Matisyahu's Blog

I was watching a video regarding the rise in subscription based software and the bigger theory of everything becoming a subscription. I remember when the first subscription software appeared in New Zealand over 25 years ago, I saw it being sold in Dick Smith back when it was in business as a physical store – you paid for a one year subscription and on the piece of cardboard you received there was a serial number that you would enter in when launching for the first time and you’d be good for a year. The way it was marketed was that it was cheaper to pay per year (assuming you upgraded every time a new version was released) rather than having to pay for a copy of office upfront (keeping in mind that Microsoft also had ‘Microsoft Select’ which allowed employees to install Office on their own computer for a nominal amount (normally just the price of the CD or DVD)).

When I saw it the first time I thought ‘no one is going to buy that’ but what it did allow was for Microsoft to get a vibe check on what end users were willing to pay – test something on a small scale, get feedback and then make any changes as necessary. It would be interesting to see how the small scale experiment informed their future product roadmap. I also remember when Apple launched the iTunes Music Store and how you could purchase individual tracks for a couple of NZ dollars or a buy a whole album then download it so you could have it instantly with the icing on the cake being when they started to sell DRM free music which allowed you to backup your music collection you bought online.

Then what we started seeing (as broadband became more widely available) was the rise of Netflix and Spotify with Netflix more of a competitor to pay television but Spotify promoted the idea of paying an amount each mouth and have unlimited music collection available at your finger tips – why pay NZ$20-30 per CD when you can have it all on your device of choice. Such an offer is tempting when you’re thinking that you’re paying around half the price of a CD per month and having a massive library to select from. It is interesting though how there has been a rebound in sales for physical media – with money being tight I think people are realising the benefit of having physical media which avoids having an ongoing amount being taken out each month. Moving over to physical media puts you in the drivers seat on terms of your monthly bills. When you have left over money you buy a CD, when you don’t have left over money then you’re happy knowing you haven’t got money going out of your account regardless of how often you use that service.

Coming back to the original reason why I wrote this blog post, when someone sells you convenience then more often than not there are strings attached – on going to bills that need to be paid, one more additional bill because you’d prefer not having to do it yourself so instead you outsource that to someone else to take care of. This is what the whole Windows model is based around these days – get the operating system for free and Microsoft makes the money up on selling cloud services or taking a cut when software companies sell their software through the Windows store. This is the reason why they make you create an online account – it is their way to get you into their ecosystem and then eventually you become dependent on it because now your whole life is now dependent on the services you pay Microsoft for.

This is part of the reason why alternatives to Windows struggle to gain ground because it demands that the end user put in some minimum effort in terms of learning how to use the system which is why the established players bet on most people unwilling to put in the bare minimum in favour of paying a subscription so then they don’t have to deal with it all. This is part of the reason why AI is being pushed so hard because the AI companies hope that once they get you hooked that you’ll keep paying through the nose and thanks to the cognitive decline it causes (link) I guess like a drug addict you’ll keep paying for that AI fix.

Now, with that being said, I’m not saying that you should pull up sticks and build your own server, host your own email server etc. but I think it is important to recognise the hidden cost when you offload responsibility onto someone else. In some cases it makes a whole lot of sense – could I setup a NextCloud server, organise a static IP address and run a server myself? sure but am I interested in dealing with the ongoing maintenance associated with keeping my server secure? probably not. The question that one should ask is whether buying convenience is worth the price of dependency – paying someone to take care of what is sitting in the cloud? sure but does it make sense to keep renting the same music over and over again when your music collection has only increased by maybe a couple of CDs every year.