<story><title>Users hate change</title><url>https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/a4d311ffcdc4fd908ec97d1c245e57dc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nofunsir</author><text>&amp;quot;everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s... how it should work. You don&amp;#x27;t get to hook into their wallets for time and all eternity.&lt;p&gt;everybody who wanted your &amp;lt;shovel&amp;gt; bought it and then the revenue stops.&lt;p&gt;everybody who wanted your &amp;lt;light bulb&amp;gt; bought it and then the revenue stops.&lt;p&gt;everybody who wanted your &amp;lt;real estate&amp;gt; bought it and then the revenue stops.&lt;p&gt;... and then you go do something else!&lt;p&gt;That is the precise mechanism that drives the economy forward.</text></item><item><author>yoz-y</author><text>Subscription model is actually way better if you don&amp;#x27;t want to end up with feature bloat. Because you actually get money from users even if you only ever fix bugs and improve performance.&lt;p&gt;If you freeze your features you will soon arrive at a point where everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.</text></item><item><author>flohofwoe</author><text>My pet theory is that every software product has a &amp;quot;peak version&amp;quot;. Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to &amp;#x27;keep the team busy&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and existing features start to suffer because the &amp;quot;maintenance surface&amp;quot; becomes bigger and bigger.&lt;p&gt;What &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; happen of course is that the product&amp;#x27;s feature set is frozen at the &amp;quot;peak version&amp;quot;, and only bug fixes and optimizations are happening, that&amp;#x27;s a hard sell to the bean counters of course, especially with subscription models and &amp;quot;software as a service&amp;quot; which they like so much. From the customer&amp;#x27;s point of view, bug fixes and optimizations are expected to come for free, because they are fixing defects in the original product and don&amp;#x27;t add any value, right?&lt;p&gt;Eventually progress and success is measured in features added, not in satisfaction of individual customers. And as long as KPIs are looking alright - meaning the &amp;#x27;average customer&amp;#x27; (which doesn&amp;#x27;t exist btw) isn&amp;#x27;t pissed off enough to look elsewhere, all is good, even though everything is terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ken</author><text>Except that revenue stream ends before the &amp;quot;fix bugs and improve performance&amp;quot; step.  People buy based on screenshots&amp;#x2F;demos&amp;#x2F;trials&amp;#x2F;reviews, and those don&amp;#x27;t expose the deep bugs you run into 3 months later when doing real work.&lt;p&gt;Shovels break, light bulbs burn out.  Then you go buy another one, and there&amp;#x27;s a good chance it&amp;#x27;s better than the earlier one.  The manufacturer keeps working to improve the quality, and people keep paying them for this.  &amp;quot;Buy a software license once for all time&amp;quot; is not analogous to this.</text></comment>
<story><title>Users hate change</title><url>https://gist.github.com/sleepyfox/a4d311ffcdc4fd908ec97d1c245e57dc</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nofunsir</author><text>&amp;quot;everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s... how it should work. You don&amp;#x27;t get to hook into their wallets for time and all eternity.&lt;p&gt;everybody who wanted your &amp;lt;shovel&amp;gt; bought it and then the revenue stops.&lt;p&gt;everybody who wanted your &amp;lt;light bulb&amp;gt; bought it and then the revenue stops.&lt;p&gt;everybody who wanted your &amp;lt;real estate&amp;gt; bought it and then the revenue stops.&lt;p&gt;... and then you go do something else!&lt;p&gt;That is the precise mechanism that drives the economy forward.</text></item><item><author>yoz-y</author><text>Subscription model is actually way better if you don&amp;#x27;t want to end up with feature bloat. Because you actually get money from users even if you only ever fix bugs and improve performance.&lt;p&gt;If you freeze your features you will soon arrive at a point where everybody who wanted your software bought it and then the revenue stops.</text></item><item><author>flohofwoe</author><text>My pet theory is that every software product has a &amp;quot;peak version&amp;quot;. Before that peak version, the product is not yet in a complete state, and it is fairly obvious, both for the developer and user, what features are missing. Once the peak version is reached, new features are not added because they improve the product, but to justify selling the product again to existing customers, and to &amp;#x27;keep the team busy&amp;#x27;.&lt;p&gt;Instead of really improving the product, features become checkboxes on the roadmap. Which eventually results in degrading the quality of the product, it becomes bloated, the UX becomes confusing (especially to new users), and existing features start to suffer because the &amp;quot;maintenance surface&amp;quot; becomes bigger and bigger.&lt;p&gt;What &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; happen of course is that the product&amp;#x27;s feature set is frozen at the &amp;quot;peak version&amp;quot;, and only bug fixes and optimizations are happening, that&amp;#x27;s a hard sell to the bean counters of course, especially with subscription models and &amp;quot;software as a service&amp;quot; which they like so much. From the customer&amp;#x27;s point of view, bug fixes and optimizations are expected to come for free, because they are fixing defects in the original product and don&amp;#x27;t add any value, right?&lt;p&gt;Eventually progress and success is measured in features added, not in satisfaction of individual customers. And as long as KPIs are looking alright - meaning the &amp;#x27;average customer&amp;#x27; (which doesn&amp;#x27;t exist btw) isn&amp;#x27;t pissed off enough to look elsewhere, all is good, even though everything is terrible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>WA</author><text>This is a bit naive. Software and especially apps these days are more a stream of updates (like Netflix) than a v1.0 you buy once. Updates are expected from users (and app stores).&lt;p&gt;Example: A customer bought your app on iOS 9. It worked perfectly fine. You wrote it once, because you couldn’t expect more revenue from existing customers. It stopped working on iOS 11, because 32-bit support was ended on Apple’s side.&lt;p&gt;Of course, it’s not Apple who gets the blame, it’s you, because your app doesn’t work anymore. But it is supposed to work, because your customer paid good money for it ($4.99).&lt;p&gt;Back in the day, sure, if you bought a software that worked on MS-DOS only, it’s your fault when you got Windows and it didn’t run your software. No expectations, no hard feelings. But iOS is iOS. It’s the thing running average Joe’s smartphones. Software bought for iOS should work on iOS. Forever.&lt;p&gt;Your examples all describe products with an expected expiration date. Software used to have expiration dates. But not anymore. The expectation changed.</text></comment>