No it hasn't. The only thing that makes you think so is the unrelenting churn of modern web development. Back in the day if you bought a particular toolchain you could keep developing with it for as long as you wanted and the only thing that could force you to upgrade is the need for more features. In the past you'd get nice-to-haves at every upgrade but if you didn't opt for it you would be perfectly able to continue developing your current condebase using your current, paid-for tools.
but neither do the maintenance costs.
That depends. On macOS the churn is high. But there are probably a lot of Windows applications from the nineties that still run unmodified.
macOS indeed requires additional effort. But regardless of that customers tend to get annoyed and stop giving you money if you don't ever fix their bug reports.
Re:Omni Group Layoffs
by Wowfunhappy on Wednesday April 01, 2020 @09:55AM
(#22748464)
You fix the bugs in paid updates, and users decide whether the bug fixes are worth the cost.
It's a good balance—if you spend extra time on worthwhile changes, the users need to pay for that time. The users can also decide to stick with what they have if they don't think your changes were worthwhile, which may be a perfectly reasonable path.
High quality software has always required a recurring payment model. It's not viable to sell standalone versions to a new set of customers each year. In the past this was informal with upgrade versions every year. You could theoretically choose not to upgrade but software developers would have all kinds of tricks to "encourage you" such as not providing forwards compatible file formats.
What the subscription model does is align customers with the realities of software development. Yes the cost of software never stops rising but neither do the maintenance costs.