Things I hate...

Well, OK, here is another one I am not really fond of as a developing trend.

PC software. Seems that a lot of companies are going to the leasing paradigm of the software they used to sell to their customers. Basically you pay your money for their product, and used to be you could keep on using it until some OS upgrade or something caused it to become non functional on your PC. I have software I have been using for quite a number of years, which work just fine on my current Windows OS level.

With this leasing gambit the software industry seems to be migrating to, you pay your money (which in many cases seems to be about the same as when you were buying the product outright), but you can ONLY use it for one year. After that, it becomes disabled until you lease it again for another year. I believe that Adobe is the first one to use this method, and I pretty much stopped using their products as a result. Except for those products I still had versions of that remaining working all along for me, of course.

Used to be I might have one application I really needed a particular bit of software to do, right NOW, and I didn't mind buying the product as I thought perhaps I might need it again some day, and I would already have it. But heck, to pay that money for a product for a single use, and next time I might need it, if over a year later, I have to lease that software product again? Thanks, but NO thanks!

So what am I going to do if they ALL go with this new MGA style marketing strategy? Well, real good question. I guess I need to keep what I have concerning PC hardware, OS, and purchased applications for as long as I can.

And here is a thought. Suppose the server operating systems and applications go the same route? I am already paying monthly for Cpanel for my server, which comes bundled with the monthly lease of the hardware.

But I guess that is a bridge I will have to consider crossing when I get to it. Since I am already leasing the hardware anyway, that might not be quite so bitter of a pill to swallow.