To be honest it's also a little bit of rose-colored glasses. In the 2000s I probably spent the equivalent of thousands of dollars purchasing one-time commercial software licenses and I appreciate not having to save up for that any more.
As evidenced by Rent-a-Center, automobile leases, and rental properties there are plenty of non-software businesses that cater to customers who prefer a subscription to a larger one-time transaction.
> Why is software development any different?
I think it's a combination of price-sensitivity and desire for internet-connected features. For example, MS Office 2010 Home was $150 in 2010 (which is ~$230 today due to inflation) and it looks like you can buy subscription-less MS Office 2024 Home for $180. But despite the price coming down in real terms, many people opt for the Microsoft 365 subscription for ~$10/month.
At least in my case, when I lament the fact that everything is becoming a subscription I'm not judging independent developers who charge a subscription for their mobile or web apps. They need to stay abreast of an endless treadmill of bugs, security issues, and API changes and may have servers to maintain as well, and all of that costs money.
But I do pine for the days when I could buy all the software I needed in a box like any other product and use it for decades with no updates or UI changes whatsoever. It's not the fault of independent app developers that I don't live in that world anymore.
I once worked at a startup that did just that. Developed a system that was significantly better and cheaper than an existing legacy solution. One of the generals who saw the DARPA demonstration overrode the whole bureaucracy and brought it with him into theater.
Five years later the startup had been bought by a major military contractor, budgets ballooned, a number of the original people (including me) left, our software was on its way to becoming the legacy solution, and the cycle continued.
After seeing how US military contracting works up close, I no longer find it surprising that military tech costs orders of magnitude more than commercial or consumer tech. It's also not surprising why so few organizations are able to do both government and consumer/commercial technology -- optimizing for one makes you ill-suited to compete in the other.
> There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions
Such a price clearly exists -- in an extreme case you could charge 50x your annual subscription price and invest it with a 2% yield to get the equivalent of your subscription as interest. More realistically, if you are already considering taking on debt to grow your business it can make financial sense to offer lifetime licenses that are equivalent to several years' worth of subscription revenue to get an influx of up-front liquidity. Of course as your needs change so will your ratio of subscription-to-purchase price and this may result in a purchase price that is too high for your customers to consider, but the number always exists.
> Every one-time price is a gamble
True, but so are subscription prices! Either way, as the person who sets the prices, you are well-positioned to pick ones that are most likely to be successful.
> What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited... Can the same not be found for many software products?
Some of the enterprise software I've worked on has an option that functions this way. You pay for a specific version which is supported for a few years. You can keep using it forever but if you want to keep getting security updates or live support then you'll have to buy a newer version that is still in its support window.
Having said that, it seems like most businesses seem to prefer subscriptions.
A majority of the parents I know are extremely concerned about the internet and social media and want tech companies to provide them with better parental controls. True, no one I know has lobbied for age verification specifically, but given how much politicians and tech companies want it, it's unsurprising that they're working hard redirect this parental concern towards their preferred solutions.
Agreed. Many parents I've spoken to want operating systems to provide a standard set of age and/or content flags that app stores and websites are required to respect.
But various groups are deliberately conflating that desire for self-attested flags with verification: Politicians who want to police speech, companies who want to advertise to verified humans, and privacy advocates who want an easier strawman to attack.
Is is an excuse for some, sure. But we will fail at pushing back if we ignore that there are a meaningful number of concerned parents who support solutions like this because they have become aware of the danger that social media presents. For many of them, self-attestation of age at the OS account level is likely sufficient, not to mention much simpler to implement and use.
But others are working hard to shift the narrative away from age attestation towards age verification or even identity verification. Government officials (on both the right and left) want to be able to police speech based on what is acceptable to those who are currently in power. Companies want to verify humans for advertising and training purposes. And some privacy advocates intentionally conflate age attestation (like California AB 1043) with age verification because it is an easier strawman to attack.
> Have apps and websites declare the objectionable content they have, and let the device decide if it will show it or not according to parental controls.
That would have been nice. The RSAC (Recreational Software Advisory Council) had a slightly more granular rating system that rated violence, sex, and language on a scale from 0 to 4 which unfortunately it lost out to the ESRB/IARC age-based classifications, and the internet appears to be going towards age-based classifications as well. Personally I like Common Sense Media's ratings which extend the standard violence, sex, and language flags by adding scales for "Products & Purchases" and "Drinking, Drugs, & Smoking".
From a semantic web standpoint it would have been useful if the web had codified these sorts of content flags so content producers could apply them to apps, websites, page sections, images, or even individual HTML tags. Then a device administrator could tell the operating system or browser to restrict certain content, either based on age-appropriate presets or based on custom levels for each type of content.
Based on the surveys from the wikipedia page it appears that 15-20% of parents used the v-chip feature on their TV. For an optional feature that has to be manually configured that seems like an incredible success. I would have guessed that fewer than 20% of users configure any optional setting on their TV.
I'd consider this a feature. I'd be proud if my kids find a way to circumvent the parental controls on the family computer or use their own money to build their own computer like I did growing up. At that point they've earned the right to the full internet.
(However, I would not be willing to use any solution that sacrifices my or my kid's privacy.)
I've lived in a few US cities, but the example of NYC comes to mind. New Yorkers are happy to lend a hand if you're lost, struggling with a stroller on the stairs, or something falls out of your bag. And they're happy to chat at a concert, club, farmer's market, sporting event, carnival, conference, convention, etc.
But a stranger gesturing for you to take off your headphones while you're walking briskly down the street or riding the subway just so they can make smalltalk does not seem socially acceptable whether it's packed at rush hour or mostly empty at 1:00 in the morning.
That is my experience as well -- most people are basically good.
But my personal experience has also been that the sort of people who ignore social cues and try and chat someone up who is wearing headphones while riding public transit or working out are generally less good.
> It's fine to start a conversation with a women wearing headphones, just take it in stride and don't be weird about it if she isn't interested in talking. I do this (with men and women) a lot.
Not sure where you're from, but where I live, headphones are a well-understood signal that someone would rather not engage in conversation at the moment. Some have been conditioned to placate the kind of people who deliberately ignore these signals by engaging in brief small talk rather than risking a confrontation, but this shouldn't be misconstrued as an interest in talking.
Different public spaces have wildly different expectations with regard to social interaction.
Most people know better than to strike up a conversation with a stranger who is watching a theater performance, reading in a library, or walking briskly to work. Whereas chatting with people at a club, sporting event, carnival, conference, convention, etc is socially acceptable.
But many places are ambiguous like public transit, gyms, shops, airplanes, etc. Assessing whether someone in those contexts would welcome interaction with strangers requires social awareness.
Unfortunately, some people overlook or deliberately ignore these cues, so folks who aren't interested in social interaction have taken to wearing headphones in those contexts to make it as obvious as possible. If you're the kind of person who is surprised by how many people are now wearing headphones, it may be because you were missing their more subtle cues before.
Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average)
Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
Whether it's reasonable depends on the distribution, not just the duration.
A 2 hour onsite with the candidate being rapid-fire interviewed by six different different teams and a 20 minute call every couple weeks for three months are very different (and select for very different types of candidates) despite having the same overall duration.
Making interviews efficient and making them easy are orthogonal. It depends on what attributes your organization is trying to select for.
To select for people who are willing to commit to a slow bureaucratic organization, make them go through repetitive interview rounds spread over many weeks.
To select for people who do well under pressure, make the interview stressful.
To select for people who can solve challenging problems, make the interview challenging.
There's no right answer as long as your hiring process is tailored to select for the attributes your company needs.
> designing interfaces that keep pointing-device-free users in mind.
Agreed. Using keyboard keys to emulate a mouse cursor seems like it ought to be a last resort for graphical applications that lack proper accessibility affordances.
Contrast that with command palettes, accessibility controls, syntax tree navigation, and other approaches that rely on the names, content, and document structure that users already know rather than a special mode that displays two letter codes that must be read each time or memorized. Many of these other approaches also allow users to activate buttons, menu items, and links that are outside the current viewport or hidden in menus which reduces the overall number of "clicks" required to perform those actions. The downside is that they can take longer to type than a two-letter code. Still, my guess is that for most people it would be overall more efficient to optimize for cognitive load than pure speed.
(Though in the long run, I suspect that improvements in eye-tracking will lead to hybrid systems that are both lower cognitive load and faster than any of these.)