> _very different_, when the user's environment is different. And 1) you haven't seen shit if you think you can perfectly control the user's environment. 2) every new user is a chance for the environment to bite you.

Can you provide some examples of this? I'd like more info here, because off of the top of my head, I can think of the following counter-examples:

1. This isn't a new problem. User environment has been an issue ever since software as an industry was born. Specifying minimum specs is a pretty typical thing. And while I don't have depth of knowledge on these challenges or their history, my understanding is that it's only become less of a factor over time. So why is digital software different in this regard? If the industry was able to sustain itself before it went digital, what about the change to digital makes it unsustainable now?

2. Computer games, which are probably a good candidate for the most resource-heavy programs that need an appropriate environment, still largely adhere to a pay once business model. Doesn't this indicate that offline experiences aren't affected by environment to such a degree that a single payment business model isn't problematic?

> You do your engineer best to try and fight that. But there's absolutely a marginal cost, which is what I was responding to.

It surely has a marginal cost. But is that cost significant, is the question. In particular, significant enough to warrant a recurring payment business model.

> It surely has a marginal cost. But is that cost significant, is the question. In particular, significant enough to warrant a recurring payment business model.

I think you're assuming more of my answer than what I gave. That's fair given that this is the point of the article, but it's not mine. I'm very specifically only responding to "is there a per-user marginal cost on software?", and my answer is most definitely yes.

To warrant a recurring payment business model, I think the right question to ask is "Is there a per user-year marginal cost on software?", and now the answer is in my view, much more complicated and domain-specific. Worse yet, I think that there's perverse incentives at play here in recurring payments.

> I think you're assuming more of my answer than what I gave. That's fair given that this is the point of the article, but it's not mine. I'm very specifically only responding to "is there a per-user marginal cost on software?", and my answer is most definitely yes.

Fair, but I feel it's disingenuous to ignore the context the original comment was written in (the context of the article) and try to argue against a specific point in the post as if it was made without that original context. The sentence may have lacked inherent context, but it was supporting the key points the GP was making in response to the article. It wasn't designed to stand alone.

Given, I'm not the author of that post so entirely possible they were intending for it to stand alone, but I think it would still be better to see if that was intent rather than to assume so and antagonize what they were saying.