Subscription-based Software? No Thanks!

[dewline]

Here's the latest installment in the series of reasons why I haven't upgraded from Adobe CS4 or bought into MS Office 365 (and other instances of such business models):

https://www.cloudpro.co.uk/saas/7905/microsoft-office-365-goes-down-across-europe

Comments

[sabotabby]

I hate subscription-based software and it's keeping me away from upgrading from Adobe CS6. I haven't upgraded MS Office in years; I'm basically using Google Apps for everything MS-like, and Scrivener for serious writing that I don't want on the cloud.

[autopope]

It's an email outage, not a general fail for all the Microsoft Office apps.

[dewline]

Noted for future reference. It still makes me uneasy.

[brithistorian]

I got to thinking about this, and I realized that the only places where I subscribe to software are places where my subscription gets me the software plus additional services: Apple Music (software plus music), BackBlaze (software plus storage), and Evernote (software plus storage).

I could use Microsoft Office for free through my university, but I never do because:
1. I already have Libre Office.
2. I don't want to become dependent on something that will go away when I finish school and could go away before then if the school changes their contract with Microsoft.

On further reflection, I think my issue with subscription-based software is more with "What if it goes away permanently" than with "what if there's an outage," because I've been pretty well satisfied with the uptime of the services I use.

[dewline]

"What if it goes away permanently?" is a legitimate worry to have.

[brithistorian]

Yeah, I suppose so. I should probably set up some plan for regularly backing up my notes on Evernote.

[thewayne]

Yep. I owned a low of Adobe CS5.5 and bought the rest of CS6 when CC was announced and never looked back. As far as Microsoft is concerned, I have Office Pro 2003, the last edition before the never to be sufficiently curse ribbon menu came out and destroyed my productivity. While I have 365 on my laptop from my friend having previously installed it, I also installed 2003 and use that for my game development. Otherwise on my Mac I use Libre.

Incidentally, if you can pull off a student ID, you can still buy Adobe CS6 from Amazon.

[dewline]

Didn't know this, although I still have other issues with Amazon.