Belated reply, because I like your posts, and I don't want to be argumentative with you. :) My mentor at that time was an AutoCAD dealer. He (eventually) expla

Belated reply, because I like your posts, and I don't want to be argumentative with you. :) My mentor at that time was an AutoCAD dealer. He (eventually) explained the value added reseller racket to me. Very similar to franchising. Autodesk and others sloughed off most marketing, sales, inventory, shipping, and tech support onto their dealers. Their reasoning, IIRC, was that while dev cost 7% of revenue, those other activities cost 30%. Why not get rubes to cover that overhead? Further, turnover in the dealer channel was about 1/3 per year. A typical dealer would refinance their house (or whatever) for a few $100k. Burn thru it trying to get established. And there'd be 2 more wannabe dealers waiting to replace them. It was very hard to not sell AutoCAD for a loss. There were a few tricks to surviving and profiting. Consulting, training, and hardware, of course. The most capable productized their AutoCAD addons. The most successful of those then matured out of dealerships and formed their own VAR rackets. My mentor created Rhino 3D. Most of the tech and code started as AutoCAD addons. Until they had bootstrapped a standalone MVP. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros_3D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinoceros_3D -- This was the 1990s. Autodesk is now the Computer Associates of abandonware graphics programs. Some of those legacy apps probably have enterprisey support contracts, so you're probably right about that. At a guess, it's probably part of the subscription models (everyone trying to copy Adobe's success).