I really resonate with this. It feels like everyone in the "value chain" between you and your product is trying to interpose some software based monthly recurri

I really resonate with this. It feels like everyone in the "value chain" between you and your product is trying to interpose some software based monthly recurring revenue stream to boost their margins. The recent story about how Cisco routers would 'phone home' to see if your license for the software was still current and not operate if it wasn't struck me as another absurd example of how lame this can be. What always astonishes me is that a company like BMW which makes an excellent car can convince itself that it can maintain and operate a software service infrastructure. Just get a few web designers and some coders to whip up an app. Reality is complicated, and what others make look "easy" (Amazon, Google, Azure) has a lot of layers you can't easily "outsource." Even back in the 90's Sun was fretting over the fact that if you just bought one copy of Solaris with your computer and never upgraded, all those engineers sitting around would just consume cash waiting to do something. Free software has whacked the software business model even further afield.