
Cloudy with a Chance of Lock-In - janvdberg
http://jacquesmattheij.com/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-lock-in
======
pjc50
The "Internet of Rentiers" argument is exactly right. Things are made
unnecessarily cloud-y for monetisation reasons.

In some ways this is the end of the software piracy wars. Software as a single
purchase that you buy once and use forever without restriction is basically
over. Besides, it needs updating to cope with both security threats and
changing ecosystems. So that requires ongoing effort. But users don't want to
pay for it in the first place.

So the solution we've arrived at by default is for the software to remain
inside the datacentre fortress where the user can't pirate it, and make the
user bring their data inside the fortress instead where it can be ransomed.
Quite a lot of SaaS is "free!" but with monetised privacy invasion or the
questionable gimmicks of free2play games.

IoT makes it possible for this untransparent renting business model to be
brought to physical objects. If you buy an appliance once and then use it for
20 years, to the capitalist you're a bad customer. Why do that when you can
pay for annual fridge software updates and a new fridge every 5 years when it
stops being "smart"?

~~~
nostrademons
This started at least 20 years ago. I remember my dad complaining when I was a
pre-teen about how everything was moving towards disposable or recurring-fee
models, and you couldn't buy anything that was built to last and hold onto it
for a lifetime anymore.

It's kinda ironic - during the Bush II presidency everyone was talking about
the "ownership society", but the trend today has been toward the "renters'
society", where consumers own nothing, the means of production are
increasingly centralized in a few specialized producers, and everybody pays
out of pocket for momentary needs. It's accelerating, too: car ownership =>
leases => Uber, suburban homes => urban apartments, vacation homes =>
timeshares => prepackaged "experiences", careers => gig economy, pay for
printers => pay for ink, books => the Internet, videos & DVDs => Netflix, CDs
=> Spotify, exercise bikes => gym membership, building companies to last =>
hitting quarterly numbers.

I wonder sometimes why consumers put up with it, but most seem to actually
prefer renting things for the short term rather than buying them for the long
term. It's like the time preferences of society have compressed radically, and
where people would used to think about investing in things that last for 30
years, they now focus on what they need in the next 30 minutes.

~~~
frik
Very good points. I wonder why many consumers act like that.

I understand that companies prefer to rent or lease because of tax avoidance
and/or lowering overhead (fixed costs) (because of inflexible accounting
programs, blabla).

On the otherside, as a consumer (and if you have the money and your interest
is longterm), why not just buy it? Why rent/lease something? In the long term
you are better of buying it. Renting/Leases are always more expensive in the
long run.

Also owning something is a lot more rewarding, relaxing, (and it can be used
many years later) than handling some leased/rented subject with utmost care.

~~~
nostrademons
I've got a hypothesis, but it's kinda out-there. It has to do with shifting
time priorities across society.

The generations that grew up in the 50s-80s could be reasonably confident that
the world a decade later would be more or less what it was before. Fashions
would change, social movements would get started, more home appliances would
be introduced, but as long as nuclear war never happened, the basic economic
underpinnings of society wouldn't change too much. And so it made sense for
them to buy things for the long term, because the purchase they made now would
still be relevant & useful in 20 years.

Starting with the Netscape's IPO in 1995 and perhaps exacerbated by the fall
of communism in the early 90s, that changed. Even before they came of age,
Millenials had witnessed the dot-com boom & crash (in which many of their
elders lost their life savings); obsolescence of PCs every 2-4 years; 9/11;
the rise of MP3 sharing and then its clampdown; the rise of cellphones, their
replacement by smartphones, and then the 1-2 year upgrade cycle of continually
getting a new smartphone; the 2008 financial crisis; manufacturing jobs moving
from the U.S. to Japan to India to Bangladesh to China to Southeast Asia; and
the rise of sharing-economy companies providing services that you previously
needed to buy a product for. Many have also been personally burned by
investments in skills that were supposed to be a sure thing, like taking on
$100K in student loan debt and not being able to get a job afterwards or
landing your dream job and then being fired or laid off 3 months later.

The combined effect of all these is to send the message that the future is not
worth planning for. There will be better products on the market in 2 years.
There will be new services. That skillset that's so hot right now may be
completely obsolete. The education that everyone says is crucial to your
future won't get you a damn thing. The financial investment that's up 400% now
may crash to zero tomorrow. You may have to move to a new city to find work,
or to follow a significant other who needs to find work.

When the future becomes radically unpredictable, it makes sense to buy for the
here-and-now, because the durable product you carefully invested in may be
useless anyway.

~~~
pjc50
This sounds very plausible to me. The world is uncertain enough that it's
safer to pay for it month by month rather than risk a stranded investment in
the wrong thing. The only "stable" investment is real estate, which has
therefore shot up in price. Physical "durable" goods are by comparison very
cheap.

~~~
jacquesm
That's flawed reasoning. The uncertainty should cause you to save before you
spend and to own rather than rent on a contract that you can't get out of.
After all, even if you have a stranded investment it will not cost you more
for the next x months. But a rental agreement will usually have termination
conditions that need to be met and if you can't get out of it then you're much
worse off than if you owned the item outright.

The biggest money maker for such subscription type purchases are impulse
purchases. Buy now on cheap credit, pay a premium for a long time on top of
the value of the item. And for those type of purchases if you were to do them
with money saved over time you probably wouldn't buy them at all. (And your
life would be better, not worse, all this stuff is really owning us.)

~~~
pjc50
I suspect we also need to look at carrying costs. Let's go back to the list
from the comment above:

 _car ownership = > leases => Uber suburban homes => urban apartments vacation
homes => timeshares => prepackaged "experiences" careers => gig economy pay
for printers => pay for ink books => the Internet videos & DVDs => Netflix CDs
=> Spotify exercise bikes => gym membership building companies to last =>
hitting quarterly numbers._

Gig economy and short-term companies are arguably not a choice but exogenous.
The job for life has been replaced by "at will" redundancies.

Home downsizing is clearly down to rising cost; saving up gets less and less
feasible. But the move from suburbs into the centre is cultural.

Home gym => gym membership I suspect is also down to increasing real estate
cost. A gym is much cheaper than the incremental mortgage cost of an extra
room.

Media libraries => Spotify/Netflix is about increasing choice. They're not
entirely replacing the library (people are buying more _vinyl_ for totemic
ownership), but replacing the radio and TV channels. Replacing someone else's
limited range of choices with a much wider one. It then gets put on in the
background as wallpaper.

(dear god this site needs a formatting reminder and preview button)

~~~
jacquesm
You can resize the input box, that goes a long way towards keeping an overview
over what you wrote for larger comments. Hover over the lower right hand
corner of the edge of the box, then a resize mouse pointer should appear.

~~~
frik
That's browser dependent, and only a few let you do that. Try that on a mobile
browser...

------
LoSboccacc
> In the case of the TV the service component wasn’t even mentioned at all
> until well after installing the bloody thing

In europe there's a seven day money back no question answered right to protect
consumers from hardware trying to pull these tricks. Won't last forever, but I
could recently return a digital camera trying to pull this very trick.

Vote with the wallet, educate those who don't etc etc. It wont ultimately
work, but if we can postpone it enough it'll become a next generation problem.

------
rdtsc
> In the case of the TV the service component wasn’t even mentioned at all
> until well after installing the bloody thing

Yap same here. Bought a TV (Vizio). Without agree-ing to their "we'll monitor
everything about you" disclaimer couldn't connect it to the wifi, couldn't
start any of the apps. So agreed to it. Then had set up rules in the router's
firewall to block it and have to un-block it if I want to watch Netflix for
example. What a pain. Supposedly I could make a more complicated rule to allow
only netflix traffic and no other traffic from it...

There was no, "let me connect to Netflix" but don't auto-update anything,
don't phone home, don't send metrics etc. It was all or nothing. And then of
course the apps are slow, crappy, and buggy.

~~~
parennoob
Wow, that makes me never want to buy a Vizio, ever. Although from what I hear,
their apps are pretty bad anyway, so you'd probably be better off using an
external box (Roku or AppleTV or Chromecast) for your Netflix et cetera. This
assumes that said devices are not phoning back to _their_ home, which might be
a slippery assumption.

~~~
jkestner
Of course they are. But it's interesting that you and I care about _who_
phones back home - why do we trust Roku more than Vizio? Is it that it feels
"unnatural" for an existing object like a TV to change the relationship?

And of course, most people actually don't care about this.

~~~
rdtsc
That is a good point, I have Roku as well in another room (connected to a
"dumb" older TV). And yeah, I trust Roku more. And I trust Google -- I have a
Gmail. Heck old work trusted Google with their internal discussion and files!

Thinking about it, I guess I made a (perhaps bad) bargain -- you can have my
data if you give me something useful and working that I want back. Roku works
and gives me something useful, working apps and I expected I had to do it when
I bought it. Google gives me Gmail, so it can spy on me. Vizio gave me a TV,
but I paid for it, and I didn't expect that it would need an invasive home
phoning agreement to be usable.

------
overgard
The worst offenders, in my opinion are operating systems. Every time I start
my computer I get an annoying prompt to sign into iCloud, which will reappear
immediately on cancel, so I end up having to close it about five times. Apple
is trying to browbeat me into using their service by being as annoying as
possible. At this point, even if iCloud was great I wouldn't use it on
principal.

Microsoft is even worse, not only do they have their own annoying cloud
"features" they opt you into, now they've decided to administer your computer
for you from afar. I had to wait an hour yesterday for Windows to install a
giant update that requires multiple reboots because they tried to install it
overnight. Worse, it was applying it at the boot screen, so I couldn't even
pause it or read the web while I waited. If Microsoft can just put my laptop
out of commission for hours on a whim, with no warning, I can't trust their os
for anything important. I'm not a Linux fanboy in the least, but since both
major os's make me feel like I'm just renting my own computer I might make the
switch.

------
cptskippy
It really irks me that I can't find a high end television set that isn't
Smart. I'd rather not have a bunch of features baked into my TV that are going
to stop working in months or years. I received an email from Roku just the
other day telling me about buttons on my remote that will no longer work, I
doubt TV manufacturers would even be bothered to give you that courtesy.

~~~
amorphid
I don't see the point of a Smart TV. My TV is a 40" monitor for my Chromecast.
I don't know what value a Smart TV could offer me.

~~~
cubano
Nothing at all, but I'm sure the target consumer for one doesn't post on HN.

~~~
SyneRyder
I just bought one - I planned to get a non-smart TV, but found a Smart TV on
sale for the same price. I expected to use my Chromecast for everything, but
instead I'm using all the built-in Smart apps and the Chromecast very rarely.
The usability of controlling everything from one remote (and even having a
remote) is better, and means everyone can watch Netflix etc regardless of
whether they brought a phone with a Netflix account or not.

~~~
CaptSpify
How long have you owned the TV though? The concern is that 3 years from now,
will they still work, vs the easily replaceable Chromecast?

~~~
russjr08
Well if it was the same price, then you could just add a chromecast or such
later, and it wouldn't be a big deal. I definitely agree under normal
circumstances where smart TVs are way more expensive.

------
danieltillett
I offer two version of my software - a system that can be run offline at your
faculty and a version that is basically cloud based. The two versions are
aimed at different types of users. It works well as an approach.

The cause of Jacques complaint is that it is very hard to sell a perpetual
offline version at the true economic value of the software. In my case the
customer would need to pay 72x the monthly cost for the value to me to be
equivalent. Everytime I discuss this with a customer they don't want to pay
anywhere near this amount. I know much more about how likely a customer is to
keep using a product long term than the customer :)

------
mnutt
Ignoring the fact that a lot of software/hardware with cloud components is
about lock-in, lately I've been on a quest to replace as many cloud components
as I can with sandstorm.io apps.

Some things just work better with centralized cloud-based storage, but there's
no reason users shouldn't be in control of that data. Social networks are the
big exception. People are working on decentralized social networks, but it's a
much harder problem. Many cloud services are just data storage, though.

------
jamiesonbecker
I agree, but only mostly: there will always be companies that 'get it' and
offer both a cloud and a standalone version.

For example (plug), we offer a product called Userify (ssh key management for
the cloud) but we also offer a (rather expensive) enterprise version for
people to deploy it on-site. In fact, we recommend that, since it's more
secure for you to deploy and lock down your own version in your own VPC or DC.

And this is good for us, since the cloud version is free in its base form, and
the enterprise version is currently the only way we're driving any revenue.

As time goes on, these models will stabilize and companies will go back to
giving people what they actually want. You can't optimize for yourself
forever; at some point, you lose customers.

So, as a counterpoint, large mobile providers have largely stopped subsidizing
phones (which was blatant lock-in) in order to give people what they really
want, which is choice. It makes more sense for the customer, and _therefore_
automatically makes more sense for the company. Unless they have absolute
market power, they can't throw their weight around that much.

So I'm not worried about TV manufacturers that require a monthly subscription.
Those will get returned to the store fairly quickly and the ones that hide
their costs will have a growing black stain on their brand and eventually fade
into oblivion. It's said that customers are fickle, but customers as a whole
are really quite rational.

(Counterpoint to this counterpoint: Apple and everything they make.)

------
Animats
Autodesk recently went this way. All their products, even old AutoCAD, are now
rented, not sold.

~~~
jacquesm
In a way this is a golden opportunity for open source.

~~~
gavazzy
Ha! Good luck creating open-source CAD software that engineers and
manufacturers will trust and use.

~~~
jacquesm
You would have said the exact same thing about schematic capture and layout
not that long ago, about compilers and operating systems a while longer ago
than that.

~~~
AlexeyBrin
The real question is, given how much work is involved in implementing a CAD
system, how can a person/business make money from an open source CAD ?

~~~
bsder
You can't. And that's why all the open source CAD systems suck.

People pay $10K per license to Altium or Solidworks for a reason.

~~~
Animats
Try FreeCAD. It's a true solid modeler, like Autodesk Inventor. The solid
modelling has roughly the same functionality as Inventor or SolidWorks, but
the user interface is far worse. It's so open source. There's a pane which
shows you the standard output from Python, in case something happens to print
something. (This is mostly useful for people writing extensions to the program
in Python, and, in typical open-source style, it's far too prominent.) There
are panes in which dialogs appear, but they don't fit properly; they may be
higher or wider than the pane. They're all QT-ugly, of course. There's no
visibility in the UI of what's important and what isn't. Everything has a
large number of properties, most of which are irrelevant unless you're
developing. And, of course, the program has a huge number of modal hotkeys.

Basically, someone slapped the UI of an integrated development environment
onto a CAD program. That's so open source.

This is a rather good program, too. The underlying solid modeler seems to have
all the right stuff. That's the hard part. Then they blew the UI.

3D content generation UIs are very hard. Some of the issues:

\- Things may be very cluttered. Selecting can be difficult.

\- Some systems allow you to select volumes, faces, edges, or vertices. In
tight spots, selection needs smarts.

\- For some operations, you need to select a subject and an object. But you
may need to pan, zoom, or rotate between those two selections. Exactly when
thing get deselected is a big issue.

\- Most GUIs are subject-verb. (Select something, then do operation.) That
follows Macintosh and Windows practice. This doesn't always work out for CAD,
where you may need to select multiple things, multiple kinds of things,
deselect mistakes, and perhaps perform other operations while selecting. Bad
solutions involve holding down SHIFT or CTRL or two mouse buttons at once.

------
jensmittag
Great article, it expresses my own thoughts and attitude very well.

I understand why companies aim for this lock-in, but I believe that the
question to ask is: why are such companies successful with such lock-in based
products? I believe that they are successful with such strategies because of
the lack of matching alternatives that offer the same usability for the
majority of users. And when talking about usability I explicitly include the
aspect of operation management. With cloud-based solutions, operation
management is effectively zero from a user perspective.

During the past 10-20 years, the web has evolved significantly w.r.t. content
rendering, content authoring, and content transport solutions. Today people
can very easily watch movies, read articles, listen to music, or write
articles, upload movies, and share music themselves. At the same time, the web
did not (or only slightly) evolve in its underlying architecture. It does not
provide the primitives required to bring content producers and consumers
directly together. If you are a content producer, you either need to use a
centralized service operated by a third party, or you need to have the
technical skills to setup and operate your own IT-infrastructure.

The effect of this gap is even more significant if you look at todays users.
Since they have multiple devices, the become content producers on one device,
and their own content consumer on the next device. While technically skilled
people could easily implement own alternatives (that run on their desktop) in
the past to get away from online services and protect their privacy, they are
faced with the challenge that such an application needs to feature smart
synchronization among multiple devices in order to provide the same level of
usability.

------
meesterdude
I bought omnigraffle several years ago, and have been using it a lot ever
since. But really, it works for me. I know it. There is a new version, which
adds some needed features, but I just don't need them enough to upgrade for
$100 or so.

So, they only ever made the original $120 off of me, years ago. But they
obviously still need to be making money in the meantime; but short of
incompatibility in some way, i doubt i'll ever upgrade. So, I'm a huge fan of
their software, but they could go out of business for being so good, if nobody
ever upgrades. But if they went to a cloud solution, I wouldn't pay for that
either, because I don't use it THAT much, and already have the app which works
fine.

Same goes for Sublime Text; I paid for 2, but I doubt I'll buy 3; or even use
it. But yet there's a company behind it that obviously needs to keep making
money.

The answer, classically, seems to be new users, and new versions. If your
software is really good, different products. Or just target Enterprise and
charge a ton.

It's a tricky situation if you're trying to make money in software.

But on the web, you can build one thing, and people can pay you every month to
use it. You don't even have to change anything, just keep it running. That's a
pretty attractive model in contrast.

I don't like office in the cloud, and I don't like adobe in the cloud. I think
there is probably a market of people who do, and that's great. But for those
things, I prefer them on the desktop.

Same goes for music. I like having it with me; not tied to a music service.

But movies and TV shows are often watch-once for me, so a service like Netflix
works well for something like that.

But as someone launching a collaborative SaaS, I can appreciate both sides.
For me, the immediate need is SaaS, and secondary to that is offering buy
once, use forever, once the economics are in place. I think there will always
be some people who just want to pay for a SaaS, and others who refuse to but
will pay for onsite. So, I think the best thing you can do is target both.
People usually want to pay for something, if its worth it and fair. But what's
fair and reasonable is different for everyone, so cast a wider net and you'll
catch more fish.

And maybe one day, I'll buy that new version of Omnigraffle.

------
Justsignedup
Funny, I feel that some interesting online tools have little business being
online:

Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your emails...
It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your server can
send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less
what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.

There are many such examples of services which don't really need to be online,
but they want that monthly payment.

Furthermore, I remember buying SpaceMonkey. It was a great idea, except that I
had this 2tb hard drive that was just sitting around being unable to be used
because I refused to pay a yearly $50 fee. I ended up just prying it open and
using the hard drive (mind you, you pay for the drive too).

One positive one is WesternDigital's NAS drive (my cloud). It has a feature
you can turn on to use it as a "cloud storage device", but that is an optional
feature which you don't have to use, instead you can have it 100% local NAS,
or turn it on (granted from a security perspective, I'd rather NOT have it
open to the open internet)

~~~
vonklaus
> Email services like "SendWithUs" which allow for A-B testing of your
> emails... It has very little use being on someone else's servers. If your
> server can send an email, you can easily run a lightweight service that does
> more or less what they do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.

I have only experimented a bit with these services and am not actively
marketing, but it is my understanding that there are several reasons to use
them:

> you can easily run a lightweight service that does more or less what they
> do. They sell a product, you pay for updates.

* You can run your own git/github repo, make your own irc setup and write your own javascript framework but you can get to market faster using React, github and slack.

* Mail is annoying from what I understand. You can have your servers blacklisted pretty quickly even if you are simply trying to do casual email, this is abstracted away.

* I have build email templates, and it is pretty annoying because cross compatibility is hell. The assumptions and basic template I used to put together my email was from a service like this, I think mailgun. They keep updated info on compatibility and provide free templates and inline tooling to get this done quick even if you don;t use the service. However, if no one used the service these resources would have to be found from various blogs, etc. More time not developing.

* Building tracking and programatic email generation and transactional logic is probably not so trivial that the free for < 10K email limit most providers have would make the engineering spend worth it.

So the point is, some services are useful because they provide more value than
building them in house. I have never used spacemonkey but the value prop is
you can keep your data locally and back it up yourself. If you didn't want to
pay the fees you could just buy 1 (or if you wanted redundancey) 2 drives and
do it yourself.

The value propositions are presented up front. The real issue is when these
services pivot or change and you are left in the lurch.

------
mathgeek
> All this of course to ‘better serve you’ and ‘for your convenience’, those
> two sentence fragments are like little alarm bells that you’re about to be
> screwed.

I'm glad that I'm not the only one who thinks this way when I see those words.

~~~
CaptSpify
I've taken to looking at marketing statements in general as from "opposite-
world". If a sales-blurb is about how great their customer-service is, I'm
guessing they are trying to clean up a bad reputation, without fixing the
problem. Same thing when they say their product is "reliable".

When I see "to better serve you", all I can think of is: "we found a way to
make things better for us"

------
saturdaysaint
I have a hard time coming up with any pressing example of this in categories
of software that interest me - I wish he'd provided more?

~~~
ctphipps
Adobe Creative Cloud

~~~
anon4
Adobe (and others) are in a tight spot called "how do we keep selling our
product when we've achieved almost-100% market saturation".

A sort of silver lining is that with the rentier model companies will have an
interest to produce more reliable products, rather than ones which break
exactly one day after the warranty ends.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Not just 100% market saturation, but often "no real reason to upgrade". Adobe
CS2 is actually offered for free download off Adobe's website, and it does 98%
of what anyone needs Creative Suite for anyways. The biggest problem is it
doesn't recognize some features of newer Creative Suite files, like folders of
layers in Photoshop.

I have a Photoshop CS5 license, and I can't ever conceive of any reason I'd
pay for CC. I have gotten my money's worth out of Photoshop CS5, and I'll
continue to get that value, but I don't use Photoshop nearly enough to ever
justify a monthly cost.

~~~
anonymousab
I think that they host CS2 for the sake of letting existing license holders
continue using the software, and public access is just an obvious side effect
iirc.

