Like with the various hardware bits that I use this would probably cause me to get stuck in the past at some point in time. Fortunately for me my tools are free (text editor, compiler) but I can see that in some professions you are now forced into buying a subscription for software where you'd much rather just pay for a license and the occasional update. Congratulations at becoming a dairy cow, even so this article was about IoT and there most services feel grafted on without any kind of improved functionality, in the case of software-by-subscription (which I think is a fairer name that software-as-a-service) one could argue that the distribution model has changed but the functionality is roughly what you pay for. Not that there aren't obvious drawbacks to software 'in the cloud'.