Re: More cloud crap
Cloud is the unfortunate, unavoidable future for most commercial software as long as corporate accounting works the way it does.
Cloud offerings completely bypass 'incomplete product' regulations*. With traditional software (or anything really) if you promise specific features will be added in the future you can't book the sale until those features have been delivered. You could sell $100 Billion dollars worth of it and you can't show a single penny of that money on your books until the feature is delivered.
As it stands now, if the software operates if run on a system that meets the minimum requirements specs then that's all you're entitled to. Free Updates, Service Packs, etc... are provided by the goodwill of the manufacturer or they can charge you for them if they want. With Cloud offerings you're paying for access, not a transfer of ownership, license or rental. As such, the Cloud offering remain the property of the provider and they can make all the open ended promises they like.
The second part also relates to how revenue is booked and forecast. It's far more desirable to have 10 people paying $1 each, per month than to have two customers making $60 one time payments (adjust for scale :). People get hung up on product margins, but margins and profit are secondary to revenue. Profit gets you a nice view from your door, revenue gets you the land, building, door, food and water. You die without revenue, profits are not a requirement to making lots of money. Simplified, cloud financials break down to making revenue knee deep and a mile wide: It gives you more flexibility, more consistency and greatly reduces your expenses in everything from cost of operating capital borrowing, cost of sales to distribution, account maintenance, and marketing. Unless otherwise specified by country specific law, auto-renewing contracts (evergreen contracts) allow you to legally forecast revenues waaaay further out than with one time purchases.
All that stuff is well and good, in and of itself. The trouble lies in the fact that cloud financials provide companies with overwhelming financial advantage over traditional sales models. After a point you can flat out gut product margins and still end up making more money than you did with 30x greater margins but more unstable revenue.
A decent analogy is the 'asymmetric warfare' concept. Under current financial regulation there's simply no way for traditional software billing model to directly fight a cloud model. In the traditional model costs grow in direct proportion to sales (that levels off after volume reaches a certain size, but only 3-5% of software companies can reach that scale). With the cloud model sales lower costs and allow you to simultaneously lower prices and the math simply won't let the traditional model be competitive.
Sorry this has gone on so long. The cloud model is going to force adherents of the traditional model to make some big adjustments and unfortunately all of them include privacy strangling tactics where sales of your information bridge the gap between the traditional and cloud financial models, but there's no escaping the fact the traditional model has a cost escalation curve that eventually makes it impossible for sales of your data to cover the company's expenses. All in all it's a fucking disaster waiting to happen. The costs of the traditional model will make its adherents ever more aggressive about pillaging your information because that's the only way they can stay in business. We haven't even begun to see how intrusive it can all get and regulators are guaranteed to walk restrictions back in efforts to keep those companies funded. It's not a maybe situation.
There aren't any great answers, but a decent balancing maneuver would be international legal agreement of what defines 'Cloud'. Right now the term is nothing but marketing and companies are using vernacular assumption to affect bookkeeping and regulatory compliance. It's pretty much complete bullshit if adding 'Cloud' to a software title results in an installed application that's bigger than the fucking non-cloud version. Companies shouldn't be able to gain an overwhelming financial advantage because they add web based authentication to a product. It needs sorted and it needs sorted now.