We should normalize "finished" software products that stop feature creep and focus strictly on bug fixes and security updates.

It takes real courage for a builder to say, "It’s good enough. It’s complete. It serves the core use cases well." If people want more features? Great, make it a separate product under a new brand.

Evernote and Dropbox were perfect in 2012. Adding more features just to chase new user growth often comes at the expense of confusing the existing user base. Not good

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ivanjermakov 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's common in libraries of small to medium size. I often see Haskell and Rust packages that are not updated because full functionality achieved, no bugs and 100% test coverage.

Absolutely not the case with enterprise software. Zawinski's law is truer than ever: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20165602

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paxys 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You are basically describing all software ever shipped before webapps and online updates became a thing.

Companies wrote software and sold them in boxes. You paid once and it was yours forever. You got exactly what was in the box, no more and no less.

The company then shipped a new verson in a different box 1-3 years later. If you liked it enough, and wanted the new features, you bought the new box.

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thewebguyd 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

And people liked that model, see the huge backlash when Adobe went subscription for creative suite.

I do wedding photography as a side hustle, I upgrade my camera maybe once every ~7 years. Cameras have largely been good enough since 2016 and the 5D Mark IV. I have a pair of R6 mk II that I'll probably hold onto for the next 10 years.

Point being, Lightroom has more or less been feature complete for me for a very, very long time. For about the price of 1/year subscription, I could have purchased a fixed version of Lightroom with support for my camera and not had to buy it again for another 10 years.

We are getting milked for every nickle and dime for no reason other than shareholder value.

It actually discourages real improvements. Before the subscription model, if Adobe wanted to sell me another copy of Lightroom they had to work really hard to make useful features that people actually wanted, enough to the point they'd buy thew version.

Now, they don't have to. You have to keep paying no matter what they decide to do.

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socalgal2 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> And people liked that model, see the huge backlash when Adobe went subscription for creative suite.

That backlash was short lived. Adobe went from $4.4 billion in revenue in 2021 to $23.7 billion. It used to cost $2500 for the "master collection". Now it's $50 a month.

I was one of those people that disliked switching to subscription. I stayed on CS6 for years. I'm also only a relatively casual user though. I once tried Affinity Photo for some work. Their workflow, for my needs, would have made me take ~6hrs more time than the similar workflow in Photoshop. So I paid the $120 a year for photoshop/lightroom because $120 is way less than 6hrs of my life. If of course that was my specific case. It might not be true for others. The point was though, $120, at least for me, is not that much money relative to what I charge/get-paid. So I gave in.

Further, Photoshop is a good example (to me) of software that can't stop updating. New formats come out HEIC for example. New cameras with new raw formats come out. New tech comes out. HDR displays are ubiquitous at this point (all apple products, some large percent of Android, PC, and TVs) (which BTW, Photoshop does not yet truly support so expect an upgrade).

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carlosjobim an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

How did Adobe manage to change your previous installation of Lightroom? If you bought it, can't you still use the version you bought?

	▲	thewebguyd an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, but no support for CR3 files, only this time I didn't have the choice to buy a new standalone version, I had to subscribe.

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wenbin 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yea, good old days :)

The catch was that old boxed software eventually breaks on new OS versions or devices.

However, SaaS has the potential to "freeze" features while remaining functional 20+ years down the road. Behind the scenes, developers can update server dependencies and push minor fixes to ensure compatibility with new browsers and screen sizes.

From the end-user's perspective, the product remains unchanged and reliable. To me, that’s very good!

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paxys 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My experience is actually the opposite.

In the old days there was no expection when and if users would upgrade anything, so vendors had to take extra care to ensure compatibility or they would lose business. People in a single office could be running 6 different versions of Microsoft Office, and the same file had to be viewable and editable on all of them. A company could decide to upgrade to Office 2010 but stay on Windows XP, so the Office division had the finanical incentive to ensure that newer versions would work on an older OS.

Nowadays the standard is "you must be on the newest version of everything all the time, or the app won't work". Don't want to upgrade to Win 11? Want to use Firefox instead of Chrome? Don't want all the bells and whistles that come with the newest version of the software? Too bad.

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guhidalg 4 hours ago | parent [-]

More like "you must be on the newest version of everything all the time, or you will get hacked".

	▲	thewebguyd 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Because security fixes don't get backported, when they could, and few are still doing separate security vs. feature updates. Even Windows is doing it now with CUs, bundling feature & vulnerability patches together, then deprecating the last version. You don't have a choice anymore, it's "accept the features or else"

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WillAdams 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Or, as in the case of Microsoft Publisher, announce that it will be going away on a certain date with no recourse.

Before 10/26 I have to re-work my desk position manual and a deposit sheet which use Publisher and which MS Word is _not_ suited for. Probably will do them in LyX or LaTeX.

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SoftTalker 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

SaaS has that potential but the reality is more often that the vendor gets acquired, or they just decide to stop supporting it, and shut it down. You have no options to keep running what you had, only to migrate to a replacement, which is likely another SaaS which will do the same thing.

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ryandrake 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This is one of the biggest issues in software development: So few projects are willing to admit that they are finished. I can probably count on one hand how many software products I use every day that actually get better (or stay the same) on update. The vast majority of them peaked somewhere around v1.0, and are just getting worse every time the developer touches them.

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	▲	janalsncm 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I can understand the incentives for professional software. If you admit the software is done then management will question why they need you anymore. For OSS it’s more psychological: admitting you’re feature complete is cutting off the dopamine hit of building new things.

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erikpukinskis 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s funny, Express.js tried this. 4.x was basically a complete piece of software. There weren’t any great reasons to change the API.

But people hated that. They considered it “unmaintained”. They moved to Koa and Hono because they appeared to be more “actively maintained”.

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wtallis 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Dropbox is a great example. It's now a fundamentally different product than the original, and has re-created exactly the problem the original solved. There's no longer a good cloud-synced folder tool; everybody has gone back to implementing network filesystems that are much more complex and a badly leaky abstraction.