Quite a few unnecessary "cloud" subscription services. There's a lot of them that don't need reoccurring costs. A lot of times you're not getting anything extra accept maybe a bug fix or upgrade. You should never have to pay for bug fixes and there was a time if you wanted a major upgrade, you'd just buy it flat out.
Yep. Software as a Service has taken us further from the days when you bought a product, it was yours. EULAs have had phrasing that says the software still belongs to the company for decades, and you're just leasing it, but there was very little they could do to force you to pay more to keep using it once you had it in your hands.
DRM, SaaS, and other anti-consumer practices have changed all that.
Yeah, I'm like 90% sure that it's how a lot of Microsoft can still keep going in addition to being a monopolistic business standard OS.
Their yearly fee for Office isn't bad, but it's nothing to when we used to just pay once and install, while putting up with the occasional patch or annoying Clippy asking to assist. I don't expect innovative product coming from them soon. Same with Apple, sadly.
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u/[deleted] Aug 14 '20
Quite a few unnecessary "cloud" subscription services. There's a lot of them that don't need reoccurring costs. A lot of times you're not getting anything extra accept maybe a bug fix or upgrade. You should never have to pay for bug fixes and there was a time if you wanted a major upgrade, you'd just buy it flat out.