To sum it up - good for the companies, not so good for many users. I fail to grasp why as a user I should care about increasing salaries at given company though

To sum it up - good for the companies, not so good for many users. I fail to grasp why as a user I should care about increasing salaries at given company though, my priorities are elsewhere, even orthogonal since its my cash they so desperately want. The company part - just look at how Adobe increased profits when they moved to subscription model. Many vocal users hated it since day 1, but majority goes and buys it even if they complain, even if it costs them much more long term. Why? Well if you are a photographer, you will need Lightroom or Photoshop as today as in 10 years. Nobody at Adobe cares that you would be perfectly fine with same version as purchased, not enough cash can be squeezed out like that. As for users part, it has 2 subparts - quite a few really benefit since they get cheaply access to otherwise expensive tools (like say editing 2 videos per year in Premiere if we stay in Adobe realm). But most simply see increased TCO long term on product they are sort of 'stuck' with, in sense they have workflow and tool they are good at, fast, and understand it, possibly even paid for some plugins or similar. Very few people migrate away from Lightroom for example, competition would have to create something remarkably similar which normally is not how product strategy looks like. At least they didn't start requiring you to move all your assets to their cloud in order to use them, that's outright slavery sold as added value. I am sure companies like Adobe would be very happy to put this in place. So yeah, companies do it because they can, if they feel that market will accept this move and move on, and not stop using its products. Kind of semi-monopolies. I do expect Microsoft will come up with similar model for OS if it hadn't already done so.