More Software is Going Subscription. Good News for Consumers Like You and Me

Subscription soft­ware is here. It’s clear. Get used to it… Because it can offer you some big advan­tages over per­pet­u­al license software.

On Friday, 6 June 2014, Fortune pub­lished the sto­ry of Zuora, a com­pa­ny mak­ing sys­tems to help soft­ware com­pa­nies tran­si­tion their infra­struc­tures and finan­cials to subscription-based sales. 

[T]he real news is that more and more indus­tries are dip­ping their toes–a rare few even jump­ing in head-first—to a subscription-based, recur­ring rev­enue mod­el. At an event host­ed by Zuora [last] week, sev­er­al of these com­pa­nies came togeth­er to dis­cuss the shift­ing land­scape and its oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges. At the obvi­ous top of the subscription-based mod­el list are cloud soft­ware com­pa­nies… but [the] event was also attend­ed by a tele­com firm, an online tooth­brush sell­er and a biotech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, among oth­ers. Their rea­son­ing? People today would rather sub­scribe to ser­vices than pony up the cash to own products.

Read the full arti­cle in Fortune.

The news that Zuora’s event was such a hit with soft­ware mak­ers will undoubt­ed­ly make a good num­ber of peo­ple fear­ful of the future. As a fel­low con­sumer of soft­ware, some­one whose entire liveli­hood depends on using soft­ware that recent­ly went entire­ly subscription-based, I cau­tion against giv­ing in to that fear. Give sub­scrip­tion a fair chance.

I sub­scribe, on a monthly- or annual-payment basis, to Adobe Creative Cloud, Microsoft Office, Evernote Premium, Dropbox, Mindmeister, and a num­ber of oth­er subscription-based soft­ware. Those sub­scrip­tions give me much more val­ue than a per­pet­u­al (pay once and own) license could, or did in the case of Adobe and Microsoft prod­ucts that I’ve relied on, and paid for, for two decades.

With Creative Cloud, for exam­ple, I get not only the desk­top soft­ware, but a suite of add-ons and ser­vices (a suite that will grow sig­nif­i­cant­ly lat­er in 2014). Without Creative Cloud, I’d have to pay sep­a­rate­ly for, or assem­ble from a dis­parate col­lec­tion of third-party ser­vices, half of those add-ons and ser­vices; the oth­er half, such as giv­ing my clients and col­lab­o­ra­tors the option of exam­in­ing, inter­act­ing with, and com­ment­ing on my PSD, AI, and INDD doc­u­ments with­out own­ing Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, sim­ply would­n’t be avail­able to me out­side of Creative Cloud. (For more on that and oth­er value-adds in Creative Cloud, read “Hidden Stars in Your Creative Cloud” by me on CreativePro​.com.)

My $9.99 per month Microsoft Office sub­scrip­tion lets me install some or all of the lat­est Office suite on 5 computers–Windows and/or Mac (I use two of each regularly)–as well as on my iPad and up to 4 oth­er tablets. Those who don’t have as many com­put­ers as I can pay only $6.99 per month for a sin­gle com­put­er install license cou­pled with a sin­gle tablet license. Both sub­scrip­tions include addi­tion­al ser­vices and fea­tures not avail­able from a box of Microsoft Office.

(Yes, I am aware of free, Open Source Office alter­na­tives, and I’ve tried them all; none is ready for full, pro­duc­tion use–at least to sat­is­fy the demands of my pro­fes­sion­al writ­ing, design, pre­sen­ter, and busi­ness own­er workflows.)

This isn’t the same world, with the same indi­vid­ual per­son­’s soft­ware needs, as it was 20 years ago. Users needs have changed, and soft­ware com­pa­nies are try­ing to keep up with us, not the oth­er way around.

Subscriptions aren’t right for every prod­uct, for every per­son, but a sub­scrip­tion mod­el for the right prod­uct, for the per­son will­ing to set aside his fears and give the mod­el a fair and hon­est try, offers many advantages.

Not the least of those advan­tages is evinced by Adobe in the two years since Creative Cloud was launched–releasing to cus­tomers new fea­tures and improve­ments when they’re ready rather than hav­ing to sit on those fea­tures 3–24 months until the next sched­uled prod­uct update. Moreover, all those new fea­tures Adobe has released since May 2012, came to sub­scribers at no addi­tion­al cost. If Adobe had held those fea­tures for CS7-branded, per­pet­u­al license prod­ucts, users would have had to pay a $99-$349 upgrade fee per product–Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Première Pro, Flash, and many others–or fork out up to $2,500 for a bun­dled suite of upgrades. Instead, for the same fee paid to use near­ly all of Adobe’s software–only a max­i­mum of $600 per year and, for Photoshop and Lightroom only sub­scribers, less than $120 per year–every user received two com­plete versions-worth of upgrades and new fea­tures. Photoshop users joy­ous­ly took pos­ses­sion of 3D print­ing, Camera Shake Reduction, Generator, Blur Gallery, back­ground save and auto-recovery, and dozens of oth­er new fea­tures. They got Lightroom, a for­mer­ly $149 prod­uct, for free when it joined the Creative Cloud in 2013. InDesign users received a QR code gen­er­a­tor, EPUB cre­ation improve­ments, Retina dis­play sup­port, and a num­ber of time- and blood pressure-saving enhance­ments to font inte­gra­tion, han­dling, and syn­chro­niza­tion. Illustrator users gained a 64-bit ver­sion of the pro­gram, Live Corners, a ful­ly redesigned Pencil tool, the Touch Type tool, InDesign-style doc­u­ment pack­ag­ing, and many, many oth­er new fea­tures. All of the oth­er Adobe Creative Cloud applications–18 not count­ing the four called out above–received a string of sim­i­lar­ly big, full-version-release-worthy fea­tures as they were cre­at­ed, dis­trib­uted every few months rather than every cou­ple of years, and at no cost beyond the same month­ly sub­scrip­tion fee users would have paid with­out the new fea­tures and upgrades.

Now, as I write this, Adobe will unveil… Well, I’m not allowed to say exact­ly what Adobe will reveal on June 18th, 2014. I can say, how­ev­er, that the announce­ment will include more new things for Creative Cloud users, that, again, won’t cost sub­scribers an addi­tion­al penny.

Again, not all prod­ucts and their users can ben­e­fit from mov­ing to a sub­scrip­tion mod­el. It’s a mat­ter of find­ing the right mix of per­pet­u­al and sub­scrip­tion licens­ing in the soft­ware mar­ket. Some man­u­fac­tur­ers will make mis­takes, yes, con­vert­ing some prod­ucts’ dis­tri­b­u­tion mod­els to sub­scrip­tion only to have those prod­ucts’ mar­kets do a Hindenburg. Of those, some will recov­er, some won’t. For oth­er prod­ucts and their users, how­ev­er, a sub­scrip­tion sales mod­el will be a per­fect fit, the way it is for Adobe’s Creative Cloud and cre­ative pro­fes­sion­als. Give sub­scrip­tion licens­ing a fair, unafraid chance, and you might be pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by the advan­tages it can have to you over per­pet­u­al licensing.