Nickle and Diming You

[RANT]

As most of you know I am an amateur photographer and in the past I bought software programs, Lightroom by Adobe was around $175, Photoshop was expensive around $500 - $600 but they all were one time expenses but now you have to have a subscription of around $10 a month so for Lightroom it is like buying the program every year. Now for an amateur who uses the app maybe four or five times a month it isn’t worth it.

Now we come to Microsoft.

You can no longer buy Office, you have to subscribe to it, for someone who uses it to write letters, and other occasional uses once again you have to pay around $10 a month. Then there is “One Drive” and Microsoft gives you something like only 5 Gig of space free so chalk up another $10 a month. I bought a 2T NAS RAID1 for the same price as one year’s subscription for “One Drive” and I can store all my data across platforms so I can share data between my computer, tablet, and smartphone. 

Cha ching, cha ching, cha ching.

That will be around $500 or $600 a year for something that you used to be about to buy out right for about what you spend on subscription fees.

I have been using open source software, Libre Office is a pretty good substitute for Microsoft Office, it isn’t as polished around the edges as MS Office but it is free. And there are photographic software programs also like GIMP and RAWTherapee that are open source. But I find they are overly complicated for what I need.

I am willing to buy software but good programs are few and far between.

I ran into problems with Libre Office Impress which is like PowerPoint but I found that Google presentation sofware to be equal of PowerPoint.

I will not be held hostage by Microsoft and Adobe.

[/RANT]