Subscription Software

Ownership of one's tools. It's an old concept. 

To a degree, throughout modern history, owning one's own tools marked the (or at least a significant) difference between an employee and a contractor.

In the much older days, a person might travel up and down a territory serving customers with a tool - such as a big grind wheel for sharpening knives - that was hard to come by, or only needed occasionally, and therefore not required for everyday use.

Today many of us rely on software to perform a job, or part of our jobs.

For many, programs like Photoshop for manipulating images, a page layout program, or audio and video editing are the necessary tools of one's trade. For another individual, a program that will assist with report design and writing might be key, and for another, bookkeeping tools will be required.

In the early days of such software, it wasn't cheap to get started. Early on, Photoshop was almost an investment. A single installation of the software in 1990 was $895, and was only available for Mac - though within 3 years it was also available for a PC. But that was a lot of money, and it wasn't easy software to learn. So a user had to really invest, both time and money, to make it worthwhile. At the same time, the alternative was a darkroom and a pasteup board. With Photoshop, you got a disc and a license, and the upgrades relied on your desire and need for the new features the program offered with each new version.

I can recall hunting around for open source ("freeware") alternatives, like Gimp, especially if it wasn't going to be an every day tool. Why spend so much money if I only needed it occasionally?

Microsoft's Office suite was de rigeur for most offices, as Word, Excel and PowerPoint became the go-to for basic office writing, accounting, and presentation software. 

But do you remember WordPerfect? With its "macros" which enabled saving special formatting and keystroke combinations to achieve them, it was much preferred by people who typed and/or formatted documents to very precise specifications because of the ease of creating such options. It was very popular in the 80s and into the 90s.

As with any tool, there will be new versions and alternatives. 

But now compare something like cooking, or woodworking, to using software as a tool.

If I were a cook, I might figure that a whisk would cost me pennies, a hand mixer (non-powered) a couple of dollars, an electric mixer about $15 - 20, but if I wanted real ease and speed I might "invest" $40-50 in a good stand mixer (all prices extreme approximations), and another plus would be that it could perform many more chores, like whipping, bread kneading, and some even have a variety of blades for assorted density of the material to be mixed.

A woodworker might prefer his hand tools, but what he could gain in precision and a feel for the wood being shaped would be overcome by how quickly a job could be completed, as well as wear and tear on the muscles if the worker chose to invest in power tools. Hand tools would typically be replaced by most professionals with power tools, though in the case of both the cook and the woodworker, at some point each would become accustomed to a set of tools and wouldn't seek to replace them until they wore out.

With software, the user sometimes doesn't have a choice. 

With some upgrades, there's nothing to be done. You are simply going to have to accept a change made, particularly if there's no cost (and therefore no decision) associated. I have cussed out Word and Excel more than once as I went to look for a favorite feature and found it nested in some list of options carrying a new name, or four places right or left on the dropdown menu as compared to the last time I sought it out. Why change it, I wondered, when most users were comfortable with it where it was? A new software engineer or UI (user interface) designer decided it should be a Review tool versus a Layout tool.

Those are minor inconveniences compared to the two strategies software has employed to make sure big dollars keep rolling in.

First, of course, it must be acknowledged that these software tools are, for the most part, very useful, well designed, and without them most of us users would be lost. Trying to use some form of code for every document we created, or to return to typing things out manually, would both seem crazy in a world where the alternative exists. And second, while I may not "approve" of every change made to software, most of them are improvements - or don't bother newer users who didn't start formatting documents or keeping books way back in the 80s and 90s!

The more challenging problem is the upgrade/replacement cost.

As noted, many of us started with something like Word, and then got somewhat spoiled when Google offered us Google Docs. A fully featured and compatible alternative, Google Docs is more or less free. It is web-based, and for a business (with a business address), you will pay for the G Suite since 2022, though for personal use it remains free. 

There is an ongoing risk with any freeware that it will become cost-based, or that it will simply no longer be supported and/or cease completely - possibly leaving the user with no way of accessing a project or document.

Equally frustrating can be a learning curve - you spend time learning the features of a system, and challenging enough to have it "improved," it's even worse when an old project simply goes away because the software is no longer available.

And finally, there's the "once a purchase, now a subscription" upsell. You purchase a software bundle, you learn it, it's essential to doing what you do. Then there is an upgrade, and you choose, or don't choose to buy it. Fair enough. 

Then the publisher decides to no longer support the old release of the software, but again, the risk is yours to take should you choose to rely on a product that's no longer available, upgradeable, supported. 

But now with ubiquitous internet and licensing what users can face is that their product, licensed to one computer with a name and an address (and relying on an internet sign-on with each start), can no longer be opened without a subscription. 

A perpetual license is what the user bought - a one-time fee, and ownership of the particular software in question. A subscription license requires the user to pay a monthly or annual fee, and then the user can access the latest and greatest of the software at any time, though in general they'll need to be connected in order to use it.

In a way, you can harken back to the old telephone model: you paid your line charge, and the equipment was provided. Then the phone company stopped providing the equipment, and merely offered you a line drop to your home - from that point on you were on your own. If there was such a thing as a phone system upgrade (like dial versus touch tone), your home phone(s) were still your problem, no longer the phone companies. And they no longer had to worry about recovering their property if you moved.

With software, you've always supplied your own computer, but the software company would give you a disk with its product on it and a key for accessing it - and then it was yours to keep and use until your computer quit, and even then (assuming it was compatible) you could install it on your new computer if you chose. The company was banking on your wanting all the new features, or your OS having changed sufficiently that their software was simply outdated.

It's a constant cat-and-mouse chase with software, features, "ownership" and upgrades. 

Granted, it's not like buying a car, so it won't required as much thought and care as selecting a model that will serve you for 10 years or 150K miles or more. But when you factor in how much time it takes to become adept, how many projects in development or for which you need only make tweaks to a previous version you might have, the idea of starting from scratch with new software is daunting. 

So our tools are on loan, or at least, rented. For now, the skills are still your own!