People tend to want to best of both worlds. They want to "own their software" (i.e., pay once, use forever) but they also want the benefits of SaaS: low up-front investment, cloud services, continual evolution, network effects, etc.
Photoshop is an easy example: would you rather pay $400 up front to have version X.X forever, or $10/mo forever to always have the latest version. That's a tradeoff! Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2.
Cloud services are even harder because you start talking hardware. "Owning Photoshop" is easy because it runs on my computer. I'm maintaining my computer for me and only me. What would "owning their software" even look like for, I donno, Github? Are you running your own AWS instance? Are other people running their own instances?
There are ways to build P2P software, or on-prem enterprise stuff... but no one really wants to buy it. They're ok paying $10/mo for the billions of dollars of infrastructure because there's really no other way to do it.
Photoshop is an easy example: would you rather pay $400 up front to have version X.X forever, or $10/mo forever to always have the latest version. That's a tradeoff! Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2.
Cloud services are even harder because you start talking hardware. "Owning Photoshop" is easy because it runs on my computer. I'm maintaining my computer for me and only me. What would "owning their software" even look like for, I donno, Github? Are you running your own AWS instance? Are other people running their own instances?
There are ways to build P2P software, or on-prem enterprise stuff... but no one really wants to buy it. They're ok paying $10/mo for the billions of dollars of infrastructure because there's really no other way to do it.