I know as a consumer I'm much more reluctant to buy a new subscription product than I am to make a single purchase, but the options get less and less every year.
The problem was that the maintenance revenue was valued at a much higher multiple by investors than their Perpetual Licensing revenue because it was recurring. Cue the thought... "What if the whole thing was recurring?"..."Hmm how could we justify that?"..."We make it a SERVICE that WE host!"... and then here we are now where if you want to actually own software, chances are you're out of luck.
I ran a SaaS and PaaS for fintechs and we had annual events where we had to hard negotiate with customers who didn’t want to incur the employee training burden for upgrading to newer releases with new features etc. Instead of accepting the rolling releases they would do one or two updates/year and we would stand up monolithic support programs to accommodate them. Moving away from this customer model was about headaches and release/support debt.
There are a lot of challenges with complex on-perm solutions that hosting-for-customers can alleviate. Staffing for every customer hosting variation gets unduly complicated — and impossible — very quickly.