LabVIEW subscription model for 2022

[daphilli]

My understanding is that "Perpetual" means that ability to use LabVIEW doesn't expire, as it does when a subscription expires. One will pay again for another year's updates. Its a reimplementation of the old original license policies. Probably, "perpetual" is a confusing choice of words but it's the terminology that some of us customers are using in the discussion to highlight that we don't want our ability to use previously purchased licenses to end. 

The tradeoff is that we customers gain the benefits of 1.) not having to expose our operational computers to the internet to validate a subscription or of 2.) not living in terror of losing operational capabilities due to either inability to pay in a bad economy or LabVIEW cancellation at the cost (theoretically) of less consistent revenue flow to NI.

The vendor-side business allure of Software As A Service (SAAS) models is potential for more consistent revenue flow to facilitate business planning. But, some customers (like myself and former employers) don't like the customer-side business risks of the SAAS model. Since Adobe switched to the SAAS business model, I've banned their products. And, I'm on the path towards doing the same with Microsoft's products.

[TiTou]

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@AhmedEisawy  a écrit :

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If you don't get to a price point suitable for your budget, please reach out to me to help.

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English is not my first language, if that's not haggling, what is it?

[rolfk]

SAAS is sold with the promise to be more cost effective since you can pay as you go and it is usually significantly cheaper per month, year or whatever unit it is sold in, than a full perpetual license. In practice and that has been proven by several surveys it ends up costing usually more due to the summation of all seemingly small amounts to significant costs, lingering subscriptions that while not really used are just forgotten or let run just for the case, as stopping it has the bad consequence that you suddenly can't even look at your existing work.

It leaves a very sour taste that the work you have done and which is legally yours, is not even viewable anymore and definitely not correctable. SAAS for a customer may make sense for big businesses but it is simply not a comfortable model for individual users. For a vendor, SAAS is of course the promise of the hen that is laying golden eggs, as long as they can manage the logistics of recurrent payments and reliable management of licenses. Every time the issuing of a license encounters even the slightest hiccup, you got a doubly or even worse dissatisfied customer.

[daphilli]

Having business experience from founding a couple of startups in the 1980s, my perspective of the LabVIEW pricing and licensing issue is broader.

Due to yearly Operating System and hardware updates by Microsoft, Apple and the Linux community, there is a baseline of R&D expenditures required to keep LabVIEW on the market. And, the baseline R&D expenditures must be amortized over the customer base for sustainability. If the customer base shrinks, then prices must go up to cover the baseline R&D expenditures. If the customer base grows, then prices can go down.

However, there is also market economics. Increasing prices weakens demand and reduces the customer base. Decreasing prices strengthens demand and increases the customer base. And, prices x sales = an inverted-U shaped revenue vs. prices curve with optimal revenue somewhere in the middle.

The problem is that if the market is too narrow or small such that amortization of baseline expenditures places the minimum sustainable price on the right side of the curve then it is easy to get trapped in a death-spiral of fleeing customers and rising prices. That is where some of us customers fear things are heading. And, because LabVIEW is unique and has no good replacements, we are passionate about the issue. LabVIEW is a strategic necessity for us.

But, we need to step back and think about what LabVIEW is; A mature, refined rapid development platform targeting engineering applications. And, the constraint to only focus on engineering applications is self-imposed and artificial.

If I was running Emerson, this the strategy I would employ in this scenario to broaden the customer base and simultaneously improve profitability, long-term sustainability and pricing.

1. Benchmark LabVIEW to characterize where it places among computer languages by speed. About 12 years ago, I ran an experiment with results suggesting that LabVIEW execution speed can be competitive with C++ with careful coding. If characterization confirms this to be correct then it can be a strong marketing point.

2. Generate a list of rapid development tools used in the broader market, such as Appian, Microsoft Power Apps, Zoho Creator, 4D, etc.

3. Identify the Controls and VIs that can be added to LabVIEW to take over the broader market.

4. Develop the identified Controls and VIs in a comprehensive way on a niche-by-niche basis.

5. Include systems-level programming capabilities that the high-level rapid development tools can't compete with.

6. Market the LabVIEW solution as faster, easier, more capable, higher performance.

This is how I recommend putting LabVIEW back on a growth business track.

Regarding systems-level capabilities, I'd investigate if LabVIEW could also compile to Rust or at least either an OOP extended variant of Rust or a competing systems language. That could extend LabVIEW's reach in the embedded development market.

An example of this is that my present project is using LabVIEW to develop a custom syslog server for cybersecurity. Unfortunately, the project is for securing my own office, so it doesn't generate revenue. But, with addition of a few more types of graphs and charts, LabVIEW could compete with Elasticsearch or any of a number of other products in the cybersecurity market space.

[rolfk]

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@alexderjuengere wrote:

could it be, that a subscription model is more safe against software piracy?

I don't know, if thats a major concern for LabView...

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It may be in some ways but with several of the potential attack vectors I could think up, I do not really see how it would make piracy somewhat less likely. In fact I see one reason to for sure try to hack the thing: to make sure you can keep using it even if you stop paying. With a perpetual license it is a one time question of: Should I hack instead of buying it? With a subscription it is a continuous question: Should I hack or keep paying!

[billko]

NI/Emerson's current implementation of the subscription model is legal ransomware.

[Eric1977]

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@rolfk wrote:

It leaves a very sour taste that the work you have done and which is legally yours, is not even viewable anymore and definitely not correctable.

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This right here is what scares/angers me and others. If I, or my company, wants the license to lapse, for any reason, I should be able, at the minimum, to view the code I wrote and not be locked out of it. I should not have to download some other software, provided by Emerson/NI or not, just so I can view it.

[Hooovahh]

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@Eric1977 wrote:

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@rolfk wrote:

It leaves a very sour taste that the work you have done and which is legally yours, is not even viewable anymore and definitely not correctable.

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This right here is what scares/angers me and others. If I, or my company, wants the license to lapse, for any reason, I should be able, at the minimum, to view the code I wrote and not be locked out of it. I should not have to download some other software, provided by Emerson/NI or not, just so I can view it.

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One olive branch that NI did extend is you can use the LabVIEW Community Edition to open and view your code, if your subscription license has lapsed. This was put into the EULA and legal text of the usage of the community edition which is free to download.

[Jay14159265]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

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@Eric1977 wrote:

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@rolfk wrote:

It leaves a very sour taste that the work you have done and which is legally yours, is not even viewable anymore and definitely not correctable.

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This right here is what scares/angers me and others. If I, or my company, wants the license to lapse, for any reason, I should be able, at the minimum, to view the code I wrote and not be locked out of it. I should not have to download some other software, provided by Emerson/NI or not, just so I can view it.

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One olive branch that NI did extend is you can use the LabVIEW Community Edition to open and view your code, if your subscription license has lapsed. This was put into the EULA and legal text of the usage of the community edition which is free to download.

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I have used the community edition for this purpose. I have noticed that the community edition is not a perpetual licence so after it expires you can no longer open labview and you must get and install a new community edition licence. Getting this licence to work is not easy, I was down for 2 days trying to get this to work and ended up having to uninstall all NI products and re installing to be able to open labview. The point is that after all that I have zero confidence that I can use the community edition currently installed on a lab computer to view code after a year or two much less in perpetuity.

[Jay14159265]

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@Jay14159265 wrote:

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@Hooovahh wrote:

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@Eric1977 wrote:

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@rolfk wrote:

It leaves a very sour taste that the work you have done and which is legally yours, is not even viewable anymore and definitely not correctable.

---

This right here is what scares/angers me and others. If I, or my company, wants the license to lapse, for any reason, I should be able, at the minimum, to view the code I wrote and not be locked out of it. I should not have to download some other software, provided by Emerson/NI or not, just so I can view it.

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One olive branch that NI did extend is you can use the LabVIEW Community Edition to open and view your code, if your subscription license has lapsed. This was put into the EULA and legal text of the usage of the community edition which is free to download.

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I have used the community edition for this purpose. I have noticed that the community edition is not a perpetual licence so after it expires you can no longer open labview and you must get and install a new community edition licence. Getting this licence to work is not easy, I was down for 2 days trying to get this to work and ended up having to uninstall all NI products and re installing to be able to open labview. The point is that after all that I have zero confidence that I can use the community edition currently installed on a lab computer to view code after a year or two much less in perpetuity.

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And to add to that, if you need to look at code that is 20years old, will labview ce open it? I don't think so, you need to have the version it was written in or some version that is close to that. This is a non-issue with text based languages. But this issue comes up quite a bit in labview land. How does saas licencing handle that.