'It's Not You. Software Has Gotten Far More Expensive' (capiche.com) 145
A SaaS "price transparency" site at Capiche.com writes that "It's not just you: software has gotten far more expensive," citing their survey of 100 business applications.
Software prices went up 62% on average over the past decade -- over three times faster than inflation, outpacing even rent and healthcare. Today's iPhone XR, by comparison, costs 25% more than 2009's iPhone 3GS (or 67% more if comparing the iPhone XS). Some apps went up far more drastically, though even if you removed the ones whose price went up more than 200%, software still on average went up 42% -- or over double the average inflation rate... [I]f you paid $9.99 a month for business software in 2009, there's a good chance you pay $16.18 for it today -- if not $19.78.
Of the hundred business apps we surveyed, sixty-seven raised their prices an average of 98% in the decade between 2009 and 2019. Fourteen lowered their prices an average of 28%, and nineteen apps kept their prices the same... Notably, if the apps you used raised their prices, odds are their prices nearly doubled over the past decade. That's perhaps even more noticeable than if all of your apps went up a few percent...
in an industry where we were long accustomed to getting more for less -- an industry where that still holds for most physical products -- software has gone up in price three times faster than inflation. That's hard to ignore.
All of their data is available in a public spreadsheet on Google Sheets, and they ultimately argue that today free "most often a strategy, a means not an end. Apple gives away software to sell devices; Google gives away storage to get you to store more so you'll upgrade."
Of the hundred business apps we surveyed, sixty-seven raised their prices an average of 98% in the decade between 2009 and 2019. Fourteen lowered their prices an average of 28%, and nineteen apps kept their prices the same... Notably, if the apps you used raised their prices, odds are their prices nearly doubled over the past decade. That's perhaps even more noticeable than if all of your apps went up a few percent...
in an industry where we were long accustomed to getting more for less -- an industry where that still holds for most physical products -- software has gone up in price three times faster than inflation. That's hard to ignore.
All of their data is available in a public spreadsheet on Google Sheets, and they ultimately argue that today free "most often a strategy, a means not an end. Apple gives away software to sell devices; Google gives away storage to get you to store more so you'll upgrade."
Loss leaders have been around forever. (Score:4, Informative)
Free apps and services are the $2 milk that's way at the back of the grocery store and generally sells out by noon -- a loss leader to get you in the door so you have to walk by the candy and potato chips on the way out.
You Can DRINK 2 Dollar Milk... (Score:2)
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The "Free" apps are often "free" for base options. That's how they get you. If you look at the revenue generated by the top apps in the app store right now almost all of them are F2P.
Re:Loss leaders have been around forever. (Score:5, Insightful)
I usually can't tell, normally I don't get further than "they want WHAT permissions?"
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Same. Any app, whether desktop or mobile, that artificially wants permissions beyond the scope of what the software is expected to do is out. The biggest offenders being automatic updates/update checks, spyware/telemetry, location, camera, microphone, contacts, advertisements, in app purchases/crippled functionality/nags and elevated (admin) permissions.
This is why I get most of my software from open source repositories and all of my games from GOG.com. Most other software developers these days are nosy, en
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And then it turns out, if I just refuse whatever isn't what I want, I eventually find an app repository where everything is free, and if I don't like the permissions I can download the code and change them before installing.
People say all this stuff about having cake and also eating cake, I say, learn how to bake.
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I really wish there were a payment system that worked with F-Droid. I know it sounds trivial, but the NFC based payment systems are one of the few ways to pay for fuel without getting your card skimmed at a pump. GPay won't work for obvious reasons.
Enterprise Versions have also been around forever (Score:4, Interesting)
Some of the examples they gave were also of applications raising their prices because they increased the services rendered. They gave one example of software going from $9.99 per month to $11.99 per month, but with four times more storage offered. Saying that is a 20% price increase is disingenuous. You could just as easily say it was a 70% price drop per GB of storage offered.
Our company's Salesforce bill has more than doubled in the past five years, but we went from just using their CRM to also building client portals, utilizing their Marketing Cloud, and adding Mulesoft as part of our integration stack. So does that count as a 100% price increase, even if our per license cost for CRM licenses dropped?
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It could be less if it wasn't subscription based. Hard to tell. I know a lot of people are doing things "in the cloud" because that's the latest thing to do. But it's like leasing a car every 2 years vs paying once and running it for ten or twenty for maintenance fees only (I just got a new car after 20 years because it finally started to cost more than minimal maintenance costs... I think I saved at least a few times the cost of my new car doing it this way).
Depending on circumstance, it may be cheaper, b
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Ah shite, I'd forgotten Salesforce.com had bought Mulesoft.
How's it doing post-acquisition? Are they improving it or just using it as glue between their other acquisitions?
These costs are not significant (Score:3, Insightful)
These costs are not significant. Does it really matter if your $5/mth fee went to $15/mth when the human using the app is earning $3,000/mth or more? Only a single app surveyed was over $1,000/mth.
I thought they were going to say expensive things like the price of an Oracle DB licenses went way up, which it did.
Re:These costs are not significant (Score:5, Interesting)
Does it really matter if your $5/mth fee went to $15/mth when the human using the app is earning $3,000/mth or more?
Indeed. My wife runs an app business, and I had a hard time convincing her that if she doubled her prices she would lose 20-30% of her customers, but make far more profit on those that remained.
So she ran an A-B test with the higher price, and sure enough, her revenue went up by 50% while support costs declined. Now she is thinking of cranking the price up even higher.
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Re: These costs are not significant (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a delicate balance between market share (part of a long term plan) and profit.
Traditionally, this is true. But not so much in the app business.
Her revenue is 95% iOS, and 5% Android. In the Apple App Store, Apple takes a 30% cut of revenue, and they list apps to maximize their own profit. So if an app sells for $14.99, and a competitor sells for $4.99, it will still be listed higher even if it is half as likely to sell, because the expected profit for Apple ($4.50 vs $1.50) is more than twice as much.
So if you price to maximize your own profit, you will ALSO maximize Apple's profit, and thus your visibility to potential customers.
This may be different if you do your own marketing outside the App Store, but she doesn't. She tried Google and FB ads, and they were not cost effective.
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Re: These costs are not significant (Score:5, Informative)
The higher the price, the more visible the app.
No. This is wrong.
The higher the PROFIT, the more visible the app.
Profit = (price) * (probability of sale)
If you double the price, and sell 30% fewer, Apple's profit is (2*0.7) = 140% of what it was before, so higher visibility.
If you double the price, and sell 60% fewer, Apple's profit is (2*0.4) = 80% of what it was before, so lower visibility.
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The only downside
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I believe it costs 80/year to put an app in the app store. So they do have the resources. Voting won't protect the app store against malware. Bonzai buddy and weatherbug were both very popular.
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My Stepfather owns a landscaping business, he sometimes complains about certain customers. I told him the same thing. Jack the prices up on your most pain in the ass customers, if they leave you win, if they stay you win.
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This called "discouragement pricing", mostly meant to discourage customers from doing business with you, usually troublesome ones that are less profitable. In theory the discouragement price should represent the extra costs associated with taking their business.
I work at a small SMB MSP and we have a category of customers who buy the least amount of services, often avoiding having us implement some technologies because they think they can do it themselves. Invariably they have problems and demand immediat
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Re: These costs are not significant (Score:2)
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Do people in developing countries actually pay for apps?
In most developing countries, piracy and counterfeiting is rampant, with very little recourse from the rights holders.
Often, developers make huge discounts for these countries. If anything just so that they end up with an official product rather than some dodgy stuff that hurt their image. Even letting therm know that piracy is not the only way is a win.
In the west, there is some of that. Things may have changed but even though a lot of amateurs used P
Re:These costs are not significant (Score:5, Insightful)
The thing that matters to me is that we're on this damn subscription treadmill at all. Buying software used to be a one-and-done purchase and then the license was yours. Now it's an annual fee for far too many things. For example, yes Office 365 is ONLY $79 a year, but it's every year. I *bought* a copy of Office 2007 for $200 back in 2006 and I still use it to this day because it does the job and it's paid for.
If I didn't have that physical copy (ANOTHER thing that's becoming more scarce) then I'd either be shelling out annually or would have switched to Libre Office - which is OK as well, but there are still some annoying workflow differences. Plus, the SaaS model for software on your own machine constantly gets updates and things change without you expecting it, or some features just vanish. To be fair, some are added as well, but when something disappears on you when you least expect it and you need it, it's a pain in the ass big time.
Re: These costs are not significant (Score:2)
Going to a SaaS release cycle provides a highly desireable predictable and stable income to budget for and budget against. $79 per year is probably more than what the software is worth given what people were paying previously, being it works out to everybody ugrading to the latest version at every release rather than a percentage running a specific release for a decade or more or $30 per year
Re: These costs are not significant (Score:3)
SaaS software sucks. Constant buggy releases, ever changing UI, terrible documentation, expensive as fuck, poor support SEO, et al.
When you can't charge more for support, you actually have to do a good job up front. SaaS is designed to produce crap so you string along users for support. No thanks.
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> Software takes a long time to write and produce, and incurs support costs after release in an always online world.
I've been working in software development since the early 90s, started in packaged software and currently work for the SaaS side of things. The SaaS product I work on is one of those that would be practically impossible to "package" to end users, as it's pretty much literally a real-time service. That's where SaaS makes sense, not on 99% of the software packages and apps out there.
> Go
Re: These costs are not significant (Score:4, Informative)
> The company are the end users.
No, the company is the company selling the subscriptions.
> When you're making software purchases a monthly cost per user is much easier to budget for at (using Photoshop as an example) $10 per month than it is $700 every 2 years
But that's a false dichotomy. Most people and companies weren't re-buying Photoshop every two years, especially if they only used many of the basic features. Plus, it's actually $20 a month now - paid in advance. There's the other problem with subscription vs one time purchase. There's nothing to do but hold your nose and keep the subscription you need to use when the price slowly creeps up. With one-time purchases they don't come back to you later and tell you the price went up so you have to settle up again.
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You're correct. What we're buying are:
1) the security updates to products, plus any functionality also thrown in, and
2) compatibility with anyone else we may need to share information with.
Security especially can easily be worth the cost.
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> What we're buying are:
> 1) the security updates to products, plus any functionality also thrown in, and
Remember the halcyon days old yore when companies who made insecure products were remorseful (not really but they acted that way) and provided fixes to their carelessness as a courtesy for free? Now it's a revenue stream.
> 2) compatibility with anyone else we may need to share information with.
The cynic in me would say that point 2 compels EVERYONE who wants to "share information" to also be on
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Software I used to use at work ran something like $1200 originally, and upgrades (every couple years) were around $800. Then they switched to a subscription model--$2k a year. Once the new features of the subscription version were no longer as useful I just went back to my old version.
Re:These costs are not significant (Score:4, Informative)
If I didn't have that physical copy (ANOTHER thing that's becoming more scarce) then I'd either be shelling out annually or would have switched to Libre Office
Just a heads up, the office 2007 activation servers are scheduled to be taken offline this December (2019)
There are tools out there to let you backup your current activation files, if you don't have an HD image or similar for where you have it installed.
But for new OS installs the physical copy alone won't be enough, without one of those "other" programs typically reserved for software one hasn't purchased and has a receipt for.
If you have any files in an in between limbo state of compatibility needing both MS office and libre office to fully convert, it might be a good time.
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Ah, good to know. Fantastic.. Thanks.
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The subscription treadmill is great for businesses who can move stuff to OpEx and not CapEx. It is great for businesses where people happily pay $10 a month for what was a $50 app previously. The people that get the short end of the stick are everyone else. To boot, if something happens in an economic downturn, you have to keep paying, or lose access to everything.
What will make life very interesting is how businesses will fail when they can't afford to keep their cloud services going, and without access
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> What will make life very interesting is how businesses will fail when they can't afford to keep their cloud services going, and without access to their data, they are just plain dead in the water.
Absolutely a very interesting point. I have a lot of other problems with running things "on the cloud" you don't own as it is, this is another one I hadn't considered until now. For most businesses that are small, their cloud costs will be (relatively) small as well - for now. Fast forward 10-15 years thoug
Re: These costs are not significant (Score:2)
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If you have in-house CRM software that kicks the llama's ass, perhaps assign people to fork a variant for public consumption? There are a lot of people who would kill for free or reasonably priced stuff.
Re: These costs are not significant (Score:2)
I don't care if there's a free alternative as much as I care there's a purchase alternative.
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The purchase model is in decline because people want to pay once and then they expect to receive patches forever and get support for new OS releases. This forces the developer to have to support all of these older versions and that is just not a sustainable model for the software developer. Many apps now have a cloud component which incurs ongoing expenses. It be better in the long run to match revenues and expenses. The month fees keep everyone on the same, up to date version.
Re: These costs are not significant (Score:5, Informative)
You sound like a developer who lacks a mirror.
The purchase model is in decline because people want to pay once and then they expect to receive patches forever
No. I hear this a lot, and it's wrong because the people who are saying it lose sight of what's really expected:
A product that works as advertised.
In the pre-broadband days, this was generally done with good QA testing. Developers would have their product tested as best as they could, because patching commonly involved mailing floppies *and* support calls getting far higher as a result of those mailed floppies, so it made sense to do good QA.
Now, patching is effectively free, so it's far more common to see software written that works in the most common cases, then patch as bugs are found and patches can be written, with far less QA prior to release.
Now, to be fair, I will admit two big things. First, there was far less hardware and OS combinations to test against at the time. There may not be an infinite number of hardware/software combinations in the world, but I will understand that 'good QA' is a far bigger undertaking than it used to be.
I'll also admit that programs have gotten way more complex as well. I'd imagine that a skilled developer could familiarize themselves with the source code of WordPerfect 5.1 in a week or two. I sincerely doubt an equally skilled developer could do the same with LibreOffice in the same time frame; indeed it would likely take months to do so, even if one limited themselves just to Writer. Far more complex software is just going to have far more challenges to the point where I will give credit that so much software generally works as well as it does, as often as it does.
Before I get too complimentary though, the point still stands. Customers wouldn't expect patches if software didn't need them. I'd argue that the expectation isn't so much 'patches forever', just 'patches until the product works as expected'.
and get support for new OS releases.
This wouldn't be a problem if OS releases weren't on this stupid rolling model now. More to the point, if OS versions are going to be written in a way that breaks compatibility, then we need to go back to having 3-5 years between releases, rather than this completely unnecessary annual cadence.
This forces the developer to have to support all of these older versions and that is just not a sustainable model for the software developer.
Well, there are a few options:
1. Write well-designed software that is as OS independent as possible. To me, the gold standard for this was ESET NOD32 v. 2.7. Ran on very version of Windows from 95 to 8.0, and was less than 10MB in size. Now, granted, it was written in assembler, so it's clearly not practical for every possible circumstance. However, aside from device drivers, there are plenty of decade-old applications that supported multiple OS versions.
2. Charge for OS compatibility patches.
3. Come to terms with the fact that some users simply won't upgrade.
Many apps now have a cloud component which incurs ongoing expenses.
Oh, my favorite! This is a simple one: give users an option to run their own server component. You want to funnel everyone through AWS? Be my guest, but don't complain about the cost. Pass the cloud component off to clients as a premium service, but in most cases this is entirely possible to avoid by creating a self-hosted version of software, or writing it to store its data locally.
Again, I'll reiterate that having a cloud option is perfectly fine, and I completely understand why. If, however, the cloud component can't be eschewed by customers with their own servers and public IPs, then don't try and convince me that the Azure bill is their problem.
It be better in the long run to match revenues and expenses. The month fees keep everyone on the same, up to date version.
Un
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There is a lot of software that has increased in price, but no real improvements:
* LogMeIn. The price has gone up insanely.
* Enterprise backup programs.
* Windows Server licenses.
* Most Adobe products.
At best, there might be a feature like allowing for their own cloud service added, but is it worth the cost of it? Not really.
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Sigh, no, generally it's not. What you are doing is settling for an inferior product. If you think open source Office is "just as good or better" than MS Office you don't really use Office to it's full extent and therefore wouldn't know the difference. So I suppose for you it's "better" because it's free. There is a reason people pay for software, and that's because the companies that create them have more time and MONEY to invest i
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There is a reason people pay for software
Because they are rich. Because they can. I am grateful to such people because yes they pay for the cost of future development. If the whole world just relied on the crack and pirate model there would be no new software development except for open source projects.
Of course always online client-server software subscription models are a way to try to avoid free riders entirely by not ever releasing the complete application itself. This means that the software is 100% useless without an internet connection and
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The client server model is already starting to bite us. When Microsoft decided to get out of the eBook business, all those people realized that their paid for items were in actually just rented... not sold.
I wonder what will happen if/when a major cloud provider goes under. There will be many companies in a world of hurt, far worse than even the mainframe era had at its zenith.
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You can tell libreoffice is inferior JUST BY LAUNCHING IT. Sometimes it starts up in a reasonable time, sometimes it takes so long that i could just about install ms office and do whatever i was trying to do in the interim. My potato is somewhat elderly, but it's got eight cores, 16GB, and SSD, so there's no excuse for this shit.
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My household brings in over 10k a month and we still have to be careful where it goes.
Education is expensive, for a lonnnnnggg time.
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Or Java licenses.
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We use some software that is ~$500/month/seat and when compared to someone’s $6,000 gross margin, it is a huge deal. For reference, it used to be $85/month. If that software practically did the work we were paid to do it is one thing, but it is just drafting. Add in the other software they need for their job, and it is over 15% of gross margin.
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Yes, because when your electric bill goes up that much, as does your phone bill, your TV bill, your water bill, your [insert things you use here] bill, you end up with significantly less money each month.
Same applies to software. We don't use just one piece of software. We use many various apps. It's no the individual cost that matters. It's the cumulative one.
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These costs are not significant. Does it really matter if your $5/mth fee went to $15/mth
Yes increased prices only matter if you add them all up. So don't add them up and just feel happy.
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That's exactly it. It matters but there's both a switching cost and you have to consider the next best alternative. If the next best alternative to your 15/mth solution is one for $10 but you have to spend a week training everyone, and have an employee spend a month transferring data from one system to another ... Also, what other IT/business process changes will the time spent changing to a cheaper solution interfere with? At some point the boss will just say "I'll pay the extra $5/per to not have to worry
Self inflicted. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Self inflicted. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: Self inflicted. (Score:2)
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Actually, HaaS was already here. Remember IBM in the 1960s and 70s? You think you owned those computers?
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That reminds me of one of Philip K Dick’s novels: Ubik.
It wasn't the premise to the plot, but he (Dick) casually paints a setting in which everything had to be financially compensated to function. The protagonist of story begins so down on his luck, that when he is approached for a job offer by a female corporate exec, she literally has to slide coins under the door so that he can open the door to let her in.
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I think DS9 ripped off that novel for the "Ferenginar" scenes.
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They were forced to do it. Adobe just stopped making buyable versions of Photoshop and After Effects and all the rest, so you want want any version made in the last 5+ years you have to rent.
A lot of software just moved online. Can't use last year's accounting software because it's all out of date now, and web is the only choice they offer any more.
A lot of development tools are going that way as well. Want to use parts made in the last decade? You have to rent the IDE.
They aren't stupid, they know they hav
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How did they get the older offline versions to stop working?
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How did they get the older offline versions to stop working?
By not issuing security updates. Eventually risk mitigation overcomes the upgrade / subscription cost.
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They made the new version file formats incompatible with the older versions. Professionals and businesses will need to open documents made in newer versions, and are thus forced to upgrade.
The Suits Who Run The Show Are Different Now (Score:5, Interesting)
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Apartment complexes have been doing this for decades. Two bedroom apartment - $980/month. 4 years later $1180 a month. Can't afford it anymore? Then move out.
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Two bedroom apartment - $980/month. 4 years later $1180 a month.
In my local market, it is even worth than that. My apartment that was $720/month in 2013 became $1110/month in 2017. It wasn't even that good and it went up $100/month every year.
Can't afford it anymore? Then move out.
Done that. I ended up buying a house in a better neighborhood not farther from my work. The house is bigger and after factoring interest, taxes, utilities, loss of opportunity on the down payment and mortgage, insurances, and maintenance of the property, it is about the same price as the apartment I used to live in today. (Because
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While I don't disagree with your general assessment, what killed the Amiga was that most of its software was aimed at the entry level model and that the very specific hardware meant that transition to newer models meant buying pretty much all your software again anyway, so why not move towards other architectures that are more resilient?
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Hell, quite a few things were not even compatible between KickRom 1.2 and 1.3, changing the firmware was already enough to break compatibility.
Programming for the A500 was not unlike programming for a console. You had a pretty well defined hardware platform at your disposal, and most programs were written for this hardware platform. Which of course led to sloppy programming, timing delays with loops and hacks that were tailored to the specific chipset of the A500. Moving from A500 to, say, 2000 was already
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All of my serious Amiga software worked fine on not just 1.3, but 2 as well. And 3, come to think of it. Only games were affected, because only games tried to be that tricky.
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Unfortunately games were the market niche the Amiga had carved out for it, most machines sold were essentially glorified game consoles for their users.
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What killed the Amiga was mismanagement. It had nothing to do with technical merit or the availability of software. You could get WordPerfect and lotus for amiga, plus there was a PC bridge card, they were perfectly viable for small offices. But the coffers were looted, and Dave wasn't permitted to design the system he wanted.
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The Amiga had a 5-7 year gap on its rivals, with nothing even coming close to its graphics and sounds, barring machines like SGIs or Sun Workstations with crazy high price tags. Because the management was so bad, they didn't do much, if anything to improve, and rivals eventually made commodity sound cards and graphic cards which made the Amiga pointless.
The Amiga had a lot of cool innovations. However, when the suits take the reigns of the companies, and engineers are replaced by MBAs who have no interest
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I generally agree with the assessment. Prior to the late 90s computing was an 'acceptable' market but largely dominated by those who *wanted* to do it, not so interesting to those looking to just make money without an inherent interest in the technology. The late 90s bubble and subsequent collapse both piqued the interest of gold-seekers less inherently interested and paved the way for that mindset to take hold of the market in the following years.
Another problem in various markets is that we have been sp
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Some of the larger software platforms have always been annual licensing. I am surprised to learn that studio software was not annually licensed the whole time. The bigger financial platforms were licensed annually. I remember in the late 90s watching AP having to wire a transaction for $30k because they forgot their license for JD Edwards was due.
Office 2010 (Score:3)
I bought an actual copy of Office 2010 a long time ago. Every time I get a new computer, I move the license. There is zero new functionality in anything post Office 2010 that I actually need or care about. I'm very happy not paying an annual Microsoft Office tax each year.
I'm stuck with paying Adobe an obscene amount of money each years for Adobe Acrobat Pro. I need to edit a PDF about 5 times a year. For 5 hours of use, I'm paying $200 a year - every year. Then Adobe loads massive numbers of crap-ware executables that I have to delete (Run "handle" by sysinternals. The crap Adobe has reading your open pdf file will scare you). I'm happy to pay Adobe $200 once and then use the program for a decade. PDFs aren't changing much year to year, and everything I need is simple.
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Re: Office 2010 (Score:2)
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It's been tried. "tetex" was just such a language and format, and it has supported descendant "texlive.. There was very, very little market compared to the directly printer-supported Postscript and PDF. I know of _no one_ in modern computing who publishes any documents in TeX based formats rather than PDF or more web-based formats such as MarkDown and RST.
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The Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open, ISO standard. Anyone can implement a PDF reader, or creator, without paying royalties to Adobe.
This is how software like Foxit and Nitro PDF are able to exist, and flourish.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I'm stuck with paying Adobe an obscene amount of money each years for Adobe Acrobat Pro. I need to edit a PDF about 5 times a year. For 5 hours of use, I'm paying $200 a year - every year.
More fool you. I use PDFElement on my Mac. I think that was a $99 "one and done" license.
I don't rent software. Next major version of MacOS fatally breaks Apple's Aperture. I can either rent Lightroom, or not upgrade the OS (especially since the current version will still get minor/security updates)..
I'm not going to upgrade the OS...
Re: Office 2010 (Score:2)
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I've been using Foxit for years, and it is as good as Acrobat for almost everything, with the exception being long forms, where it might just fall flat on its face.
Similar with Affinity Photo and Photoshop. Affinity Photo does pretty much everything Photoshop does, and has a similar enough UI to help ease moving over to it.
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Not just cost, but usability as well (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just the cost that's gone in the wrong direction, but so has usability. Seems that each new version makes the software package harder to use, either through the introduction of new bugs or by the brilliance of a "redesign". There are no UIX experts driving the ship of ANY software package that I've seen ( windows, apple included ), and it shows.
I'd be more than willing for software to get more expensive if it's utility increased along with it, but that's simply not the case.
Rent seeking (Score:2)
Stop renting your software. Renters generally pay more in the long run.
Not for me they haven't (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Hey me too.
Though I have paid some money for software in the past 10 years. A couple of Android apps that were worth the price; some were from FOSS advocates. Also some games that aren't FOSS. So maybe I spent $300 in the last 10 years. So not so crazy!
Or maybe our inflation stats are bullshit (Score:3)
Just think, in a few short months she can go to work making somebody else rich while paying her student loans. God Bless America.
iphone versus software (Score:2)
The opposite for consumer software (Score:2)
It's much easier to get any kind of software for free these days. From dev tools to games, things which cost money in the past can often be gotten for free, or have good free alternatives which didn't exist a decade ago (or existed in a rudimentary and not very user friendly manner).
5% ROI per year for Software company (Score:2)
For a software company, to satisfy their investors, they can either grow their market, grow their market share or milk the available customers more. Growing marketshare isn't easy theses days and having a revolutionary product that creates new markets isn't either. That leaves getting more from the current market share.
62% increase over 10 year is an increase of about 5% per year. This is similar to other forms of investments like real estate.
Seen from this perspective, the number is easy to explain. The CE
Editor David (Score:2)
Re: Gouging just changed its name, not its goal (Score:2)
This meant that computing was affordable at low wages, and people could work hard and get ahead by carefully managing their cash flow. Now you have businesses who hire peopl
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, in the early days the initial purchase price was HIGH. Then, they realized that once the install base reached the saturation point lowering new unit sales, that they'd have to make their money on upgrades, not initial unit sales. It wasn't until users realized that they didn't have to do every upgrade that the support/maintenance fees hit, and that's when VLA, MLA, and all sorts of other alphabet licensing programs kicked in.
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft Office 365 comes with their entire suite, though Word and Excel are all I need. It also comes with a terabyte of cloud storage and some surprisingly good iOS apps that take advantage of it. For the same $99 I would pay Dropbox for JUST the terabyte of storage.
The $99 for Dropbox also gets you a bidirectional sync client on Linux. This client is something OneDrive and Google Drive lacked last I checked. Or when has this changed?