The article vastly underestimates the desire of large enterprises to deal with only a handful of IT vendors. Sure, no enterprise wants monopoly pricing, but they also don’t want dozens upon dozens of different IT vendors to deal with.
And part of the reason why I hate the trend of turning everything into services is that regular (middle-class and below) people don't get to outsource the increasing amount of relationships they have to enter into.
A central service where you can easily manage many subscriptions, with integrations into other websites. There are a lot things I would pay for if I didn't have to go through the process of creating and managing yet another account. If it was just a one-click add/remove.
News websites come to mind. I would also use a "buy access to this article for 50 cents" feature. It just has to be frictionless.
The major players might not want to give up the money from people buying subscriptions and not using them much or forgetting to cancel them, but that seems like a lunch ready to be eaten.
There’s downsides to both.
We’re on a trend of unbundling right now, but the pendulum is quickly shifting the other way.
Justifying the need for it, go though the paper work, estimate costs etc. VS just adding a new line item in an existing bill.
You have one person to talk to, they manage RocketChat, NextCloud (with an office suite, agenda, files), Jitsi, Discourse, CodiMD, all of this with a single sign on for your coworkers.
All for 10€/month/user.
It's not as integrated as say a full microsoft suite, but probably one order cheaper.
If you add these I'll have bingo:
* "We already have X for this" (X is only vaguely related and/or does it far, far inferior)
* "it's too expensive" (said by $200/hour consultant vetoing $50/month SaaS)
* "it doesn't conform to the architecture" (used for anything that isn't Java and Microsoft Office)