Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right. The fact that people can make outsize rewards from subscription services are the reason that even small single use tools are now 'services'. I have a piece of software that removes the background from my video feed. It's a subscription, and it regularly phones home. I have a piece of software that lets me visually combine, rotate and reorder pdfs. It's a subscription. Even the simplest things, like a 't…
> It's miserable fighting off a million people who want to help me for 'less than the daily price of your coffee'. Is it also miserable "fighting off" a million companies who want to sell you stuff for the daily price of a coffee? Stuff like T-Shirts, books, newspapers, candy, etc? You seem to have a patronizing attitude towards software products/services. You seem to think that they are so simple, that they should b…
I don't think anyone is claiming that; the opposite of subscription SaaS is not freeware. At some point companies realized that they could have more predictable, long-term, higher revenue streams if instead of selling you a bit of client-side software a single time (with uncertain future business from upgrades), they sold you a subscription to their software, which is often (unnecessarily?) cloud-based. This all feels weird to those of us who have been around for a while and got used to buying software the "old way".
Building a cloud/web-based app means it's (mostly) effortlessly multi-platform. You don't have to build separate apps for Windows, Mac, and (occasionally) Linux. (But there's also the e.g. Electron option.) And meanwhile, you can push bugfixes and new features out to your customers near-instantly. Your release cycles are small, and are often measured in days or weeks, not quarters or years. You can justify charging on a subscription model because you are constantly working for your customers. On the flip side, if a customer wants to cancel their subscription, what happens to any data generated with your app? If it's in a proprietary format, IMO it's unethical to hold a user's data hostage like that.
Selling software by the download is a hard business to be in, and the incentives are not always aligned well. You're expected to fix bugs and release patch versions for "free". But usually you can charge for new major version upgrades. So the incentive is to skimp on bugfixes and instead work on new, big features. Beyond that, there's an incentive to make big, sweeping changes to your app so you can justify calling it a new major release, which triggers an upgrade fee, even if those changes don't actually benefit users. (Then again, this phenomenon, for some reason, exists with subscription apps too.)
But many people just see it as a money grab, especially for products that used to not require a subscription. In 1998 I could go and buy a copy of MS Office in a box from my local store, and it was then mine. I could use it as long as I could find an OS that would run it. Likely I could still run it today under wine or something if I still had a copy. But now we have Office 365. I have to sign up for a subscription. If at any point I want to cancel, I can't use the software anymore. The data I've created with it is still mine, but I have to deal with imperfect format conversions done by other office apps. You could perhaps draw a similar parallel with Adobe's creative software.
Regarding money, I think there's also an aversion to having to pay indefinitely. Sure, MS Office was expensive to buy, at several hundred dollars or whatever it was. But when I forked over that cash, I knew I was done paying for that version. Even if the SaaS version is priced at a few dollars a month, and I'm unlikely to ever subscribe long enough to pay the old "full price", there's still an irrational feeling of getting a raw deal. I think most people are more comfortable with known, one-time costs than with recurring costs, which may change if the company later decides to charge more.