[_revy]

I suspect this is a reversal of cause and effect.

Did consumers demand subscription services? Or did vendors (led by Adobe) decide to change to subscriptions to get uniform cash flow?

At agencies I have worked at all creatives I worked with would prefer to spend $200-400 and have a permanent software license. Perhaps this isn't a representative group.

[leetcrew]

I'm not saying consumers demanded subscriptions. vendors push them because it's a saner way of managing revenue for products that require maintenance post-sale anyway.

that said, I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives. one way or another, a product will stop receiving support when the money stops flowing in. with a permanent license, it ends when people stop buying licenses. with subscriptions, it continues as long as enough people keep paying.

[_qulr]

> I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives.

Funny how consumers tend to despise them though.

The term "subscription" itself a typically a euphemism for "rental". There are a small number of companies who offer a year of updates that you get to keep forever (which makes consumers play the game of when exactly to buy to maximize the new features in that year), but most so-called subscriptions disable the software entirely if you stop paying. In other words, rental.

Long-term rental is almost always a bad deal for consumers. One of the few exceptions is housing, because many consumers can't afford to buy a house, and also houses are one of the least liquid assets you can own, if you have to move it (and yourself). Otherwise, rental is going to cost you a lot more in the long run.

Financially, rental can work well for the seller, of course, but we end up with "subscription fatigue", where the market can't sustain as many sellers, and the few rich companies get richer (which is exactly why they were "pioneered" by BigCos such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Apple).

[mook]

> that said, I think consumers would prefer subscriptions if they understood how it aligned incentives.

Actually, I think subscriptions misaligns incentives. With subscriptions, it becomes important for the vendors to keep releasing updates (so that the customers feel like they're getting value out of the subscription), which means having bug-free software is a terrible idea. You'd need to either release intentionally buggy software (so you can ship a follow-up version to fix it) or go on a feature treadmill (in which case trying to stabilize has rapidly diminishing returns and high opportunity cost).

As a consumer, software that was developed knowing it would never be fixed and has to be perfect the first try is much better (even if it still has bugs). Mario64 had bugs (e.g. backwards jump going really fast); but the bugs weren't really noticeable in normal gameplay because they couldn't just ship an update most of the size of the whole game before you start to play.