I share the sentiment that there are plenty of products going the subscription route without any meaningful justification. However, one argument the author doesn't account for is the increasing prevalence of apps that involve cloud services - which, even in the case of something lightweight like a sync mechanism, will still incur ongoing costs for existing users indefinitely. This situation does go some way to justifying subscription pricing - though plenty of apps use subscription pricing without any cloud involvement (looking at you Parallels).

That said, one counterpoint to this is that too much software depends on the cloud unnecessarily - in many cases there's no need to use the cloud, what the user wants to do should be perfectly possible locally and therefore the lack of any ongoing expense would remove the need/justification for subscription pricing.

Edit: Here's a perfectly timed example of this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11439001