Software sold today does not require maintenance. Software to work in the future requires maintenance. I am not buying future software. I am buying today software.
Increasingly I am not buying software at all.
Increasingly I am not buying software at all.
That solved all the issues with paying for maintenance, but sadly someone must have figured out a mandatory subscription was a better way to make more money.
Major versions come from a time where one had to produce physical media. Thus one could do a major release only every few years. Back then features had to be grouped together in a big bang release.
Nowadays one can ship features as they are being developed, with many small features changes all the time.
It seems to me like the "subscription model" is exactly the same, except for the use of DRM and cloud dependencies to force users to pay for new versions. The only thing that changed was that the option to remain on an old version was taken away from users.
The manufacturer/builder gets paid once, and you get value monthly.
The existence of purchasing cars and houses with no ongoing cost to the builder is due to competition.
Houses, not sure how it's done in more populous areas, but around here you don't ever rent from the builder. You rent from someone who bought the house from a builder (or bought from someone who did, etc etc).
The idea of capturing reward post-receipt is feudalistic.
Price is usually established based on how much something cost to make (materials, effort, profit), combined with market conditions (abundance/shortage of products, surplus cash/tough economy...).
If you want to continuously extract profit from consistent use of a hammer or vacuum cleaner, somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.
And software like photoshop is not trivial to copy so it can survive being priced based off of value provided. There exists competitors that don't have a subscription, but they are not good enough to kill it.