Is anyone aware analyses of how this affects a company, their employees, their products? I find it very difficult to reason about value with subscription services, especially when the costs are even more divorced from labor than normal.
Subscription software is just a way to fleece gullible people, most software before mass internet penetration allowed stealing software (I refuse to call software as a subscription a rational thing for 99% of software).
Is just a way for companies to sell you the same shit repackaged with only minimal effort. You don't seem to grasp the fundamental principle of a corporation is to give you the LEAST possible service for the highest possible price. AKA it's fuck you I got mine.
99% of the time Software as a service preys on gullible people and flaws in your psychology you aren't aware of. Best to stay away.
Piracy actually put pressure on companies to innovate because you could get the complete version for free there was some incentive to improve the product to make it better than the pirate version, as strange as that sounds. Piracy is actually good for competition because most people are honest, if that wasn't the case Microsoft, EA, Valve, etc couldn't have become rich pre-internet where it was trivially easy to pirate everything by just copying the files.
Modern DRM is literally holding files hostage using the internet as a dongle and using encryption.
So no software as a service preys on gullible people to sell you last years with minor tweaks at inflated prices.
Maximizing total number of goods is not the same as maximizing goods per dollar spent. You want 1 smart car, and you want to pay as little for it as they will let you.
I tend to agree (hence why I commented), but I was curious if there was any methodology out there for figuring out things like margins and man hours per subscription cycle—I am fairly illiterate in reading through quarterly releases, for instance, and I'm not even sure if this thing is required to be reported.
Software is largely enormous margin in an era of increasing drm and encryption because they can delay piracy indefinitely like on mobile with client-server gacha games.
Check out the revenue for mobile, it's insane because it preys on mass stupidity and tech illiteracy.
Either way many segments of software you can be sure are making insane profits like Overwatch, league of legends with selling flags for skins.
The internet has given tech companies 24/7 access to the super rich, the super gullible and super mentally ill.
Think about that for a second, before the internet people with brainless spending habits had no direct access to companies they got their products through intermediaries. The internet is a game changer for software companies because they can trap software inside "the world sized PC" we call the internet.
The internet remember, is the worlds biggest motherboard, and whoever programs the motherboard owns the motherboard. That's how we ended up with steam drm, uplay, origin, etc. We've been getting hacked software and slaughtered on the privacy freedom front because the average consumer is retard level stupid when it comes to technology.
Many software companies are getting away with the crime of the century. I'll see if I can't poke around and find some helpful guides for you to decode corporate speak.
