Subscriptions Are Remaking Corporate America (2018)

subscribe to read hahahah<p>For one, I hope subscriptions die. It&#x27;s a pernicious trend that is borderline fraud for consumers (like gyms, profiting from users who simply forget to unsubscribe or making it painfully hard to unsubscribe). It&#x27;s also exclusionary for most of the world for whom the subscription price might be a year&#x27;s income. With downloadable software it was kind of possible to find a crack online, but web apps and content make it almost impossible.It also makes individual property ownership impossible. we need honest,anonymized payments on the web.

The Starcraft community requested subscription content for years during the hots years. The popular reasoning was that the game needed refreshing and updating but that a company can’t afford to do it without incentives - and the ongoing revenue would incentivize them to keep the game in great shape.<p>Then again, you can’t use subscription software at all after the company completely moves on either - no windows 95 compatibility mode to keep using your expensive desktop applications. So you still end up with unusable software eventually - longer peak but a shorter life for more cost<p>The fundamental problem is how difficult and expensive it is to make software and maintain it year after year

I signed up for “subscribe and save” because it gave me like a 5% discount on my Protein purchase from Amazon.<p>Before the next 5 lb jar was supposed to get sent, they sent me an email saying they were about to charge me and I had until X date to cancel.<p>You can make subscriptions work if your intentions are good and you’re not looking at them as a revenue stream based on people forgetting to cancel.<p>I ended up cancelling that next shipment but ordered again a few weeks later.<p>The model isn’t bad. Just depends on the execution.

A year ago I downloaded an interval running app for 10 dollars. Recently I recommended it to a family member only to find out they changed the pricing to 10 dollars per month for the same features.

<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;VryJ4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;VryJ4</a>

Subscriptions for SaaS are essentially a lease, and leases are almost always preferable to sales for the one doing the leasing. See e.g. IBM[1]<p>[edit]<p>Software (and other media with a high development cost, but low marginal cost such as films) are particularly valuable to lease, because you remove the secondary market, which can cannibalize sales.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;40751117?seq=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;40751117?seq=1</a>

So because of the timing on this article, the notes on Apple’s PE ratio are interesting to consider. Apple is now trading at a P&#x2F;E ratio of 23 (Microsoft at 28), and Apple has made a point of trying to reorient &#x2F; reclassify revenue as subscription revenue over the last several years. Even still I think this argument is rather weak, I think looking at a coarse metric like P&#x2F;E to induce a single fact is a little too much.

I wonder if sometime in the future, there is going to be subscription fatigue.

The unintentionally amusing part: &quot;To continue reading... Subscribe or sign in&quot;

Here is an alternative link in case someone cannot read the article because of paywall<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zuora.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-subscriptions-are-remaking-corporate-america&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.zuora.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;12&#x2F;09&#x2F;how-subscriptions-are-remak...</a>

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