Something I've seen online a lot lately is criticism of companies like Adobe and Microsoft (and a lot of other organizations) for the general float toward services rather than on-premise infrastructure, web tools rather than desktop applications, and other issues, such as forced updating in Windows 10, as well Adobe's forced move to the subscription model.
I think some of these are fair, maybe not correct, but it's a fair point, a good question to ask, and even a fair criticism to make.
Some of them, such as questions about Windows 10's update model and questions about the… intrusiveness of Windows Update, especially since there is no option to turn it off altogether.
Most of this criticism is based (often solely) on the fact that it wasn't like this before, and is therefore somehow an innately bad idea. I think a few things about that. First, that's just lazy thinking. This type of reactionary thinking is both annoying and lazy. Not much thought goes in other than "it's different and therefore bad". Secondly, it's often wrong. Most people recognize that, say, Microsoft or Adobe has made a change to how they sell software, but don't recognize the change in, say, how their computer connects to the Internet, or how they themselves use the machine and the software and services on it.
The other thing I think people don't recognize is that a lot of what's going on today is something the tech companies have wanted to be able to do for a long time. There's no concrete proof of it, but I can nearly guarantee that if there was a way to, say, schedule a software patch and an automatic reboot on a home user's system in the early 1990s, the companies would have done it.
Even if the idea wasn't there before, I think that the idea came about because the capability was there, not because the biggest, oldest, and most established software companies are innately different today than they were in the 1980s or 1990s.
This, too, is one of the smptoms of the fact that most computing products really are just that: products. Regardless of what Apple "at the intersection of technology and liberal arts" and some of the other companies trying to sell you a lifestyle might say, they really are trying to get you to buy their products.
For these companies, there's a more predictable revenue stream involved if you do things like subscribe to your software on a yearly basis.
Fortunately, I don't think that the companies are the only ones to benefit from this. There's a reasonably clear value proposition for a lot of subscription-based software, such as Microsoft Office365 and Adobe Creative Cloud. There are not currently any subscription services for operating systems, but I think that there could be some advantages if there were. For example, with both Office and Creative Cloud, the full package (if you are going to use every application, and upgrade every version) is usually less expensive than buying new perpetual licenses was.
In the case of Adobe Creative Suite where upgrade licensing was available, it nearly breaks even, but upgrades to Creative Suite weren't very flexible. Creative Cloud on the other hand, allows you to easily move the software from one computer to the next, and also allows easy movement between Mac and Windows systems. It also officially allows the software to be on two systems, although to my knowledge, Adobe doesn't have a Creative Cloud offering that officially allows a person access to, say, five licenses of the software.
Unfortunately, a lack of flexibility and some other general shenanigans means that there are definitely times when even I wish Adobe would just give up and go back to regularly scheduled major versions.
On the Microsoft side of things, it can be murky. The use case for Adobe software that updates and upgrades continuously is reasonably straightforward, but on the Office side of things, most people who are using Office can successfully use one copy for extended periods of time, or use different versions with the same documents. Office is like Windows in that most of the people who buy a computer with it won't bother upgrading to a newer version.
That said, Microsoft actually provides a pretty compelling case for Office365 (but they, unlike Adobe, still sell current versions of Office in a perpetually licensed manner). For $99/year, you get all of the Office products on five computers, including the ability to make sub-tending accounts, so that your family members can have their own storage space, email, and so on. There's also a $70/year option for a single computer and user, and the oddly positioned but good value if you can get it $80/4year/2computer Office 365 University subscription. With Office 365, you get some Skype credit, some nice features on the Outlook.com, plus the entire suite of desktop Office applications, short Visio and Project (I wonder what Microsoft's long-term plan for those two is), and some other productivity and collaboration features, such as the online storage and the OneDrive sync client.
The actual pricing is about a wash if you were buying Office on a regular basis for one or two computers, and customers actually come out ahead if they were previously buying Office for four or five computers, and if they use the online storage space.
I think that the flexibility could be a little better on Office365, however. For example, I don't believe that there is any way to buy additional disk quota.
The fact that Internet connectivity is near ubiquitous and that it's reasonable to expect somebody to either have the Internet or have the ability to bring their computer to a campus, library, or café, probably has more to do with the increasing popularity of cloud-connected, subscription software. Games have been doing this for a fairly long while, with World of Warcraft (and others) now having been available for over ten years. The value case there is a little bit different, because World of Warcraft is both computer software and entertainment software. Even if no development whatsoever was happening on the "computer software" the actual entertainment content component gets work, and the whole thing as it works today relies on servers for collaborative play.
Word and Photoshop are a little different. Nevertheless, I don't think that there's any kind of shift in attitude at software publishers. They would have asked for $10/mo to use Word long ago if it were technically reasonable to do so. I've got some more thoughts on exactly how the value of "cloud" software (and also vendor control of local computers) might be enhanced.