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Notes -
A lot of the software business has gone from selling software to renting software. Likewise, IoT is (in practice) not based on the idea of people buying products but them renting cloud services to use the products.
I mean, I can understand the drive, being a rentier (or neofeudal tech lord) is a sweet gig if you can get it.
If you sell software, you have to compete against the versions which you sold five years ago. This is not a problem if you are substantially improving your product, few people would stick to Windows 95 to save a few bucks for XP. But if your software is mature, that will not work. The classical Adobe software (Photoshop, Illustrator) has had the features the users want for decades. Sure, someone who spends 20 hours a week in Photoshop might benefit from running the latest and greatest version, but most users will be fine with the features of the 2010 version, so they have little incentive to upgrade.
So of course web-based SaaS became popular with software companies: it destroys the 2nd hand market you are otherwise competing against. If the customer wants to use the feature for the next ten years, he will need a subscription all the time, so you collect rents without having to innovate very hard.
Obviously for the user this is a terrible deal. Not only do you pay for a feature continuously, but the software vendor can also use it to push unwanted updates on you in an attempt to extract even more money, a process generally known as 'enshittification'.
Personally, I think that Knuth has the right idea with TeX (current version 3.141592653, released 2021) -- most software should converge rather than diverge in features and version number.
Of course, for some kinds of software this is not feasible -- operating systems will want to add drivers for newly developed hardware indefinitely, and security patches are another thing which is never done with most software. But I maintain that having an UI team which needs to produce something new, exciting and different for every new version of Windows or Android is actively harmful. (Yes, this makes me an old person.)
My solution is to mostly use F/OSS. For example, my window manager is Window Maker, which can be depended upon not annoying me with new features when I upgrade my Debian. Luckily for me, all of the essential software for software development is open source. (I do run proprietary video games, but not with subscription services, and I use proprietary toolchains for FPGA work, but I am very hard to rely as little as possible on them.)
On the contrary, the move toward SaaS has been a mutual one between both software vendors and the customers (at least, where the customers are businesses). SaaS converts a capital expense into an operational one, one that can easily and predictably be calculated by accounting, and can scale up and down with business needs. This is actually a great deal for a huge number of businesses, especially ones that tend to be low on capital but reliably operate on cash flow. It means you can grow a business with ~0 IT investment, and it means that you aren't stuck with a depreciating asset in the case the business contracts or goes defunct. The best feature for businesses is that it's predictable - prices don't change much over time, and you can much more easily financially model a set monthly cost of business than you can major purchases and implementation costs of hardware and software that often have independent life cycles.
Yes - SaaS raises prices for consumers because the total amount you can extract from a consumer over a multi-year subscription is significantly more than the highest price you can stick on a shrinkwrapped product with a straight face. But at constant EV of price paid, SaaS is better because you pay more for the successful purchases and cancel the stuff that doesn't work out for you, so trying a new product is a lower risk proposition.
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