Subscriptions make accountants happy.
And anything that makes an accountant happy is a BAD thing.
When corporations started making billions invading privacy with cookies / data mining, when they began offering MS in the cloud for a monthly fee (while cutting on-prem functionality) and when state sponsored hackers began undermining everything, we should have stood up as one and said, "No, enough!" Instead, people gave up their privacy for emoji's, businesses paid MS so they could have cute animated GIF's in Teams and governments placed their own selfish needs above the people they are supposed to represent.
We, as a free society, have lost. The freedoms we signed away in one sided EULA and orders from secret courts are never coming back without stark measures. Democracies no longer exist as governments have stopped looking out for their citizens unless there are votes to be gained. Laws are broken daily by corrupt politicians / civil servants filling up their bank accounts and no one is punished. Greedy corporations sacrifice hundreds of human lives for a bigger profit margin for their shareholders while paying millions to large law firms to protect their reputations. GDPR fines to Google, multiple Boeing 737 MAX crashes, the 2008 real estate collapse caused by outright deception and multi-million dollar CEO payouts while their workers make minimum wage under draconian conditions. That's just the price of doing business.
We, as a species, have no right to go to space and inhabit other worlds until we clean up our act and start making personal responsibility mean something again. If the Boeing board had faced Felony jail time for the MAX deaths, airplane safety would improve dramatically as one example.
Corporations are recognized as "people" in the US so they can make political donations. Time for the board members to be treated as "people" in the eyes of the law. Lock up one crooked politician or corrupt CEO and the rest will fall in line very quickly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
