And increasingly people do not own what they purchase
No, but didn't you hear, that is MUCH better for the consumer. They don't want to own things. They want to pay subscriptions indefinitely
https://www.zuora.com/vision/subscription-economy/
The subscription model does better align incentives (product creator keeps making a better product that keeps delivering more value) and customers who value it most can pay higher rates for more features while those who do not value it as much don't pay.
The big issue from the consumer perspective is lock-in. And then the big issue from the company perspective is dealing with the cost of repeated churn & people who use free trials or such repeatedly across different computing devices, web browsers, emails, VPNs, etc etc etc
I had been hesitant to buy an Office 365 license wanting to forgo an ongoing subscription price for software I downloaded, but they added a feature I wanted which was only available to Office Insiders, which is only accessible to those with an active Office 365 subscription. That feature was worth far more than the ongoing recurring licensing fee.
Some other companies which have really juiced revenues by going recurring on account access fees like Adobe I have been more hesitant to move across on & I bought the latest version of the Creative Suite the day their model shift was announced so I had the newest version of the old stuff which will last as long as possible.
Sometimes with software there is a bit of a water cycle as companies use small businesses to dogfood their software & build awareness later move upmarket to enterprise the cost spiral eventually leads to a new market entry point for a new provider catering to small businesses. But in some cases if there is a subscription price set low enough and/or a free tier and/or academic exemptions to the price spiral perhaps once dominant software can remain dominant far longer.
Sites like Canva or services like Sketchup or Google Docs are plenty popular, but nothing has really displaced Adobe or Autodesk or Microsoft Office.
I can't imagine how complex the Excel codebase is or how hard a deep rewrite would be without breaking the software on existing computers all around the world.
Some of the smaller software companies have simply went away or were sold for a song while the dominant players have grown more dominant (based at least upon what the stock market is saying with Adobe being worth over $100 billion, Microsoft not too far from $1 trillion & Autodesk more than tripling over the past 3 years).
As the customer relationships become annuities rather than discrete sales, it gives the leaders increased margins to spend more money on brand awareness and drive up ad rates in the industry, which blocks out most other competing commercial offerings unless they are more specialized to a specific niche market.
A smaller animation software maker like Smith Micro Software trades at about $2 a share, down from $63 in 2010. They definitely should do the subscription model with their animation software seeing how well it worked for Adobe.
Muvizu went away and got purchased by some company out of China for a song. Customer support & setting up a license may require learning a bit of Chinese & opening up a QQ account or such.
