We’ll get the easy stuff out of the way first. Xbox is intended to be a product not software. The individual games and apps are the software. Dropbox and Tinder are services that have a software interface. You’re not paying for the software, you’re paying for the service. Google, Microsoft, Adobe, etc. just don’t enter into this discussion. They work at a level the vast majority of software just never reach. There’s a saying in the software community: “you’re not Google.” It means don’t consider what any of the big 50 software companies do when you’re making decisions about you’re development efforts. It holds true.
Now let’s look at your 1Password software example and do some back of the envelope math.
Let’s say they have 100,000 customers. Let say that 10% of their customers have trouble that needs a question answered in a given year. (This number is way under the actual percentage based on my knowledge, but like you say, password management software MAY BE a bit easier than other software.) And lets say it takes 15 minutes to answer a question. (Again, a very conservative estimate.) That’s 10,000 * 15 min / 60 min/hr = 2,500 hours per year. That’s more than one full person who just answers questions. Realistically spread that out among developers and consider the hit that takes on productivity and you begin to see why support is so costly.
Now look at the types of questions they get. It’s not things specific to their software. They’ll get just as many questions about why they can’t connect to the internet. Why a particular site doesn’t work. Why is their software messing up some other site or software. You’re not getting the technically smart people asking questions after all. You’re getting the ones who don’t fire up Google to look for an answer. If you’ve never fielded support calls/emails before give it a try. You might be amazed and the things people expect (demand!) help with.
Now let’s look at the software itself. It’s a competitive market. In particular because if its low startup costs. Metaphorically, but bordering on literally, one guy in his mom’s basement has the potential to compete with you. The startups today use a concept of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) to ship their wares. That means you ship knowing your software has only about 1/3 of the features you as a developer or team would have liked in it. And you know you have at least two more years of development to get the remaining features in the software. But if you waited then (1) you might not have predicted the market correctly and (2) someone else would likely have beaten you to the market.
And, of course, there are the feature requests. Think password management is simple? I remember what it was like when LastPass first came out. And when I compare that to what it does now I much prefer the current incarnation. Then to top it off, there are a half dozen features I think could be added to it to make it even better still. And I’m just one of a half million for them. Think they’ll stop development and say, “nope, this software is done. We just don’t need any new features.” (You, yourself, may think that for a particular product, but your view is pretty narrow compared to the view the software developers see based on feedback.)
You’ve got to stop thinking of software as “done.” It’s not an xbox, it’s not a novel, it’s not a song. It’s an ever evolving ever changing utility that adapts over time to it’s current set of users. And it will continue to do so as long as there’s a user base asking for it.
