Doesn't explain businesses that had been per-purchase for a long time and are now still switching to subscriptions though. (E.g. photoshop, jetbrains...)
With cost of living crisis and such, soon enough though it won't be able to last. People are already cancelling one of the biggest main subscriptions they have (netflix).
Also I fear this is really changing society. Many years ago, as you got older you got into a better place in life because you had saved up and bought all the stuff you need and slowly aqquired good equipment and everything you need.
Now our lives are full of tech that needs to be replaced every couple of years, heck even now headphones have gone wireless, your headphones needs replacing every few years and now with more and more things being subscription, it's fine when your are young, but your not able to save so much as your constantly having to replace/buy new stuff, when your older what happens? You don't have the same stuff you would have built up in the past, you need to keep paying for it all.
What this means for the endless, exponential "consumer" ideology is that it isn't sustainable in the long run. This should be blindingly obvious but for some reason many people weren't or aren't seeing it.
Only because you can't afford a subscription won't mean that people will stop trying to upsell. Instead you'll be constantly confronted with all the things you're supposedly missing out on, will be stuck with purposely annoying workflows and generally will feel like constantly using the shareware version of everything. That's not a future I personally look forward to.
This part is absolutely bonkers to me and absurd that we’ve accepted it.
I’m an amateur music producer. Many producers I know, even pros, use headphones that are years old, some even decades old. Most of the bestselling models haven’t changed at all in decades. You can use them for years and the only parts you need to replace are the ear cushions and cable. Most manufacturers even build them with replaceability in mind with detachable cups and cables.
Your grandfather's wheelbarrow didn't need replacing every 2 years but he also didn't have Netflix. You can easily have your grandfather's lifestyle by buying a future-proof wheelbarrow and cancelling your Netflix subscription.
Software is fixed cost to create and near-free to distribute. Sure there are tiny cloud costs for running things and maybe you need a couple engineers to fix bugs, but the subscription pricing model doesn’t fit this.
To use headphones as an example you can still go get a pair of wired Sony headphones that will have great sound and last for a decade for $50. I just did. (Or you can spend more and get even better.)
I've also bought $15 Chinese Bluetooth earbuds that were janky and dead in less than a year.
Sometimes the simple, older, reliable stuff is better.
You can build a desktop PC that will last you for a decade with occasionally upgrading components. Now you can do it with a Framework laptop too.
Personally I bought a nice i7 laptop about a decade ago and will only get around to retiring it this year, it stopped being my main workhorse several years ago but has been great as a secondary living room entertainment machine.
I don't need the latest greatest, I play a lot of retro and indie games and watch movies at picture qualities that video snobs would sneer at, but that gets back to whether you want to develop expensive tastes or not.
Not that life has fundamentally become unliveably expensive.
There are some places where cost of living really is a serious problem - homes, health care, education.
But a lot of this I feel is really about younger generations having voracious consumer appetites, like an absolutely off-the-charts, record-setting desire for luxury and status. A lot of it is driven by a heightened sense of needing to keep up, look good on Instagram etc. which is a whole other can of worms. Do you really need to keep up with the rat race, the Joneses, the latest fashions etc.? Maybe it's different now, but the Boomers went through their own version of this, they had their big hippie anti-materialism movement in the 60's (and then by the 80's they seemed to have forgotten all about it).
I think a big part of this is just how much better advertising has gotten, basically cementing consumer goods as required to the average person. Add on to that how good high quality laptops are specialized goods for those who spend their lives obsessed with tech (i.e. the framework laptop). If you walk into Walmart or BestBuy, your options will be severely limited to products which aren't built to last. I can't blame anyone for feeling confused when it comes to which products to buy.
Also, capitalism can’t help but lower the quality of products as a way to increase numbers sold. It’s inherent to the system. Companies would be insane to produce for example a phone that lasts 15 years, it would cut into their profit marges.
more profitable is more likely to be viable in more future situations
Jetbrains is a great example, because with a steadily growing ecosystem of third party developer tools that they must integrate with, their maintenance cost is probably high and rising. We expect our IDE’s to support everything under the sun but balk at paying for the never-ending work needed to support that. Something’s gotta give in that equation.
However, there are a bazillion other applications -- password managers, note taking applications, Git clients, you name it, for which this is not true. I made a very niche-specific GUI application in 2010-2012 (a search application for Dutch treebanks), written with Qt. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It's effectively abandonware or just done (depending on your perspective). I have released updates since then to make sure it keeps running on the latest OS versions. It takes me, maybe 2-4 hours per year? (Typically replacing some deprecated Qt APIs and I there was one libxml2 API change.)
I think a lot of software companies just want to get on the gravy train. Usually, their yearly price is close to what a perpetual license used to cost. So if you successfully switch to a subscription model, you have much more income than before.
The primarily loser here is the user. You are poorer after an application switches to a subscription model. If a company goes bankrupt or decides to pull the plug, better hope that your data is not in a proprietary format (while I can still run some old WordStar in DOSBox and open old files).
Had a subscription model been used, those software might have benefited from 30 years worth of usability updates...or they might still be garbage, looking at SAP.
While it took a community outcry, I think Jetbrains now has the best subscription model, that’s a positive for both users and the company.
They could just let me keep the version I already have and block me from future updates. The way, they set it up right now, they are deliberately causing some disruption when unsubscribing.
It's called a Cash Cow[1] model—you make a one-time purchase, which allows you updates for the next year. At the end of the year, you can either purchase another year of updates, or enjoy the full-featured app you currently have.
The thing keeping me from subscriptions is the fact that if you decide you no longer want to pay, you no longer get access. This encourages devs to continue to ship great updates, while not gimping your software at the end of the payment term.
[1] https://drewmccormack.medium.com/a-cash-cow-is-on-the-agenda...
For example, Adobe is the largest SaaS by revenue:
https://www.mikesonders.com/largest-saas-companies/
— Model clearly works if you look at Abobe’s revenue per year since 2004:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/266399/revenue-of-adobe-...
— Here’s a detailed history of Abobe, if you’re interested in the SaaS part, just search for “SaaS” on the page:
That doesn't mean the rest of your statement, but if that happened then competition in a free market would take care of it. Perhaps you can start the next billion-dollar Adobe?
The fact that so many companies are moving to the subscription model shows that it works better than others.
Want to run an ad? Prices have gone way up because you're the only one that's clinging to the old model. Want to pay premium to hire someone better? You can't, your competitor can because they have turned to subscriptions. In many cases your hand is forced.
Customers vote with their wallets and social shares. If you find a product that it a one time purchase, then you should share it, post about it since you will be rewarding the company, for they sure are not able to compete on customer acquisition.
Even if for some reason you didn't need all of this, IDE 1.0 would eventually stop getting updated and the bugs would stop getting fixed, so you would naturally need to update.
Considering people naturally want the latest and greatest, and devs hate maintaining legacy stuff, a subscription makes sense in this case.
> Considering people naturally want the latest and greatest
They often don't. Especially with updates, those are often far more in the interests of the developers than of the users. That's why so much development effort has gone into auto-updating schemes.
Remember how much effort Microsoft had to invest to get people off Windows XP. A large part of their userbase would have been perfectly fine with staying on XP for all eternity. It was Microsoft who wanted them to update to Vista, not the users.