The new world where you own nothing - you are the "revenue item"
It seems too many technology companies are now on the bandwagon of your "customers" are not actually "customers" but are rather your "generators of revenue stream" and you milk everything you can from them either by selling all their habits & private data, or forcing them into direct paid subscription models.
In my opinion, it seems the world is racing down a path back to the days of a small group of mega rich overlords who owned everything and then the masses of poor peons slaving away for subsistence, always being renters never having any property they actually own.
Instead of rich families it's now Global Mega Corporations.
Before long I think a lot of the software / technology world will be divided into 2 camps:
The crowd who thinks it's normal to basically have your credit card hooked up to your computer & everything you run is on subscription (or "free" if you give them all your personal information)
The enlightened and stubborn rebels who use open source software & still can build & repair their own devices, running non-commercial software.
You notice also this big "cloud" push... why have your own servers and your own data... just give us all your data and pay us whatever we demand for access to it & having it work... it's perfect... you are never going to not pay us are you? So the plan is something like 3 big mega corporations (probably microsoft/google/amazon) hold most of everybody's data and most of the servers.
Microsoft doesn't care about the few enlightened rebel technical users raging against the corporate machine. They are fully committed to using their OS near monopoly leverage to turn into the next google/facebook. They don't want to sell you a new OS, they have to "give" you the OS and in return lock you into being their "revenue generator" with ads, selling your info / habits, pushing other subscription games & items etc. They need to get a guaranteed income stream from their users & nothing will stand in the way.
The problem is they will probably get away with it, as too many people now think as long at it's "free" well then who cares how much they are selling me as a product to everyone. For most of the average folk, they are unwilling to move off "windows" even if you help them.
Once upon a time you bought your operating system & then when a new one came out, you bought it, if you decided it was worth your money (or got it as a bundled price with a new PC when you decided it was worth upgrading). Pretty much yours to keep and use as long as you saw fit. You gave them a 1 time payment up front (either directly or via a middleman) and were set.
Now you can't actually buy the Microsoft Desktop operating system outright any more, you continuously pay for it. Either by them shoving ads at you, slurping your data to sell to others & being a test base for stuff before they roll it out to the corporate customers. Or you pay a constant yearly licensing fee if you are big enough to have them deem your wallet big enough for the corporate version.
Similar to what Adobe did a few years back... NO we WON'T sell you our new updated software, it's rent it, forever paying or it stops working. So no more actually having to come out with a better product to get people to pay, just sit back and let the cash roll in and outsource someone to insert a few new things from time to time.
Another example is Quicken with their Quickbooks product... Sorry we are going to stop supporting payroll, tax updates and other things (that you still pay for each year), unless you "upgrade" to our latest version... Latest version however is a subscription only product and if you actually dig in, they will confirm that if your subscription stops... so does the program and all your data is kind of stuck.
The John Deere tractor mess is another example... buy the tractor... but unless you pay us continually for "maintenance" the tractor will refuse to run and you have to sign away your rights to sue us if you loose a crop because we couldn't be bothered to get to your farm on time to press the "we got paid" button on your tractor.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
