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Posted by bartb
Mar 19, 2018 at 07:41 PM
Not currently. I think its an appealing idea. It appears to me that more and more software is going to a subscription model which can become very pricey really quickly. Setapp kills two birds with one stone, it keeps subscription costs low and developers get paid.
Posted by satis
Mar 19, 2018 at 09:21 PM
I’m all for subscription pricing, for a number of reasons. And Setapp lets small devs successfully get into subscriptions.
For devs, subscriptions usually mean less pirating, and no need to hold off on update features on the old sales model (where they’re stockpiling new features so as to sell upgrades). With subscriptions devs can roll out updates to users regularly and add support new standards and features outside of the confines of a standard product cycle, and by doing so they’ll know they’re bringing all their users with them, which reduces support costs otherwise spent on old versions.
The subscription model can fund more r&d with a predictable and constant revenue stream. (And that revenue stream can grow as pirates start to buy subscriptions: in areas like Poland where piracy is historically extremely high, Adobe has found that the percentage of Creative Cloud subscribers is significantly higher than average. Why? Because offering a monthly plan makes it easier for individuals to buy products that they may have not been able to afford with an up-front perpetual license.)
Ultimately for devs successful subscriptions result in a steadier, less volatile income stream so they can better plan projects and updates while having a good idea of what can be budgeted based on predicted income streams. And ultimately that’s all good for customers, who get more regular updates/bugfixes of their apps, and less of a chance the dev will stop supporting the app.
What Setapp does is make subscriptions more palatable to users while avoiding the problem of the rise of individual subscription costs causing multiple bites at customers (to the extent that some people balk at it).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with monthly fees. We don’t bat an eye when we write checks for cable TV, Internet, phone, gas, electric, magazines, mortgage, and so on. We don’t even object to paying monthly fees for digital services. Netflix, after all, has 44 million people worldwide paying monthly, and Spotify/Apple_Music have 100 million subscribers between them.
I’m just a little surprised that Apple didn’t look at Adobe’s (and Microsoft’s) success and consider offering similar app bundles/tiers for set monthly charges. Maybe they still will….
Posted by bartb
Mar 20, 2018 at 01:46 AM
Great post!
Touching on your last sentence regarding Adobe & Microsoft - MS is enjoying a lot of success with Office 365. I think they are aiming to move their apps fully into the cloud and eliminating their standalone desktop apps. I have been using MS OneNote since Day One but I think the handwriting is on the wall (the future is the cloud, along with monthly subscription fees).
So, I feel its time to move on. I am migrating all my OneNote data to Devon Think Pro. I love OneNote and have had a lot of success using it in my corporate worklife. But when maintaining a personal knowledge base, I prefer to have my app AND data files local to my desktop.
Posted by satis
Mar 20, 2018 at 03:01 AM
After many years of using DevonNote, then DevonThink and then DevonThink Pro, I migrated away from it (before they revised the iOS app so it finally was usable), in part because of a clunky UI. It’s a very useful and powerful app but I wasn’t using all its features, and I found a number of things about it frustrating to use. (A small example: for years and only until recently, when updating, the app would override your preferences if you’d turned off the drawer/clipper and turn it back on. Devs ignored my radar about this for 3+ years.)
I migrated all my DTP notes over to EagleFiler, which I find to be fast and elegant. No dedicated cross-platform solution this way, though I believe one could put the files in Dropbox and access them on iOS. (I just haven’t felt the need to try so far.) One project I’m going to do this year is taking 50,000+ emails and try archiving them in EagleFiler. It’s supposed to Just Work. We’ll see….
Posted by washere
Mar 20, 2018 at 05:13 AM
Online, big packages are going the free direction, DropBox Paper, Google Docs etc with others joining in. Will be the same for other areas unless specialized, then even they will lose to Data.
Offline, numerous Office suites for all platforms of varying sizes, prices etc all opening up docs, xls, ppt, DBs etc. Or free open-source wares. In office arena alone, OpenOffice or the migrating devs/users to even better LibreOffice. Not to mention numerous PortableApps which can fit on a tiny usb stick.
The big money will be online, made by the giants, by giving away the wares and getting the metrics and data. The users becomes the product via their data. And also the powerbase to be tapped as the Facebook/Russia saga just showed today. FB lost tens of billions of dollars in shares value today. Due to Data, it’s future’s control of, as threatened by legislation. For every loser, there will be new winners.
For niche software, most secure and promising area is not general productivity genres.They either have to sell out early or be beaten by the same richer companies sooner or later. Best bet is to go into very niche areas: finance, engineering, manufacture, infrastructure, science, transport etc etc. But needs expertise knowledge or partnering. The general productivity software arena has few top winners and no long term security.
However if you can get into the data game, then you are looking at even bigger bucks. The FB data on the usb stick that Russian linked professor sold to Cambridge Analytica, looked at by lawyers investigating undeclared campaign finance violations is being approximately valued at $100m. That’s the golden-egg, if you can create a golden-egg laying chicken, you are looking at billion$. Which makes the rest look like chicken feed. Data.