patrick.net

I know it’s different for business vs personal use, but I refuse to buy annual fee type software as a rule. I’d rather own the right to use the program as a one time fee than as an annually occurring fee for service. Example: MSOffice. I keep my version of 7.0 rather than “upgrade” to a version I have to pay for every year. Fuck a bunch of that! The program was fine 10 years ago.

I just wonder what all of these companies and enterprises are going to do the day MS or Amazon goes bankrupt or at least their Cloud Server division?

Will these companies be too big to fail because they run so much that should have never been outsourced in the first place?
I can envision a scenario where AWS or Azure bad management intentionally runs their finances into the ground, with bad compensation behavior. Much like Banks and Finance institutions do all the time. We the Tax payers would most definitely have to step in and foot the bill, because so many City, County, State and Federal Government data is housed on those servers. Also just imagine how it would upset thousands and thousands of large and small companies they also house the data for. If they went belly up it would totally crash our economy and Governments would come to a stand still.

I'm waiting for it to Boomerang back. I'm one of the few Enterprise programmers that know how to write transactional software tailored to individual companies and the industry they serve. There's no Framework and Endpoints for Rick McCalister's quarky way he runs his Specialty Items distribution business. So Rick is trapped using these clunky over heaped ERP's and CRM's. There's no features for his special book keeping needs, no features for his unique inventory system. So he has to conform to these SAAS like Sales Force, SysPro, Netsuite, then he has to reinvent his business model around a cookie cutter solution losing all of his Mojo edge that gave him uniqueness.
It sounds slick in the sales presentation but Rick's get's it implemented and finds that many of the features requires trading partners and vendors have to change the way they handle PO's and Supply chain processes. Many wont to it, so then you're stuck with doing custom hacks that are like shoving water in a hole above the water line.

It's not very competitive using the same software everyone else is using.

If you use Google apps, obviously all that data is studied by advertisers. Maybe not corporate data, but even corporate data probably becomes available to the NSA the minute it is in the cloud. Spying. Do you control your data?

Then indeed you may gain in convenience, but at the price of control. Software publishers were always trying to lock you in, it's even worse with the cloud.

The price is also questionable, for software like MS Office: they get you to pay again and again something you would have paid once in the past.

Being banned is not a very real threat for most businesses, but having to bear the random functionality changes, random patching or down times in the cloud is very real.

It's the renter economy, where you actually own nothing.

Quigley says

I know it’s different for business vs personal use, but I refuse to buy annual fee type software as a rule. I’d rather own the right to use the program as a one time fee than as an annually occurring fee for service. Example: MSOffice. I keep my version of 7.0 rather than “upgrade” to a version I have to pay for every year. Fuck a bunch of that! The program was fine 10 years ago.

Have you tried LibreOffice? Totally free, powerful, resides on your Windows, Linux, or Mac, and is constantly updated. Unless you are using some legacy Macros or VBA routines, why not? LibreOffice can read, save, and work in Office formats as well as the Open Document format.

It always seemed like a spectacularly bad idea to me to make a business dependent on AWS for its existence.

HeadSet says

Have you tried LibreOffice? Totally free, powerful, resides on your Windows, Linux, or Mac, and is constantly updated. Unless you are using some legacy Macros or VBA routines, why not? LibreOffice can read, save, and work in Office formats as well as the Open Document format.

It comes with Linux, and I love it. It's better than MS Office.