> Oh please, consumers decide the market. If consumers didn't want services they wouldn't buy it. If consumers wanted "owned" software, businesses would sell enough "owned" software to soak up all that demand. But consumers didn't, and businesses didn't, and so we arrive at today.
That's false. Consumers don't decide shit. They don't compare things they see to what they could be, they chose from what's available. Add to that the sales and marketing doing their best to hide the true costs of their offerings, and you have what you have today - customers being played like a fiddle, coaxed towards making suboptimal choices.
> Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell.
Spotify was a legal alternative to pirating music, that was one of their bigger selling point.
> Few people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix
GMail, at least for now, still lets you own the data. The story may change if they ever decide to shut down IMAP access.
> Consumers are clamoring for it, aren't they?
They are, after they get burned a couple of times. See also the reactions to Adobe or Jetbrains going SaaS; the latter actually yielded under pressure and brought back the perpetual licenses.
It's hard to compete with SaaS on price and convenience, because benefits are immediate and true costs are delayed. "Free basic, $9/month advanced" for a shiny-looking product is great at the point of customer acquisition; it's only later on that the customer discovers that the service sucks under any reasonable workload, in one year it costs 1.5x as much, and in 5 years it may just be gone, taking all your data with it.
That's false. Consumers don't decide shit. They don't compare things they see to what they could be, they chose from what's available. Add to that the sales and marketing doing their best to hide the true costs of their offerings, and you have what you have today - customers being played like a fiddle, coaxed towards making suboptimal choices.
> Few people kicked and screamed as they bought Spotify. It turns out that streaming a wide variety of music for an access fee is a pretty good sell.
Spotify was a legal alternative to pirating music, that was one of their bigger selling point.
> Few people kicked and screamed as they picked Gmail over Postfix
GMail, at least for now, still lets you own the data. The story may change if they ever decide to shut down IMAP access.
> Consumers are clamoring for it, aren't they?
They are, after they get burned a couple of times. See also the reactions to Adobe or Jetbrains going SaaS; the latter actually yielded under pressure and brought back the perpetual licenses.
It's hard to compete with SaaS on price and convenience, because benefits are immediate and true costs are delayed. "Free basic, $9/month advanced" for a shiny-looking product is great at the point of customer acquisition; it's only later on that the customer discovers that the service sucks under any reasonable workload, in one year it costs 1.5x as much, and in 5 years it may just be gone, taking all your data with it.