

You grossly overestimate the number of people who are both willing and able to deploy, secure, manage, and maintain this kind of infrastructure. You may not find any value in offloading these responsibilities to a service provider operated by trained professionals, but your outright refusal to acknowledge that other people might is nothing short of callous.






From a purely profit-oriented perspective, no. They’re setting up a pretext to eliminate the lifetime license plan due to a lack of interest. No sane person would pay that kind of lump sum for the service (and the insane ones will bring in triple the revenue), so they’ll claim that there is no market for it. After that, they’re free to crank up the periodic subscription prices.
Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by profiteering opportunism.