades, I'm not aware of any significant breakthroughs to show for all that effort (LLMs might be the closest, but they are down to sheer processing power rather than software itself).

My computer in 2010 was achieving basically the same tasks it achieves now - I can browser the web, buy goods online, watch videos, chat with people, play video games, and so on. My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.

[missedthecue]

"My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable."

Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.

- Operating systems have become MUCH more stable. I restart my computer every 3 months, it used to be every 2 days.

- I remember when I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it, and then repeating. I remember constant Skype issues around 2010. Facetime is practically flawless. Encoding has quietly gotten a lot better.

- Adaptability is amazing. I remember when software was only available on extremely specific devices, and now I can access almost everything I have from literally every device.

- Encryption by default is practically universal now.

- Seamless syncing. From version recovery to web browsing. We multitask a lot more.

- Universal file formats and APIs

[Nextgrid]

> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable

2010 is Windows 7 era, not the dark ages of pre-XP-SP2. I don't recall having computer crashes out of the blue - all the ones I've experienced are due to my own fault by trying to overclock the system.

I'm sure shitty hardware and drivers is a thing (this is traditionally where Apple excelled at in comparison) but I don't recall it being an issue on quality hardware.

> I had to pause a youtube video and wait for the grey bar to advance before watching the next 90 seconds of it

Shitty Wi-Fi/broadband/peering? Ironically nowadays I sometimes experience that too, except instead of waiting for video to download I'm waiting for some Javascript to finish re-rendering the page 3 times.

> I remember constant Skype issues around 2010

Again shitty connection maybe? I was spending every evening on Skype calls and to this day it's been way more reliable than anything I've tried since, thanks to it being P2P. So I guess if you were having constant issues it's down to the network.

[bizzletk]

> I don't recall having computer crashes out of the blue...

I think usually Windows machines crash into blue instead

[literalAardvark]

That's really just a meme though. NT has always been rock solid with just some driver related issues dotted around.

[GaryBluto]

> Seems like rose colored nostalgia glasses.

Not really. I used a Windows 2000 computer a few months ago and it worked like a charm: quickly and efficiently. Modern Windows feels leagues behind in performance.

[gt0]

Agree, I never used Windows 2000, but I used NT4 in the late nineties and it was rock solid, no less reliable than Windows 11, and of course, snappier on vastly lesser hardware, I think I used it on a Pentium III.

[gt0]

Operating Systems are more stable compared to early nineties, but not 2010. I was using NT4 in the late nineties, and it was rock solid. I had a Sun Ultra 1 at home at the time, and that was rock solid too.

Stability got good in the mid-late nineties for most Operating Systems, it's mostly plateaued since then, because it's not like you can be more than 100% reliable. My Sun Ultra 1 never once crashed in the time I owned it, same for my NT4 machine at work.

[neevous]

> Operating systems have become MUCH more stable.

While restarting some versions of Windows servers in the 2000s and 2010s to workaround memory leaks was normal, old OSes through history have been stable.

Linux has been around for decades and has been very stable.

Windows 3.1, 3.11 for workgroups, NT 4.0, Server 2000, XP, Vista, 10 & 11 have all been fairly stable after patches.

Win 95 and 98 after patches were stable enough. Win ME and 8 were crap, but Win 8 was more just crap experience.

Really most of the problems with Microsoft, Apple, Linux desktop environments and package systems could be categorized into being related to increases in complexity, many unnecessary changes, and just poor design or experience.

IBM chose macOS years ago because of the reduced cost to maintain them, while most IT professionals continue to choose Microsoft because the barrier to entry cost is low and because of familiarity, likely because younger people have Windows because it’s cheaper, they can play more games on it, and that’s what they grew up with, but Linux continues to be the primary server OS.

Little of that has to do with stability, and just because Windows 10 & 11 are stable doesn’t mean that things weren’t more stable 40-50 years ago. Linux admins for years prided themselves on the uptime metrics back then.

[_DeadFred_]

Netware. That thing stayed up forever on cheap clone hardware.

[lenmoren]

> … 40-50 years ago. Linux admins …

Note that Linux admins would’ve been in last ~40 years, but yes things were stable even longer ago. The problems came mostly with memory/resources not being cleaned up in C/C++ libraries and programs, primarily in Windows, because it was a little more chaotic with a lot of dev, a lot of differing hardware, and not as much oversight.

[sltr]

Not one of the OSes you mention were around 40 years ago (i.e. in 1985)

[lenmoren]

I think they were just saying that was the decade when microcomputers started coming about in offices

[noir_lord]

> I restart my computer every 3 months

Funny how habits stick, I still shut my primary desktop down at the end of every day because for all of my youth that was just what you did.

They boot so damn fast it doesn't really matter and I kinda like starting the day with a "fresh" desktop (same reason I clean my desk every night - starting work with a neat desk is great - I trash it through the day and repeat).

[rkomorn]

Do you rely on state saving things like resumed browser sessions, or just really start fresh every day?

[ForHackernews]

I start fresh every day. Bookmarks and git are durable, browser sessions are transient.

[rkomorn]

I'd call you an inspiration but that would be giving myself too much credit because in reality I don't think I could even convince myself to try.

[noir_lord]

Fully fresh everyday, it’s in the history if I want whatever it was.

I’m still fairly ruthless about not having a tonne of tabs open (also gonna be an age thing, I predate tabbed web browsers and for a while after their introduction you’d either grind them to a halt or crash them entirely with too many tabs open and too many wasn’t many).

[rkomorn]

I admire this. I'm also old but fell on the "comically large number of tabs" side.

[croes]

I remember that when I clicked a button in the UI and got an instant reaction instead a pause because some resource has to be loaded the cloud.

[ozim]

Restarting?

Huh I remember times when I was basically reinstalling the system once a month because of file system issues.

Putting computer to hibernation nowadays works and earlier it would most definitely cause problems.

[Swizec]

> My computer in 2010 was achieving basically the same tasks it achieves now - I can browser the web, buy goods online, watch videos, chat with people, play video games, and so on. My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.

The problem is that everything after `-` is a service. Someone needs to keep those running.

By way of analogy: You don’t pay Walmart a one-time $30 fee and expect fully stocked shelves forever. You pay a small portion of every purchase to keep the supermarket service running.

[Nextgrid]

> Someone needs to keep those running.

Those services are either paid or havd (much less obnoxious) ads - that didn't change. OSes themselves were paid, typically baked into the purchase price of the computer.

> You don’t pay Walmart a one-time $30 fee and expect fully stocked shelves forever

But I don't expect Walmart to get worse at its primary purpose of taking my money. Imagine if Walmart replaced its perfectly-working checkout lanes with a new version where the PoS had a random ~10s delay in between scanning items, would have a 10% chance of reloading the page and force the cashier to rescan everything, would sometimes register the wrong items, and would distract the cashier with bullshit "suggestions" while he was trying to scan items. That would be crazy right?

[franga2000]

I don't know about Walmart, but most stores around me did replace perfectly working and very speedy checkout lanes with slow, glitchy, not fully feature-complete self checkout. Enshittification may have been invented in SaaS, but it's everywhere now.

[ceridwyn]

> 10-20x

More even, for storage at least.

In 2010 I got my first taste of SSDs after I bought one for an ageing laptop and it was the single most impactful hardware upgrade I can recall experiencing. I think I was following Engadget at the time, and probably caught wind of the idea from there, convinced enough to part with a shocking $2/gb. In any case, I was blown away. I remember excitedly showing people (who could not care less) that I could click on every application as fast as I could, and they would simply pop open. Photoshop + high res photos open in seconds was unbelievable, gone were the days of getting coffee after starting something up. Crysis levels took around 10s. I was delighted by ~250mb/s. Nowadays fast drives are ~6gb/s, with pcie5 promises of ~15gb/s for something like ~$0.50/gb. The enthusiast hardware is 60x faster than it was.

As for the more common consumer side, maybe consoles? The Nintendo switch 2 just launched with internal memory access at something like 2gb/s and external memory support for memory cards that support 1gb/s. In 2010 you could get the New 3DS and enjoy ~4mb/s on the micro SD card as the nand was mostly inaccessible. So that's a cool ~250x faster. Some games released on both switch and n3ds (e.g. Monster Hunter XX), so it should even be possible to compare load times!

[ponector]

>> My computer today is 10-20x more powerful than the 2010 one, yet somehow everything is slower, uglier, and less reliable.

Imagine how miserable will be the experience to use 2010 computer with modern web and modern software!

I remember once I was forced to upgrade the old PC because it couldn't play YouTube video smoothly after they updated used codecs.

[pjmlp]

Eventually the company won't sell enough version 5 to keep everyone employed.

[ceejayoz]

Maybe that means we don’t need version 5? Companies aren’t supposed to be immortal.

[ixsploit]

And if a critical security flaw is discovered in version 4, nobody is going to fix it, and you need to buy a new product from a different vendor.

[Nextgrid]

If it's so critical, then you will buy it. Market supply/demand and all that.

But there's many "security flaws" that are nowhere near critical or just don't apply to your use-case for the software.

[anonymousiam]

You've touched on the business model for both Microsoft and Apple. Once they decree that the OS is no longer supported, you're forced to upgrade. Microsoft has even begun to play Apple's game by also obsoleting the hardware.

[eMPee584]

.. after being pwned, and even then only maybe. Unless.. pushy ads for bugfixes?

[pjmlp]

Well, when that OS version update comes and the company is no longer around, it is time to move to something else, or keep the old OS version running as long as the hardware holds.

[dns_snek]

That's the expected outcome when companies stop creating value.

[pjmlp]

In capitalism world where people don't matter, yes indeed.

[immibis]

This isn't really an argument for making people do useless work. If we'd just pay them the same amount but without making them do the work, it would be an overall improvement. It wouldn't be game-theoretically stable, though, and as we know, game theory is the strongest force in the universe.

[dns_snek]

I'm going to be the last person to defend capitalism as a way of organizing labor, but I think that a capitalist system where every company is actively producing something valuable is preferable to the capitalist system we have today.

Of course it sucks to occasionally lose your job, but in a system that's more efficient at allocating resources, this shouldn't be as big of a problem as it is today. I would expect purchasing power to be greater across the board and we would have a more prosperous standard of living as a baseline, primarily because labor isn't locked up and wasted in organizations that don't actually produce anything of value.

[pjmlp]

Usually people that are comfortable losing their job are lucky to live in world regions where finding a new one is easy, regardless of their age, or population demographics.

[lisbbb]

Every SaaS is someone's grift. It is what it is. Before that it was smartphone apps. The grift will move on eventually.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

"Just as consumers don't want to pay the "true" price of food or the "true" price of clothing, we don't want to pay the "true" price of software"

But software is nothing like food

I lived without software for many years

As a consumer, the best software I use is not new. It's old

Today's software is literally forced on consumers

It's true they dont want to pay for it

It's given away for free as a Trojan Horse to collect data, enable surveillance and online advertising services. It also allows remote installation of further software on the consumer's computer

Or it's not delivered at all but sold as a "service"

None of this is essential like food

Consumers will pay for food, water, shelter

[franga2000]

Postman has over 600 employees and has raised several hundred million dollars in venture captial. The reason Postman is this expensive isn't because it's very expensive to develop and maintain, it's because you're paying off the VCs.

If they took a reasonable investment and kept a reasonably sized team, they wouldn't have to charge for a curl GUI what Adobe charges for their entire suite of industry-leading creative tools.

[Ekaros]

I think VC money and expectations it brings has destroyed so much. To me Postman sounds like product that should be reasonably run with team at most in low dozens. And that includes all roles including customer support. 600 people sounds like world has just gone wrong.

[paulryanrogers]

Shrink wrapped software also often had cheaper upgrade packages, so you didn't always have to pay the full price each year. And before activation and 'licensing' you could resell it.

As for FOSS going unpaid. SaaS doesn't necessarily lead to FOSS contributors getting paid more than they would if their software was going into shrink wrapped products.

[gruez]

>And before activation and 'licensing' you could resell it.

So... nothing from this century? I'm not even sure how software without activation/licensing would work out economically. You'd either need something like a CD/dongle check (which is a hassle/expensive), or accept that one copy is going to be endlessly passed around.

[skydhash]

Bought a lot of licenses for software on macOS. Some notable ones are Alfred and Things 3. I have a license for two of the Affinity (Designer and Photos) suite and a not so old version of Parallel.

Most people don't really pass the license around. And it's not that much if you're a professional. But most subscriptions prices are egregious.

[paulryanrogers]

GOG sells plenty of software without DRM. DLC is much like the upgrades and expansions of old.

SaaS is fine for what it is. It's just not a trade off that suits everyone. And crucially it denies users control over the tools they're paying for.

[stavros]

The problem with Postman isn't that we couldn't pay the developer a living, it's that it had to grow and grow and grow until it could extract the maximal amount of money from whatever corporate user it could get, in the process losing what made it good in the first place (simplicity).

It's not an accident that my company migrated to three clients in the space as they all met Postman's fate, and we're probably going to migrate to a fourth one soon. I'm surprised Postman is still around, but I'd be even more surprised if it's doing well.

[fishmicrowaver]

Yeah sure, but I was probably fine with version 4, and it is now a massive hog of an app that contains all sorts of bloatware to justify its cost that I don't need or want.

[matheusmoreira]

> we don't do enough to recognise that, in part because of how much free work is contributed by open source contributors and how little we recognise how much work they really do

Well then let's start recognizing it right now.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...

> Why I (A/L)GPL

> Open source to open source, corporation to corporation.

> If you do open source, you’re my hero and I support you.

> If you’re a corporation, let’s talk business.

> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.

> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.

https://zedshaw.com/blog/2022-02-05-the-beggar-barons/

> To the Beggar Baron, open source's value is its free donation.

> You would never stand on the street and offer to buy the wallets off people who are about to donate a few dollars to you. That'd be stupid.

> They're giving you their money for free. Take it and run.

Always slap AGPLv3 onto everything you make. Always choose the most copyleft license imaginable. Permissive licenses yield zero leverage. It's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved.

[croes]

>SaaS solves that problem by keeping everyone on the latest version.

You mean creates the problem not know which version you have tomorrow. Great if all your tutorials are obsolete because of a sudden UI change

[throwaway894345]

Yeah, I say this as someone who likes the idea of self-hosting, especially for the privacy implications, but the economics of software just benefit SaaS for the time being. There are just too many efficiencies to keeping the backend in the control of the software developers. Schema changes are far, far easier (if you're not sure whether a schema change is going to stomp on real user data, you can pretty easily find out). Similarly, when all of the data is colocated with the backend service, multiple stacked roundtrip latencies are often fine.

And when you release a new feature, it benefits new users right away and you get paid for those features right away. You don't have to wait for a new version to ship. And consequently, you get feedback right away, which means you don't stack bugs on bugs only to find out at release time (this is basically agile vs waterfall).

Subscriptions are essentially the only sensible pricing model for anything with regular, frequent upgrades, and until we can make self-hosted software as easy and reliable as SaaS software (for the same cost) then we aren't going to see very much software distributed to end users (lots of software has gone the other direction though--e.g., office suites).

[ForHackernews]

Software is not economically expensive to produce. It's cheaper than almost any physical good. On the contrary, because software is so cheap to produce, it's extraordinarily profitable, and SaaS is even more profitable because customers keep paying over and over again for something that only needs to be produced once.

[unworkableideas]

There are definitely advantages to the SaaS model. I was an excited and early believer and I absolutely recognize the amount of work and risk that goes into development of software. I also appreciate the business model — the new version cycle was exhausting in a different way. But working as a reseller for some big SaaS vendors there is just a ton to dislike about the model and the bundling of the services. At certain point, it really stops being about the users and it becomes a game of maximizing revenue. I guess I really can’t blame them, but it adds so many levels of complexity in the name of maximizing revenue instead of empowering users with capabilities.

[danaris]

The thing is, while this is, to some extent, true, it has to coexist alongside the fact that many SaaSes, in practice, are predatory and overpriced.

Once you're providing your product as SaaS, the incentives for you to gatekeep features behind higher tiers of subscription become very strong. Similarly, the incentives to create lock-in become much more prominent than they are if you only get paid again if they liked your product enough to buy the next version, too.

And, in all likelihood, the extra money—the difference between "how much we need to continue to provide a high-quality product (including dev salaries)" and "how much we're charging you"—is going to pad the execs' bonuses and fund stock buybacks.

I would love to see there be a middle ground—where any piece of software that makes sense to have as SaaS can be provided as such, for what it costs to make it plus reasonable profit, at a high quality, and the dark patterns are disincentivized through regulation and/or through voting with our wallets.

Unfortunately, given the political climate we live in, that's not going to happen any time soon. So for me, personally, by far the best choice is always going to be to pick software I can buy once and own forever, and if I want the next version I can buy that.

[mkesper]

Sorry but I never understood how postman was a viable product in the first place.

[mattgreenrocks]

Agreed, it's rather insane to me. Basically seems like distribution trumps pretty much everything, sometimes even whether it's a viable business model.

I was grocery shopping the other day and saw Liquid Death, which is a brand of...water, but with edgy marketing? I'm told to "make things people need," and then regularly see rent-seeking companies held in great esteem, ultra-undifferentiated offerings such as Liquid Death, an API client with a monthly fee, and other things that seem to contradict the maxim of making things that people need.

[forgetfulness]

Apparently the whole deal with Liquid Water is that it's so people don't give you crap for not drinking alcohol at parties or festivals.

If they see you drinking water or soda off a normal can, people will feel self conscious and get pissy about them drinking but not you, with a flaming skull on the can, nobody bats an eye.

The target audience is actually recovering alcoholics from party crowds, and the product is pure signaling.

[mattgreenrocks]

Thanks for the insight. Actually a great approach for a rather commodity product.

[senordevnyc]

The actual quote is “make something people want”, and that’s very different.

[mattgreenrocks]

Fair. I doubt people want rent-seeking companies inserted into their transactions, but they want what's on the other side, so they just accept it.

[pjmlp]

We used to pay for our tools and not stick with shitty development workflows only to avoid paying for them.

[wmwragg]

My issue isn't specifically the subscription model, though it gets annoying and I prefer a one time fee, or the cost, I'm happy to pay, my issue is the lock-in accompanied with the SaaS subscription model. You stop paying you loose access to your work, esp. as most SaaS models aim for proprietary data formats and no, or deliberately really annoying and cumbersome, export abilities often only allowing exporting in their own proprietary formats "for backup", which are useless once you stop paying

[shagie]

This is part of why I'm completely ok with Jetbrains subscriptions - they have a perpetual fallback license. When they transitioned from the "buy a version, use it forever" licensing approach to a subscription model they added the perpetual fallback license (likely after some spicy feedback from customers).

You can use whatever version you've had for a year forever.

So if you cancel your subscription, the old version still works (and is probably fairly functional).

---

The problem that Jetbrains had before the subscription model change is that major upgrade versions (that you paid for) were driven by accounting needs rather than engineering. "Need more money?" - release the version that is currently getting built, even if it doesn't offer compelling value. "Got some neat things for the next version?" - hold off on releasing it to customers until the company needs more money.

The subscription model made it so that accounting had a stable and predictable revenue stream and engineering could release things as features were developed.

[skydhash]

This model makes the most sense for professional tools (IDEs, CAD, Office Suites,...). Like insurance or support contract. You don't lose everything the moment you want to shrink your spending budget. But for utilities (pdf readers, task managers,...), subscriptions feel like extortion.

[pseudalopex]

The problem was real. And update subscriptions are a good solution. But other update subscriptions allow perpetual use of the version at the end of the subscription. JetBrains products require downgrading to the year old version. And downgrading was not supported when I looked. This is a lock in tactic.

[AstroBen]

Sometimes. I always point to Jetbrains with their fallback license as it being done right

Buy 1 year continuous and you get forever access to that version.. or you can keep paying for upgrades on a subscription

..its also worked out incredibly well for them profit-wise

[CatWChainsaw]

So do you support media-streaming services being able to modify or deny you content because that's part of the true price?

[throw-10-13]

Postman is one if the worst examples I can think of.

Bloated product backed by VC’s scrambling for any return on their investment.

[GaryBluto]

> SaaS solves that problem by keeping everyone on the latest version.

Mandatory upgrades are far from a solution to anything.

[SirFatty]

What's the true price then?

[pjmlp]

The total cost is based on monthly salary of everyone involved, plus infrastructure price and office costs.

Now a price per box has to be figured out, so that enough boxes can be sold per month to cover those costs.