> Does $50/month for the tool that allows you to do your trade (and always having access to the latest features) really seem ridiculous? Seems like a fairly trivial business expense to me.
It would absolutely seem ridiculous if that tool was a drill, or a saw, or a ladder. Those are critical parts of doing business in the building trades.
Software is of course a little more difficult. If executed well, many types of software should be a naturally dead-end business model. Develop, fix some issues, ship, sell, be done with it. Not entirely different from building a house, or a car - you could tinker with either one of those indefinitely as well, but that doesn't make it a worthwhile business model.
If the push to continuously redesign and add new features for the sake of continuing revenue generation wasn't there, software can eventually be close enough to bug free to close the book on it. Take video games for example - they are complicated pieces of software, but you can still play 10, 20, 30 year old games with little or no issues at all.
> and always having access to the latest features
Thing is, most people don't actually want this, and even many who do don't value it nearly as highly as the software companies want to charge for it. Hell, some people pay significant amounts of extra money for "enterprise" software support just to not have new features added.
It would absolutely seem ridiculous if that tool was a drill, or a saw, or a ladder. Those are critical parts of doing business in the building trades.
Software is of course a little more difficult. If executed well, many types of software should be a naturally dead-end business model. Develop, fix some issues, ship, sell, be done with it. Not entirely different from building a house, or a car - you could tinker with either one of those indefinitely as well, but that doesn't make it a worthwhile business model.
If the push to continuously redesign and add new features for the sake of continuing revenue generation wasn't there, software can eventually be close enough to bug free to close the book on it. Take video games for example - they are complicated pieces of software, but you can still play 10, 20, 30 year old games with little or no issues at all.
> and always having access to the latest features
Thing is, most people don't actually want this, and even many who do don't value it nearly as highly as the software companies want to charge for it. Hell, some people pay significant amounts of extra money for "enterprise" software support just to not have new features added.