I don’t think this model aligns the incentives particularly well. If a business does a great job creating a piece of long-lived reliable software, they get puni

I don’t think this model aligns the incentives particularly well. If a business does a great job creating a piece of long-lived reliable software, they get punished by infrequent updates. If they ship a good-but-not-great product with some lock-in, need for frequent updates and an ecosystem of backwards-incompatible plugins and formats, then they get rewarded because you’ll end up buying it again next year.