It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand.
Evernote and Dropbox were perfect in 2012. Adding more features just to chase new user growth often comes at the expense of confusing the existing user base. Not good
Companies wrote software and sold them in boxes. You paid once and it was yours forever. You got exactly what was in the box, no more and no less.
The company then shipped a new verson in a different box 1-3 years later. If you liked it enough, and wanted the new features, you bought the new box.
I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I upgrade my camera maybe once every ~7 years. Cameras have largely been good enough since 2016 and the 5D Mark IV. I have a pair of R6 mk II that I'll probably hold onto for the next 10 years.
Point being, Lightroom has more or less been feature complete for me for a very, very long time. For about the price of 1/year subscription, I could have purchased a fixed version of Lightroom with support for my camera and not had to buy it again for another 10 years.
We are getting milked for every nickle and dime for no reason other than shareholder value.
It actually discourages real improvements. Before the subscription model, if Adobe wanted to sell me another copy of Lightroom they had to work really hard to make useful features that people actually wanted, enough to the point they'd buy thew version.
Now, they don't have to. You have to keep paying no matter what they decide to do.
That backlash was short lived. Adobe went from $4.4 billion in revenue in 2021 to $23.7 billion. It used to cost $2500 for the "master collection". Now it's $50 a month.
I was one of those people that disliked switching to subscription. I stayed on CS6 for years. I'm also only a relatively casual user though. I once tried Affinity Photo for some work. Their workflow, for my needs, would have made me take ~6hrs more time than the similar workflow in Photoshop. So I paid the $120 a year for photoshop/lightroom because $120 is way less than 6hrs of my life. If of course that was my specific case. It might not be true for others. The point was though, $120, at least for me, is not that much money relative to what I charge/get-paid. So I gave in.
Further, Photoshop is a good example (to me) of software that can't stop updating. New formats come out HEIC for example. New cameras with new raw formats come out. New tech comes out. HDR displays are ubiquitous at this point (all apple products, some large percent of Android, PC, and TVs) (which BTW, Photoshop does not yet truly support so expect an upgrade).
So? Anecdotally, the vast majority of Adobe product users are still upset about the subscription model (but not upset enough to switch to worse software)
> It used to cost $2500 for the "master collection". Now it's $50 a month.
Illustrator-filmmaker-animator-publisher-photographer-web-designers everywhere rejoice!
The subscription model irks me because it's a bit overpriced and they keep trying to shove subscription features on us. No, I don't, and will never care about ridiculously overpriced cloud storage nor generative AI tools. How about adobe fixes issues in the core product first? If given the choice, I would definitely choose a pay-once, no-upgrades licence. But adobe saw their opportunity and started squeezing us for more on a product that was fine.
The plus side of this is it's motivated me to consider building my own photo editing software.
What about it ended up not working out for you?
There was no real backlash against Adobe. They added subscriptions and grew revenue. Some people grumbled online, but they paid, which means they don’t like the old model, they like the new one.
The catch was that old boxed software eventually breaks on new OS versions or devices.
However, SaaS has the potential to "freeze" features while remaining functional 20+ years down the road. Behind the scenes, developers can update server dependencies and push minor fixes to ensure compatibility with new browsers and screen sizes.
From the end-user's perspective, the product remains unchanged and reliable. To me, that’s very good!
In the old days there was no expection when and if users would upgrade anything, so vendors had to take extra care to ensure compatibility or they would lose business. People in a single office could be running 6 different versions of Microsoft Office, and the same file had to be viewable and editable on all of them. A company could decide to upgrade to Office 2010 but stay on Windows XP, so the Office division had the finanical incentive to ensure that newer versions would work on an older OS.
Nowadays the standard is "you must be on the newest version of everything all the time, or the app won't work". Don't want to upgrade to Win 11? Want to use Firefox instead of Chrome? Don't want all the bells and whistles that come with the newest version of the software? Too bad.
Even Windows is doing it now with CUs, bundling feature & vulnerability patches together, then deprecating the last version. You don't have a choice anymore, it's "accept the features or else"
We have great emulators and virtual machines these days. As long as something runs offline and isn't doing anything weird you can just install it once and keep using it and it will never break.
Before 10/26 I have to re-work my desk position manual and a deposit sheet which use Publisher and which MS Word is _not_ suited for. Probably will do them in LyX or LaTeX.
For OSS it’s more psychological: admitting you’re feature complete is cutting off the dopamine hit of building new things.
The only problem is he never updated it to roll forward to future iOS version/iPhone models and it hasn't been usable for years (and years).
This made me search it up - the world moves so fast it's difficult to find any information on it whatsoever.
Absolutely not the case with enterprise software. Zawinski's law is truer than ever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20165602
But people hated that. They considered it “unmaintained”. They moved to Koa and Hono because they appeared to be more “actively maintained”.
I’ll pick on AppZapper here. It doesn’t need to do much, it’s a Mac app that finds the files related to an application and deletes them, for a complete uninstall. It released in 2006, with v2 coming out in 2010. The website looks like it’s still from that era and the last update was in 2020, almost 6 years ago. To be fair, it’s a cool app, from the “delicious” design era. It makes a ray gun “zap” sound as it uninstalls an apps, for no reason other than to be fun. It’s great.
Is it still in active maintenance with nothing to do, and there have been no meaningful changes in how apps are installed in the last 6 years, or has it been abandoned? I really don’t know. If I’m a new user trying to decide if I should pay $20 for this app, what do I do?
I don’t want updates for updates sake, as that leads to enshitification, but there needs to be some sign that a user isn’t throwing money at a dead product. Or in the ls example, developing a workflow around a dead tool.
A ran into a similar question with Yojimbo. It also launched in 2006. When v2 came out it was a paid upgrade and seemed fairly minor for how much was being charged (at least to a broke college student). It felt like they didn’t really care about it. But here we are 20 years later and it still seems to be going. But it was 14 years between v2 and v3, and the last release was in 2023. With 14 years of support, maybe that v2 would have been a worthwhile upgrade for me in hindsight, but when they go years without an update, I start to question if I should be looking to something with more support. Should a new user buy and invest time in putting their data into something that hasn’t been updated in 3 years, or is that a red flag?
These are the things I struggle with.
If it’s something that will become critical to a user’s workflow, that can be a big problem. Why invest in an app without a future?
You've honed right in on what's changed since the old days: Platform vendors (such as Apple) now continuously inject instability into everything.
You might argue that developments such as "changing processor architectures" justify such breaks from stability (though I myself have qualms with one of the richest companies in the world having a general policy of "cutting support and moving on"). But I would point out that Apple (and other vendors) create instability far beyond such potentially-justifiable examples.
To me, it appears as if Apple actively works to foster this modern "software is never finished" culture. This is seen perhaps most clearly by they way they remove apps from their iOS store if they haven't been updated recently (even as little as 2 years!): https://daringfireball.net/linked/2022/04/27/apple-older-gam...
Shouldn't we be demanding stability from our platforms? Isn't the concept of "finished software" a beautiful one? Imagine if you could write a useful program once, leave it alone for 40 years, and then come back to it, and find that it's still just as useful. Isn't this one of the most valuable potential benefits of software as a premise? Are the things we're trading this for worth it?
I keep looking for more useful DOS applications. Have had a git repo for 15+ years that has my config and virtual C:. Once something is installed it will just keep working and I sync that repo to all my machines so it have the exact same things running with the exact same versions. Binaries from 40 years ago still run fine. Just wish more modern applications supported it.
I also have QEMU installations of some Windows versions and old Debian versions (I like Debian 3.0, since the entire library of packages fits neatly on a single DVD ISO... that was the last release that small). Those are also useful for having stable platforms to run offline applications on without having to be bothered by upgrades.
> Dropbox were perfect in 2012
You mean that dumb app that forced you to move files into a single folder instead of adapting to your workflow was prefect?
Yeah, no, we shouldn't normalize that, we should push for improvements
> You mean that dumb app that forced you to move files into a single folder instead of adapting to your workflow was prefect?
Users in 2012 were overwhelmingly of the cohort who's metaphor for doing work on a computer was the filesystem. You opened Files with Programs, worked on them, saved them. You wanted your latest Files on all your computers (1), and you wanted to Share them (2).
Unless users were on a system managed by a sysadmin there were only really two solutions for problems (1)&(2): you would Email the File (A), or you would copy it to a Floppy/CD/USB (B) and physically move it.
Note the caveat of "in absence of a sysadmin". So either on a school or corporate work environment, or if you happened to have a geek in your family/social group who did it as a passion project. Or y'know, if _you_ were the geek you could roll your own.
So of course when Dropbox was first introduced to a technical audience they didn't get it. See the infamous thread ;) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
While you're there, note the tag line in the title of the post "Throw away your USB key"
Now rereading your comment it is clearly an example of exactly what OP was referring to:
> It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand.
If Dropbox did not "adapt to your workflow", then just _don't use Dropbox_.
Instead you attack it as "dumb" and demand it change...and those users for whom Dropbox _was_ perfectly adapted don't have their solution anymore.
Software doesn't have to be forever changing and chasing user growth; it's not a zero-sum game. The bits don't care if no one uses them. But _people_ care if you take away their bits.
> ...we shouldn't normalize that, we should push for improvements
Agreed, you should create a new solution and put it out there! Just as suggested by the post you've replied to :)