Software is expensive to make. It can take years to build and if the price tag resembled true cost of software, very few would be ready to pay the full price. Subscription makes software available to the masses.
Subscriptions make more sense for both users and businesses. It's not like you can fire the entire product team once you finish shipping a version of the product. And for users, the upfront cost is less and you're getting updates more frequently. You can also cancel if the service isn't what you expected. The power swings in the favor of the user more.
At the end of the day, it's all about life-time value anyways. Selling two copies of your software for $120 total is the same revenue as selling $10 subscriptions for 12 months.
I remember when you could buy software, learn it, and use it effectively, without having constant habit-breaking changes stuffed down your throat. I remember when you owned your data and didn't have to rent it from a service provider. I remember what it was like to trust my machine, because everything was happening locally and software wasn't phoning home.
Subscriptions incentivize selling programs that are in a perpetual unfinished state. We lost the opportunity to call a project "feature-complete". LZMA2, H264, and RSA/AES were developed years ago, yet 7zip, netflix, and ssh still need regular updates for some nonsensical reason.