The end of the standalone application

Once upon a time, I loaded and ran software from 360-kilobyte floppy disks on my KayPro computer — and I was happy. At the time, I could install software on a huge 10MB hard drive and run from it there. Good times!

The years passed, and my hard drive grew ever larger. But I still “owned” my programs. Well, the End User License Agreements (EULA)s would technically disagree, but the applications were on my computer and under my control.

That was then. This is now.

Over the last few years, software-as-a-service (SaaS) has begun to totally dominate the end-user software market. By 2019, for example, you couldn’t buy a “permanent” version of any Adobe program. Instead, you had to subscribe to Creative Cloud if you wanted to run Photoshop, Illustrator, and Premiere Pro. Rather than paying once for the whole suite, it will now run you $60 a month.

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