On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 21:20:11 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:

>> I don't think that's Gates' vision.  It's the wet dream of the entire
>> software industry.  Rather than selling a license that may never be
>> upgraded, they want you to continue to pay "maintenance" fees so you're
>> a source of continuous revenue.
> 
> My employer does this. But then again, in the 14 months or so that I've
> worked there, I've released several updates with game-changing
> functionality improvements. And we have several more imminently in
> development.

That makes your employer something of an outlier, sadly.

> MS Office, by contrast, hasn't changed noticeably since the 1990s. I'm
> sure if you search hard enough you can find some new features, but
> they're fairly small.

Yeah, incremental changes are more common.  They're low risk, high-
reward, especially with a subscription service.

>> But as usual, Microsoft is bringing up the rear on this, in actuality.
>> Services like Google Apps (for business), Salesforce.com, and even AWS
>> and other cloud "computing platform" providers have been doing this for
>> at least a couple of years.
> 
> I thought the idea behind Google Apps was more that you can access it
> from anywhere. It's not like you're paying a subscription just to run
> the software on your local machine.

Yep, same as Office365.  Or the new Adobe Creative Suite.

> Similarly, AWS is renting server power, not software.

How well I know.

Jim
-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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