Software

I love my few subscriptions to online news services—call them the papers, if you will—but I haven’t touched newsprint for a year or two. What I don’t like are the required subscriptions for the graphics packages that I need for image manipulation and typography.

You bought the darn program back in the day. Now, you are a renter for a hefty fee. I think I could live with this if the product was left alone. It would be simple, not complicated. But every time I turn around, there are “improvements,” enhancements, and fixes. For some people, that might be fine, but I use what seem to be very basic subsets of routines and tools. They are rather simple things, and the engineers seeking to complicate my life bury these tools deeply in submenus. Wouldn’t I prefer to use their new tools and routines for subset characterization of rasterized vector intersections? NO!

For a while, I leaped ahead of the problem. I found a very inexpensive program that did precisely what I wanted. Then, the engineers “improved” it. Now, they announce that they’ll be moving to a subscription plan.

I wonder if the rumor is true that to a software engineer if it isn’t broken, it needs more features?