| The reasons are not legitimate, as evidenced by the very fact such software worked just fine "before internet connections were inexpensive". The reason behind software forcing you to be on-line are quite simple: greater control and money-making potential. - SaaS model makes a shit ton of money on the Internet; it makes deployment orders of magnitude cheaper (especially as it's cross-platform deployment), but it opens the possibility of (as the name suggests) turning what should be a product into a service - so now you get billed continuously for what you'd rather buy once, and this is ultimately possible because you can't pirate other people's servers. - Entrepreneurs, seeing success of SaaS model, are trying to shove it everywhere. On the one hand, a lot of software that should stay native is moving into the web. On the other hand, there is this idiotic push of turning hardware into SaaS by connecting it to the cloud. - If you're not aiming at renting your software away for money, there's at least possibility of money-making by selling data it collects. And while I think a lot of permanently-connected software is simply designed with malicious intent, there's also developer laziness. Too lazy to learn anything but JavaScript? Let's make an Electron app. Too lazy to learn how to build native software? Let's host everything on our side and make an "embedded browser" mobile app. Too lazy to actually go out and ask users what are their problems? Let's hide "analytics" in the app[0]. And the "dev laziness" argument also explains why our applications still do mostly the same things they did 10 years ago, but max-out our current CPUs. This all should be opposed, but I don't see it happening - the commercial and laziness incentives are all turning everything into cloud-first SaaS solutions. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11566720 |