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Seems to me that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of SAAS. A service either: - Has a big enough moat that its immune to competition - in which case you get rent seeking behaviour; or - It's vulnerable and could disappear / become economically unviable so you wouldn't want to have your business rely on it. So you essentially have to choose between two unpalatable choices.
So to answer the question of how we came here: The same way anything in the commons sphere rots and dies. Not enough people care enough about it. They're OK giving away control one way or another and companies are more than happy to sell it as a service. What user gets in return is diminishing but once the process starts it's kind of runaway I'm afraid.
I bought MS Office (non-subscription) and honestly Google Docs/Sheets (free tier) works for most of my needs.
While Apple wants to push subscription apps, you don't need to subscribe to them. I don't. If the value is there, sure subscribe to them.
Apple is pretty in your face with selling their services. I get nagware iCloud storage limit subscription notifications that I can't dismiss. They are pushing for Arcade, TV+, Music, etc. sign -ups in their OS settings. I haven't paid for them and don't intend to.
Just because these paid subscriptions exist does not mean they are entitled to your money every month.
Now with games becoming digital, if you break their 'terms of service' they can lock and ban your account; taking your 'digital' games away or even locking the console. (Unless you paid for the physical version.)
In last 30 days, I transferred over 280 GB of translation data from my service to end-users around the word. Should I tell DeepL, Google and AWS that they should offer me their services for free or what?
EDIT:
I apologize if this sounds too passive-aggressive, but I'm tired of hearing that subscriptions are bad. Thanks to subscription model, we can have many smaller service providers who simply have fun from working on something (like me). If you think that giving someone $5/mo for a cool app is too much, then okay. You don't have to do it, no deal. ¯\_(ツ)\_/¯
PS Great example of solo-developer is the InkDrop creator. He is working on this note-taking app since ~2016. https://www.inkdrop.app
What confuses me is seeing this kind of question on the same forum where people often gripe about not being paid the 6 digit salary they expect to produce the software we use. How do you achieve super cheap products made by people making super high pay? Money doesn’t just materialize out of thin air to make that work.
PS: my comment comes off as advocating for the subscription model. I personally hate it with a passion: I’d rather pay for upgrades/updates to code, and pay for resources metered by my usage. My comment should be interpreted as understanding where the model comes from, not necessarily liking it.
Seems to me that there is an inherent contradiction at the heart of SAAS. A service either: - Has a big enough moat that its immune to competition - in which case you get rent seeking behaviour; or - It's vulnerable and could disappear / become economically unviable so you wouldn't want to have your business rely on it. So you essentially have to choose between two unpalatable choices.
I think a large part of the problem is that so much software (like Office) is turning into a service when it doesn’t need to be.
One significant advantage of SaaS over traditional download-and-run-and-pay-for-updates apps is the fact that everyone is always on the same version. In a large organisation, and across organisational boundaries, working around people using different versions of things is an incredibly inefficient use of time.
Office 365 is worth the money for that reason alone.