>It will be interesting to see if the SaaS subscription/rental model changes this.
I think the rental model will slow this down, but not get rid of it entirely: not as long as people still want to write blogs about the "new version of our product". I think JetBrains will make a good case study: their products are feature complete and they seemed to struggle to find new features to add lately (plus they have switched to rental model).
What we really need is something similar to API versioning: when GMail has a new version, bump up the version to 24, but keep version 23 accessible to those who prefer it.
I think the rental model will slow this down, but not get rid of it entirely: not as long as people still want to write blogs about the "new version of our product". I think JetBrains will make a good case study: their products are feature complete and they seemed to struggle to find new features to add lately (plus they have switched to rental model).
What we really need is something similar to API versioning: when GMail has a new version, bump up the version to 24, but keep version 23 accessible to those who prefer it.