Time for an anecdote. I have recently witnessed a medium large company with a paranoid CEO, obsessed with business security, owning physical servers only for internal needs, hosting every single needed service, hoarding all the data. And just overnight they started switching these services to SaaS based one by one.

Why? Lack of on-premise and offline based software. Consequently, the innovation today is almost exclusive to SaaS based products. On-premise and offline client software is just becoming an optional expensive side-product of every SaaS product.

But it's a pretty logical step forward. As for the value, SaaS eliminates administration, installation, hardware, technical support and security hastle and majorly cuts the costs for a client company. As for the price, we always praise the always blooming software industry, successful startups, awesome jobs with so many perks and benefits, but someone has to pay for it. I think people don't consider that software is just getting very valuable and too expensive to make and it just makes more sense for companies to rent it then to own it forever.