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helm t1_ixpdke0 wrote

Reply to comment by cballowe in Mercedes-Benz to introduce acceleration subscription fee by kishiki18_91

This is a yearly subscription to unlock something in a car you bought. Cloud computing doesn’t involve equipment that you own. It’s rent.

You can rent a car for a limited time too.

A straight comparison would be to buy a throttled GPU and pay rent to unlock higher speeds.

Buy adding this feature, Mercedes isn’t improving their car in any way, they’re simply trying to get customers to accept a new pricing scheme.

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cballowe t1_ixpdrj9 wrote

Mainframes are often delivered with more CPUs in the box then you're licensed for. You can call ibm and have them enable more at any time and only pay for them while you use them. The machine is sitting in your data center with double the power that you can use.

This has been how IBM does things for decades.

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helm t1_ixpee6a wrote

I'm unfamiliar with this pricing model. But I'm quite sure a mainframe comes with yearly service fees, software licenses, etc, that makes it quite different from a one-off purchase in the first place.

I recently helped shut down an old Oracle database (physical + software) that cost our company $100k/year. Again, different pricing models, different expectation. If you buy a house, would you want to pay a subscription fee to have access to heated floors?

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cballowe t1_ixpfean wrote

That's true. But also, you have hardware in your data center that can be turned on and off with a phone call to IBM (and assorted monthly or one time pricing). The maintenance contracts etc are tied to what you're licensed to use. Software licenses tend to cost way more than hardware, but in all of it you only pay for the things that you use. (Or ... You pay for the things you want to use, but they can be dynamically enabled or disabled.)

Other industries are trying to go a similar way. I've heard that some heavy equipment companies want to sell some sort of uptime/operating guarantees and not necessarily specific equipment. That might mean you need 5 trucks but they ship 6 to your site and some spare parts etc because that gives them the flexibility to have spares and deal with downtime/repairs while still hitting the contract requirements. If you put that 6th truck in service, those numbers might be missed or if you want to have 6 operating then the contract goes up.

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helm t1_ixpgf32 wrote

Yes, but it's clear that your examples involve a negotiation in which the supplier is trying to more effectively match the buyer's needs.

This is all about building one car for everyone, but locking parts of it down with software. This reduces production costs. The value for the customer would be to upgrade/downgrade features at will. But so far, car makers haven't sold it very well, I think.

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cballowe t1_ixphb2y wrote

I think the "car makers haven't sold it very well" is more of the issue than building one physical model and enabling/disabling bits with software to meet customer needs.

I don't need a <5 second 0-60, so the option to not pay for it makes sense. There's definitely some people who would pay for it. With gas motors you get the difference between the base model and the performance model, with electric - it's software and not a bigger motor. Seems fine to me. you need to have that base model spec available.

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