Ask Slashdot: Would you rather buy a product or a service? SaaS is always bad?

shanen writes: Concrete example: Product version of Microsoft Office 2013 versus the Service version called Microsoft Office 365.

SaaS is basically immortal and the permanent winner is the corporate cancer that sells it. But maybe SaaS is the natural result of producing terrible software? Microsoft "products" have been permanently broken for a LONG time. New bugs and security vulnerabilities keep being discovered, which means the product cannot EVER be regarded as completed. Whatever the original cost, no matter what the software was supposed to do, it needs unending support. Right now I'm unable to see any other solution than SaaS!

Not limited to Microsoft, of course. Perhaps Apple was the original source of the approach, and several other corporate cancers are now eclipsing Microsoft, but I think Microsoft was the first major "success story" of the approach.

(Well, actually I do see at least one alternative, but there's no way to get there from here.)

SaaS Is The Ultimate Betrayal Of Computer Nerds

[dryriver]

Those of use who have been computing heavily since the 1980s or 1990s have pumped tens of thousands of Dollars each into these software makers' coffers by buying their products - software, games, apps and so forth - over multiple decades. We bought their products when they were still simple and shitty. We allowed these companies to thrive financially and grow and become powerful. We paid these companies even when the software was less than brilliant in quality and had many limitations. How did they thank us