Are we being nickled and dimed to death?
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If the businesses were happy that they were given more flexibility or accepted that they were making financial mistakes and being like "oops, my bad", it would be different. But we are acting like software companies "owe us" less good financial terms in order to head off financial missteps by management.
Step back and look at it as a neutral outsiders. The software vendors, by moving to a "pay as you go for what you use" model versus "pay up front for what you might use" is a pure win as far as models go. There is no downside except that it gives more power to the business to choose to do reckless financial things. The business holds all of the cards. It can leverage the cost savings or it can take the perceived windfall and cripple itself.
It's really unfair to be upset with the party doing the right thing and defending the one squandering critical corporate resources as "just the way it is." That's an extremely American mindset where we tend to feel that the government needs to outlaw all bad decision making and take away freedoms because "someone might abuse them." Rather than giving people the freedom to excel or fail based on their own decision making.
The bottom line is, if this causing a problem for the business, it's the business' fault and no one else's. The business has every capability to have this be in their favour. Any lack thereof is purely at the discretion of the business itself.
If you get upset about how that plays out, you need to direct your ire at the business making the bad decisions, not the vendors helping them. If you feel that executives taking that "not really profit" for themselves is fine, then don't get upset at anyone because the vendor made it possible for that flexible business decision making.
The only thing that I don't see as fair or reasonable is being upset that vendors gave businesses better options to protect themselves, grow and excel.
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I think an issue here, which maybe Scott can expand upon, is that businesses don't see how they could possibly be saving money by moving from a one time pay to a forever monthly solution.
I guess a good example could be Exchange. Many companies bought Exchange 2000 and haven't upgrade for the past 10+ years. Here's a solution where I can definitely say that company saved a ton of money over the cost of using something like Office 365. Did those SMBs have all of the DR/Backup/awesome techs, etc - probably not, but then again they probably didn't need them.
I'd be willing to wager that if they looked at their spend over the past decade for the Exchange system it wouldn't come anywhere near the cost paid for O365.
The same could be said about those running Windows XP and Office 2003 - overall there just was no reason to upgrade unless you had a specific driver (new software, failed hardware - might as well get the newer version, etc).
Converting SMBs into the mindset that they need to look at their technology as a continual expense now, instead of a once every 3-5-7 year major expense is difficult at best, impossible at worst.
And the driving force behind all of this? In my opinion it's that the vendors want a more steady income stream, even if it's just the same amount they would have gotten before, but come on, we both know it's more than it was before.
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I think one of the big problems Microsoft has had is that their products have become close to perfect. And once a product reaches perfection, the incentive to upgrade becomes much weaker. In early versions of Office, Windows and Exchange there were big improvements in both reliability, performance and features from one version to the next. But there are now only tiny differences - what do the latest versions of them offer over Windows 7, Office 2010 and Exchange 2010? These products reached maturity several years ago, and there isn't really much to add.
I feel that subscription is seen as a way to get out of this dilemma.
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I mean @scottalanmiller talks about subscription allowing "businesses better options to protect themselves, grow and excel.", but I can tell you that there is nothing in the new version of Photoshop or AutoCAD that will add any real value to our business.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I feel that subscription is seen as a way to get out of this dilemma.
The vendor's dilemma, certainly not the consumer's. LOL
I agree completely with you.
I realize the same can't be said with all software, as previously mentioned, the Adobe CS suite has definitely had some huge improvements, function add. But I'd have to assume that the base product will eventually reach the same level of perfection as Office has, and short of new FXs, the base product won't change. Adobe has already seen this writing on the wall and is converting its customers to a subscription model now - which is definitely bad for the end user.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I mean @scottalanmiller talks about subscription allowing "businesses better options to protect themselves, grow and excel.", but I can tell you that there is nothing in the new version of Photoshop or AutoCAD that will add any real value to our business.
AutoCAD you might be right, but at least the previous version of Adobe CS did add some pretty awesome new features.
