Pay me to use it
November 1st, 2005How many times over should you pay for software? by ZDNet’s Phil Wainewright — Old-school software developers believe that creating great software is a service for which they should be rewarded, year in, year out. On-demand vendors know they have to give users more.
This is a really insightful article revealing that in the real world, users prefer the notion of the perpetual licence, which works in exactly the same way as when a consumer buys a book, a CD or a DVD. You pay a one-time fee, and you can access the information for your own private use as often as you like. Of course, multimedia publishers are starting to devise fiendish tricks to thwart that basic principle. The first step was discovering that consumers can be persuaded to adopt a new playback medium every few years or so, necessitating the repurchase of their entire back catalog on the new format. Heaven forbid that home networking should thwart the music and movie industries’ strategy of forcing consumers to rebuy exactly the same content with the emergence of each new format generation.
But the software industry is greedy enough to want to go even further. Ignoring the subtleties of DRM — which snares users by glossing over the unseen ties between content and format — vendors from BEA to Microsoft are eager to take up the blunt cudgel of subscription licensing, which merely asserts that, if you don’t pay up again at the end of the year, your software stops working. The best way to deploy the mechanism of subscription licensing, of course, is as a hosted service, because it gives the software vendor the ability to instantly turn off the software-on-tap if the renewal is not forthcoming. Perhaps this explains Microsoft’s new-found attraction to ‘hosted everything’ (whether or not it can work)
In DRM Crippled CD: A bizarre tale in 4 parts Barry Ritholtz goes into his purchasing a crippled CD.
This tale is part of a larger struggle within the recording and digital download industry — not of P2P or piracy — but one of innovation and competition. As you follow this odd story (broken into 4 increasingly strange parts), you will note that as it gets weirder, Artists and Consumers are the collateral damage. It makes one wonder just what the hell the Recording Industry is thinking about these days:
And not to be left in the dust Sony, Rootkits and Digital Rights Management Gone Too Far. Exposes a clear case of Sony taking DRM too far. The entire experience was frustrating and irritating. Not only had Sony put software on my system that uses techniques commonly used by malware to mask its presence, the software is poorly written and provides no means for uninstall. Worse, most users that stumble across the cloaked files with a RKR scan will cripple their computer if they attempt the obvious step of deleting the cloaked files.
The battle of DRM has only begun with disasterious results.
November 1st, 2005 at 11:26 pm
Someday these people will learn that when your competition is free, you have to provide a better value. Treating your customers like unruly offspring is not the best strategy for success.