Oliver - some thoughts.
Thinking in broad terms, this is the equivalent of the ultimate in software usage licensing; i.e., you pay $x for what some "software" does to/for your system as opposed to buying a license to "own" the rights to use the package on your machine.
From the software vendor side, I see some some upsides and downsides, i.e.:
This is, effectively bypassing the classic channel/distribution of software "packages" business model. The direct approach to sucking out a fee each month from a user's credit card account has a certain appeal - however, on the other hand, processing one invoice and one check from say, Ingram for 10,000 of something isn't exactly hard to do. One downside is that this may be viewed as a back-door approach to getting out of the "sales and distribution of software" business.
The largest downside I see is NETA's ability to support a customer base of typical PC users - heaven knows we've seen the stories about dismal support before. Opening yourself up to more phone calls and e-mails without being able to handle the existing load seems risky.
I think I can predict a trend if this works - some software authors will grasp the concept and it may come to the point where we, the end users of software, end up having to "subscribe" instead of buy.
As the internet further invades our machines and everything starts looking like web pages, it will be hard to dismiss the idea that we don't need to own applications software as a discrete "thing."
Mr. K. |
