People have been building alternatives to MS Office, Adopt Creative Suite, and so on and so forth for literally decades and yet they’re still the de facto standard.
Turns out it’s a lot harder to disrupt than it sounds.
It's really hard. But not impossible. Figma managed to. What's different this time around is AI assisted programming means that people can go in and fix bugs, and the interchange becomes the important part.
Figma is another subscription-only service with no native applications.
The closest thing we get to “disruption” these days are web services with complimentary Electron apps, which basically just serves the same content as the website except for duplicating the memory overhead of running a fresh browser instance.
Figma didn't disrupt anything except Adobe, it's the same shitty business model and the same shitty corporate overloads.
Dropbox may not be a great example, either. It's storage and bandwidth, and both are expensive, even if the software wasn't being worked on.
But application software that is, or should be, running locally, I agree. Charge for upgrades, by all accounts, but not for the privilege of continued use of an old, unmaintained version.
In another thread, people were looking for things to build. If there's a subscription service that you think shouldn't be a subscription (because they're not actually doing anything new for that subscription), disrupt the fuck out of it. Rent seekers about to lose their shirts. I pay for eg Spotify because there's new music that has to happen, but Dropbox?
If you're not adding new whatever (features/content) in order to justify a subscription, then you're only worth the electricity and hardware costs or else I'm gonna build and host my own.