Because companies make their best and most reliable income from subscriptions.
Also the reliable income makes them more credit worthy, allowing greater loans from banks and making it possible to grow more.
Tbh it only sucks for the customers
Tbh it only sucks for the customers
capitalist tradition
I’d say companies THINK they will make more money. That might be true with big, complex software that can be sold as a service that people will use (Photoshop, Windows, Office etc) or services that offer a lot (like the original version of Netflix or Amazon Prime)
But it’s not true for things you can take or leave. (Such as most mobile apps which now have to really on sales to boost conversion rates from Free tier to subscription).
Then you also have the issue of a fragmented market so even previously successful services like Prime are looking to get more money by adding extra costs (eg Prime Video will have adverts from the summer unless you pay $40 extra per year as a new top up subscription)
So it’s more of a theoretical reliable income.
Because they seemed like a good deal when they first came around, and they were, so they boomed in popularity. Then everyone started offering them, the prices got jacked up and now you'll struggle to find an alternative.
Also, the very very short answer: More money
It's a lot easier and much much cheaper to run a subscription payment model today than it was 10-20 years ago.
'recurring revenue streams'. businesses can make more money selling products as services than actual things, and more reliably.
take adobe licensing as a perfect example of this enshitification.
Part of the problem is that the technology needed to turn increasingly mundane things into subscription services has gotten much cheaper.
Adobe opened the floodgates and it's been downhill since
Adobe did it because everybody and their grandmother just pirated Photoshop instead of paying that huge one time fee (licenses costed around $900 not counting inflation). It wasn’t until they went with the subscription model when people actually started to pay for Photoshop.
No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.
the problem is they don't offer the possibility of a "permanent" license anymore AFAIK.
They priced it for businesses/students that would be using it constantly in a professional setting and did not have a reasonable personal use price for the general public who pirated it.
I am not an adobe user, but isn't it possible to pirate its stuff? I'd do it only because I hate subscription models, and if they were the "pioneers" in this aspect I wouldn't want to give them a dime.
C A P I T A L I S M
Once they proved that people would be willing to pay repeatedly, everyone wanted a slice of that delicious guaranteed revenue.
Online subscriptions have actually been a thing for a long time. In some ways it's even fallen out of favor, especially with the rise of the "freemium" model. MMOs are a great example of this as subscriptions used to be the price of entry with no other monetization, where as these days if an MMO uses subscriptions it's a secondary "convenience" fee after entry that is almost always combined with MTX bullshit.
If you're talking specifically about SaaS bullshit, it's because it required a certain level of infrastructure before it became practical. We had to move away from cash and needed reliable internet connections first, amongst a host of other developments. Anything that couldn't be a cash purchase in a physical store was losing significant market share. This didn't stop time restricted licenses on software still being a thing, but it was generally pretty niche software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
imo, the subscription style is the evolution of "planned obsolescence".
people are willing to give money if the goods have an expiration. so instead of the goods expiring, the concept of validity of the goods now expire. same money, but saves on making different goods altogether.
Less people were tech literate back then, and the ones who were would likely pirate things like music, than consider buying things out of convenience.
When everyone and their grandmas got online, convenience was something more people were willing to pay for.
That's just my theory though.
It's a similar reason retail stores try and push their loyalty programs, it's a more guaranteed source of income than a one time payment.
As my boss said in one of those stupid floor meetings we always had to have, "if they have [the competitor's] card in their wallet, and not ours, who do you think they're going to?" God, I got sick of asking folks to sign up.
Because now is the age of techno-feudalism.
Bc people get stupider over time, it seems. :-(
If you had to pick, would you rather get a large ammount of money semi regularly, or a smaller ammount of money on a consistant schedule, oh and there is no alternative for your customer than to keep paying for as long as they use your product.
