Subscription Psycho : Analysis Of The Subscription Economy & It’sBad Actors

猫猫词库：Subscription订阅；psycho心理；Subscription Economy订阅经济/订阅制

In case you didn'talready know there is a new game in town, coming soon to a software vendor nearyou, and its called thesubscription shuffle.

猫猫词库：in case万一；vendor供应商；shuffle洗牌、重组

TheSubscription Shuffle

The subscriptionshuffle is the art of migrating the perpetually licensed customers that youoriginally built your business on, into a recurring revenue stream using asubscription model because you can.

猫猫词库：migrating迁移；perpetually永久；recurring经常性的；revenue stream收入来源

The best bit about

this story is that software vendors froth at the mouth when you dare to suggest

that they adopted subscription for any other reason than money, I waseven abused by Bob

Eganfor saying so.

猫猫词库：froth泡沫；adopted采用；abused滥用，辱骂

At least thevendors who have to work really hard to justify a subscription froth at themouth, those who started out with a subscription from day one just shrug, theyknow their customers made that choice.

猫猫词库：justify辩解，解释

Vendors whodeliver a service where the subscription model makes a lot of senseto the

customerarenotthe focus of this article or myanalysis, because we all know that the subscription model can deliver value insome cases.

TheSubscription Psychos

This article isdedicated to those vendors I call subscription psychos, people who knowits a good idea to migrate you from perpetual licensing onto a subscription,because in doing sothey make more money.

猫猫词库：dedicated to致力于

We all want moremoney, but sadly it doesn't grow on trees.

The psycho elementis why you only see the subscription shuffle being performed when a company iseither preparing to sell itself and needs to juice revenue or where its alreadybeen acquired, the original founders left and its in the hands of people who haveno real loyalty to customers.

You see if youreally cared about your customers, if you really weren’t a psychopath, then youwouldn’t be inflicting never ending payments on them for no other reason thanyou want more money you psycho.

猫猫词库：inflicting影响，造成

WhenAre Subscriptions Good For Customers?

Subscriptions areactually brilliant for lots of different products and services, thesubscription model was first pioneered by magazines, for as long as yousubscribed, the magazine kept on arriving. But before long they were joined byothers as the subscription model spread to other industries, where offering asubscription to your servicenaturally made sense to customers.

Think Netflixwhere it makes perfect sense to subscribe to their vast movie library becauseyou would never buy all those movies and also because Blockbuster was justawful, or the Dollar Shave Club where you actually save a ton of money overbuying traditional off the shelf razors in a store.

We traditionallysubscribe to something because itsaves us moneyover the longterm, also becauseits convenientandsaves us time.

The cloud servicesand managed IT services space is a good example of where the subscription modelreally makes sense, when businesses pay a per user per month fee to gain accessto complex IT systems that would be a real pain to set up and manageinternally. Cloud IT customers really see value in paying a regular,predictable per user fee for services, because they know exactly how unpredictableOPEX and CAPEX can be when they DIY.

If a technology(hardware or software) is complex enough to need dedicated teams to regularlymanage and support it, lots of infra to run it and it costs a small fortune tobuy on a perpetual license, then it makes sense to rent that service from aqualified service provider on a subscription basis.

猫猫词库：infra下文

WhenAre Subscriptions Bad For Customers?

My general answerto this question iswhen you have been quite happily using a piece of

software on a perpetual license and suddenly the vendor decides that you need

to subscribe to use software because they want recurring revenues.

For a long time,subscription model remained confined to those industries where it naturallybelonged, but then suddenly the subscription economy became a thing and Adobeled by example, showing software vendors everywhere that you can screw youroutraged customers by forcing them into a forever subscription model againsttheir will.

猫猫词库：outraged愤怒

In Adobes case 

customer opposition to the subscription model was so fierce that thousands of their customers signed a petition to make Adobe stop. To make matters worse, Adobe pulled all kinds of dirty tricks to

get people off their old perpetual licenses, like automatically cancelling their perpetual licenses if

they signed up for a free trialof thesubscription service.

猫猫词库：fierce激烈的；petition请愿

The sad truth is that even though Adobe lost a lot of customers over the short term, their mid and long term profits soared on the back

of the new recurring revenue model and in the end it did not really matter if

there was extremelyvocal

and bitter public screamingfrom theircustomers.

猫猫词库：bitter苦涩的

Because of Adobe,software vendors now know that in order to successfully convert customers tosubscription, all you have to do is be a psycho.

The subscriptionmodel is bad for customers when its clear that the reasons for adopting themodel are mainly of benefit to the vendor, becauserenting software for

ever quite clearly costs you more money than buying it.

Why DoThey Do It?

The subscriptionpsycho has good reasons for forcing you into doing something that isn’t reallygood for you and its rare they inflict the pain of never-ending recurringpayments on you out of sheer spite, although in the case of Adobe any graphicdesigner would tell you that its a tough sell.

猫猫词库：sheer绝对；out of sheer spite尽管；

As much as we wantto believe that they are just greedy people, the truth is actually morecomplicated than that, because even though the subscription model may notdeliver any tangible benefits for buyers of perpetual software licenses, themodel delivers some really solid benefits for software vendors.

猫猫词库：tangible，明确的；

It is obvious toany Chief Executive Officer that charging their customers on a regular basisfor ever is good for their bottom line and their share price.

We all agree thatpeople giving you regular amounts of money forever is a good thing, but sadlymoney doesn’t grow on trees, even if the subscription psychos really think thatit should and try to make you pay for it.

The reason thatthe subscription model is so appealing to software vendors is that there arethree things which stress them out more than competitors.

Vendorshate people pirating

their software, theyhate people who use old versions of software without paying to upgradeand the most of

all theyhate the never-ending pressure of having to continuously innovate and

produce real new features,so that you do see sense in buying anupgraded copy.

猫猫词库：pirate盗版；

It is these threethings that keep a software vendor up at night more than anything else and noneof them are really a problem for startups, they are only really a problemformature software vendors with large customer ecosystemswhohave been using the same software forever.

猫猫词库：startups初创公司；

PiracyIs Annoying

Piracy is annoyingfor mature software vendors and this is doubly so if the ‘upgrades’ the vendorpushes out do not add to core functionality. The longer software can be usedwithout updating it, the more it is pirated.

The only real wayfor a software vendor to escape the annoyance is to convince their user basethat either their software needs to conn0ect to a cloud server in order towork, or that the software is much better now that it liveson their cloud. This gives themcontrol and the ability to shut you downwhenyou fall behind on your forever subscription payments.

The subscriptionpsychos go about this in a very predictable way, first off they like to make abig hay about the CLOUD when launching their new subscription service, usuallygiving you X months of the cloud subscription service for FREE, followed byvery small monthly payments. These small payments always increase, but onlyafter the mass of their customer base has been converted over to subscriptionsand locked in to the new model.

If they are reallypsychopathic they frame their reason for the software suddenly needing ‘to becloudy’ in a very innocuous and simple way, one that you can easily get onboard with initially and that they can easily change the scope of at a laterdate when they make new plans.

猫猫词库：innocuous无害的

The subscriptionpsychos call this one thebait and switch.

猫猫词库：bait饵

The problem withsigning up to new subscription agreements is that the vendor can modify asubscription agreement at any time, your rights can change at any time and youprobably do not have a service level agreement or any recourse (beyondcancelling the service) if things go wrong.

猫猫词库：recourse求助

Rather thanswallow the small percentage of users who pirate the software and write it offas a cost of doing business, the subscription psycho prefers to inflictnever-ending payments on their customers, using piracy as an excuse.

I AmFine On The Old Version

Software vendorshate hearing this, because they typically hear it when they have passed thepoint of true innovation and stopped being able to deliver genuinely usefulproduct features any more. When a vendor hears this, it means he has done hisjob, delivered what the customer wanted and now any new feature can only everbe a new fancy bell or a whistle.

Software vendorstend to react by dreaming up new features you don’t need or by redesigning theuser interface so it doesn’t look like it was made in the 80’s anymore, in anattempt to persuade you to buy a new version of the same software you haveprobably already bought twice as ‘upgrades.

Now imagine howpsychopathic your software vendor is going to be when theyabsolutely

mustkeep adding new features in order to justify you giving himforever payments, what do you think that product is going look like in just afew years time? Bloated, slower than it was and harder to use because of thenew interface. No thanks, I'm fine on the old version.

Or at least I willbe until a psycho figures out how to cripple it.

BecauseLife Is Tough

Like practicallyany other industry and business, the software vending game can be really hardand it can be a long tough slog to become successful. Just like designing anyother kind of product, developing a new kind of software to the point you makemoney is time consuming and expensive.

The more complexyour software is, the bigger your team, the more chance you have of running outof money before you can get to market. To attempt to bring any kind of product tomarket is a risky and expensive business and some software developers havedecided that they simply cannot swallow it.

Like any otherbusiness facing risk they set about looking for ways to minimize that risk andthat is when a subscription psycho points out its much less riskier to billpeople forever for software. Butof courseit is.

When yourperpetual license software vendor suddenly wants to foist a subscription onyou, its usually because they have nothing else to really offer you in the wayof innovation or features that make you want to upgrade.

猫猫词库：foist加强于

Why Are Subscription Psychos Bad For Business?

It should befairly obvious, but in a world of quarterly results, yearly bonuses and shareoptions, combined with the fact that most psychos do not plan to stick aroundfor more than a few years, means that the short term mentality of modernbusiness really plays into the hands of a subscription psycho.

Subscriptionpsychosdon’t carethat the move to a subscription modelinfuriates and alienates some of your most loyal customers,they don’t

carethat over the long term treating customers this way means that youtarnish and devalue your brand,they don’t care for the notionthatit strengthens the hand of their competitors who gain the customers andgoodwill you lose.

猫猫词库：tarnish玷污，污蔑；devalue贬值；infuriates激怒；alienates疏远；

They dont carebecause they are psychopaths who think they can be the next Adobe, or they areplanning to sell the business in the near future.

Who Exactly Are The Subscription Psycho’s

Good question andthis is the part of the article where I am going to upset some people, butthat’s ok, I will survive and I am only listing them here because of somthingthey already did, not something I just made up.

1) 1Password—I have

actuallyjust written about these guysin much moredetail, they were the people who inspired me to write this article in the firstplace. After ten years of faithful service to a large, loyal customer base,they decided to juice their revenues with a subscription and push ‘theircloud’.

2) Adobe—The originalsubscription psychos in my book, purely because we had bought a whole bunch oftheir expensive software before they decided we didn’t own it anymore and thatwe needed to pay them their Creative Cloud money for ever in case we needphotoshop twice this week.

3) Citrix—After a lifetimespent providing their customers with application, desktop and servervirtualization software on a perpetual license and letting their loyal partnerecosystem make money building and hosting solutions around their tech, Citrixhave launched the Citrix Cloud. They have now decided they need to host yourtech, screwing their partners in the process as they begin to compete withtheir ecosystem. Citrix have gone subscription psycho ever since legendary CEOMark Templeton left.

4) Microsoft—Do you rememberwhen Word, Excel and Windows were software you bought on a perpetual licenseand which barely ever changed? I do! All of them are available on asubscription basis now because Microsoft are brilliant at selling you the samesoftware again and again, it comes naturally to them. In fact it comes sonaturally that they decided were going to rent you the software that youthought you had already bought forever.

I came up with these examples off the topof my head and I am sure that there are plenty more, this is the part where youguys tweet me your own good examples of a #SubscriptionPsycho by sending themto me on twitter @GuiseBule, when I get them I will update this list with newentrants.

The best advice I can give you if yourvendor starts up the subscription shuffle is to give one of their competitors achance, one who is probably struggling to compete against a much larger andbetter funded subscription psycho, or better yet take a chance on a brand newstartup like I do.

If you decide that you do not want to paystrangers forever payments for something you already bought, there is always analternative to every piece of software on the market, investigate and you willbe pleasantly surprised.

The alternatives may not be as pretty asthe software you decided not to subscribe to, but don’t let that deter youbecause the alternative is to let subscription psychos who decide they want apiece of you forever win.

Medium · by Guise Bule · July 14, 2017

�