Microsoft Excel is probably also a good example for another reason. Microsoft Office 2003 Standard Edition cost $400 new, or $239 per upgrade ($664 or $397 in

Microsoft Excel is probably also a good example for another reason. Microsoft Office 2003 Standard Edition cost $400 new, or $239 per upgrade ($664 or $397 in today's money). If you wanted Excel alone, you could buy that, for $229 (or $109 if you upgrade from an earlier version). That alone would be $380/$181 in today's money. Keep in mind that features were released every two years at the very earliest. Two years of Microsoft Teams costs $96 and gets you hosting. The question of web vs native isn't "do you want fast software or slow software" but "do you want cheap software that brings lots of features or do you want expensive software that makes you pay again to keep up with the competition after two years". Of course enterprise pricing was more generous and piracy was another factor that doesn't really come into play with Teams, but I'm not surprised all software has moved to quickly evolving web apps these days. In a time where paying more than $60 for a video game is considered controversial, $660 office suites simply aren't viable. Another smaller issue with even modern Excel over old versions of Excel is that a lot of sandboxing has been added since, and even that is proving not to be sufficient by itself. The old happy-go-lucky Excels were a one-click way into infecting a whole network because no time was wasted on boundary checks where it was not absolutely necessary to prevent the program from crashing. Web apps especially have layers upon layers of security mechanisms to prevent viruses from spreading as trivially as they did twenty years ago.