I’d say companies THINK they will make more money. That might be true with big, complex software that can be sold as a service that people will use (Photoshop, Windows, Office etc) or services that offer a lot (like the original version of Netflix or Amazon Prime)
But it’s not true for things you can take or leave. (Such as most mobile apps which now have to really on sales to boost conversion rates from Free tier to subscription).
Then you also have the issue of a fragmented market so even previously successful services like Prime are looking to get more money by adding extra costs (eg Prime Video will have adverts from the summer unless you pay $40 extra per year as a new top up subscription)
It works great when people have it on autopay and are paying without consuming any services, or they make it a giant pain in the ass to unsubscribe and people put it off.
I often wonder how many people are still paying for AOL. I know people that were still paying for it when dsl or cable internet became the better option. I’ll bet people are still paying for it decades later.
or they make it a giant pain in the ass to unsubscribe
Which is why I’ll never subscribe to SiriusXM again. I won’t even take it for free. You can sign up for whatever plan you want online, but to cancel you have to call (and it’s not 24/7) and listen to ten minutes of “but what if I offered you X service for $ per month? and gave you a month free? Don’t you enjoy the service we provide? Let me put my supervisor on the phone so he can try to convince you not to quit us.”
I think in California there’s a law that if you can sign up online you must be able to cancel online, which pisses me off even more because Sirius could do this for the whole country but they’d rather drag and guilt people to get them to stay.
Adobe did it because everybody and their grandmother just pirated Photoshop instead of paying that huge one time fee (licenses costed around $900 not counting inflation). It wasn’t until they went with the subscription model when people actually started to pay for Photoshop.
No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.
They priced it for businesses/students that would be using it constantly in a professional setting and did not have a reasonable personal use price for the general public who pirated it.
I am not an adobe user, but isn’t it possible to pirate its stuff? I’d do it only because I hate subscription models, and if they were the “pioneers” in this aspect I wouldn’t want to give them a dime.
imo, the subscription style is the evolution of “planned obsolescence”.
people are willing to give money if the goods have an expiration. so instead of the goods expiring, the concept of validity of the goods now expire. same money, but saves on making different goods altogether.
As my boss said in one of those stupid floor meetings we always had to have, “if they have [the competitor’s] card in their wallet, and not ours, who do you think they’re going to?” God, I got sick of asking folks to sign up.
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
If you had to pick, would you rather get a large ammount of money semi regularly, or a smaller ammount of money on a consistant schedule, oh and there is no alternative for your customer than to keep paying for as long as they use your product.
Online subscriptions have actually been a thing for a long time. In some ways it’s even fallen out of favor, especially with the rise of the “freemium” model. MMOs are a great example of this as subscriptions used to be the price of entry with no other monetization, where as these days if an MMO uses subscriptions it’s a secondary “convenience” fee after entry that is almost always combined with MTX bullshit.
If you’re talking specifically about SaaS bullshit, it’s because it required a certain level of infrastructure before it became practical. We had to move away from cash and needed reliable internet connections first, amongst a host of other developments. Anything that couldn’t be a cash purchase in a physical store was losing significant market share. This didn’t stop time restricted licenses on software still being a thing, but it was generally pretty niche software.