This seems to be absolutely crazy. I’m looking for a simple decent technical manual writing software. 95% of what is out there is on subscription and largely at, at least to me, ridiculous prices. So I pay every month in perpetuity for something I will use “Every once in a while”?
I get this approach if you’re planning on using it everyday or very regularly, but anyone else would be a fool to do this. So I use it a lot the first couple months to get things set up, but then every time I have to make a change I end up paying the entire months subscription for a couple hours of usage? It’s like paying for a year long lease, driving 1000 miles the first months, 250 the next and then 25 miles every month after that. At then end of the year you don’t own a thing, you no longer have a car and you paid for 10X more than what you needed.
I’m complaining more about the move to subscription for everything. It seems to me that this is a “Trick” for these companies to just bleed you dry. You can’t simply make a one time investment and use the software as you see fit. You pay maintenance every month so you have the privilege of being able to modify your own data.
For what it’s worth I actually found Scribus which is open source and closer to what I may be looking for.
We were looking at water softeners several years back. My wife stopped at a local place to talk to them and the guy she was talking to asked that she take a sample of the cold water, then turn the hot water on and let it get as hot as it can, let it run for a while and take a sample of that. Then bring both of the samples to them for testing.
Yep, she asked the guy “Won’t the hot water be cold by the time I get here?”. The guy was completely professional about it and explained that if it got cold that would be fine. It wasn’t until she got home and told me the story…and after I regained my composure after laughing my ass off, that I explained to her why he wanted samples like that and that the actual temperature didn’t matter.
I still throw that in now and then when appropriate
Yeah, welcome to the 2010s. You can’t buy anything and own it any more. Gotta have that revenue stream. Everybody has to collect data on you, even though they can’t think of anything better to do with it than put ads in front of me that I ignore.
I think subscriptions/Leases etc are a great idea under the right circumstances, but they just don’t fit for a lot of things. The smart company would provide both options like car dealers. “Buy now, get what you get and keep it for ever with single term support, no updates etc”. “Buy a subscription, get continued support and updates as long as your subscription is active”.
To the contrary however it seems everyone is either one or the other with a continued move toward subscription. I can go lease a car or outright by one. Why is software any different? Hell we can even do this with furniture, but not software.
We would send the meal frozen and all you do is heat it up - Hopefully in about a year from now or before we will be doing that, I’m planning to get our e-commerce up and running this summer and then we will have the base set up and ready to add product. Let me know if you want us to make your Thanksgiving Dinner
The problem with the “purchase” model is that a lot of customers will buy it once and your revenue stream dries up. My nearly 20 year old copy of photoshop still does everything I need it to do. (Actually I think it died on 12/31/2020, but up until then it still worked great.) It is hard for companies to pay for the expense of developing new software, if only a small percentage of the users are paying after the initial purchase.
