You are correct to frame this in economic terms. It is very much an economic issue as much as a software issue. Assume for the moment you had a sales driven mo

You are correct to frame this in economic terms. It is very much an economic issue as much as a software issue. Assume for the moment you had a sales driven model, like say Word did in the era of those screenshot. Your whole business depends on more sales. Developers, support, admin - stop selling for a month and the business goes under. More customers means more support, which means more overhead, which means sales has to increase in pace. This clearly isn't sustainable (so, no one gets support.) Part of those sales goes to existing customers. (upgrades). Which means new features. It's a treadmill to dream up new things just so there are things to sell as part of the upgrade. Recognizing this route could only end in a crash we switched to a SaaS model. Now support is a priority (and we'll funded), programming, and random new features less so. Customers get better support, programmers get rewarded for fixing bugs, new features can be considered, well planned, and done properly on a decent time scale. And if the business never sells another copy, it's OK. Support remains funded. It's a much better model for customers, for support and programmers, and ultimately yes, better for business owners as well.