Non-stop payments for SOS
p2p news / p2pnet: Many established software vendors are facing dwindling licence and maintenance revenues. So they’re turning to hosted services in a last-ditch attempt to shore up their incomes, says Phil Wainewright on his ZDNet Software As Services blog, “but this time as a service.”
The advantage of “a server=service, hosted software model is that the vendor can command a recurring licence revenue, thus generating annual or even monthly inflows for delivering the same old software,” he continues. But there’s just one problem, namely:
“This perception of the software-as-services model is a jaundiced misrepresentation of the way that on-demand applications actually work.
“No on-demand customer pays simply for the privilege of accessing the software. They pay because the software delivers business results. And that simple distinction exposes once and for all the clay feet, the emperor’s new clothes, of the traditional applications software industry. Their products don’t actually work until they’ve been tweaked and customized by customers or partners, and therefore the licence of itself has no out-of-the-box value to the end user. Asking people to pay for the privilege of using the software isn’t offering a service, it’s taking a liberty. It’s as much of a nonsense as asking a punter to pay a performance fee for whistling a copyrighted tune. If I’m paying a fee to watch a movie, listen to a song, or use an application, I expect to experience a professional, finished execution.
“True on-demand application vendors understand this. Conventional software vendors seem to think the world still owes them a living, just for bothering to write some software.”
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See:-
ZDNet – How many times over should you pay for software?, October 30, 2005
October 30th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Recently, I had to reformat a Winblows XP partition due to a virus. Since I could not locate the XP CD that my customer purchased (yes, she paid good money for this crap) , I attempted to reinstall from another copy. Apon trying to activate the CD The installation code was refused by Microsoft. There was no way to contact Microsoft to resolve the problem. Rather than using the XP hack that is commonly available on the Internet, I suggested SuSE Linux to my customer. My customer now has an operating system that provides everything she needs for what she does on the web without all of the annoyances.
If she is forced into being a punter sometime in the future, then the XP hack may become an option. Micro$oft can screw people only so many times before they get angry.
October 30th, 2005 at 8:09 pm
…and here is another with simular experiences that is a lost customer to Microsucks. I got a worm in my home network. New enough that there were no anti-removal tools out yet. I learned through install process that didn’t get rid of it either. By the time I learned the method to remove the worm from the hd I had installed XP enough times that Microsucks blacked balled not one but two legal copies of the OS. I won’t buy another copy of it to be faced with this same rip off down the line yet again. Nor will I worry about Microsucks efforts to catch those they think are getting a free ride on cracked software. I dropped the whole mess in favor of Ubuntu Linux and never returned to Winblows.
Know what? I am far happier with the choice and surfing is once again a pleasure and not a guarded experience.