[hnaccountme]

The article is wrong. Its not popular because of greed.

We used to have offline everything and everything just worked. Now we are forced to sync with the cloud weather we like it or not. A subscription model shows a continuous cash flow and businesses like that.

[sbt]

This is the correct answer. Consumers also don’t seem willing to pay for privacy, sadly, when they can get a product for «free» in exchange for data.

[sebastianz]

People want to sync their data, work on and see the same thing on their phone, their laptop and their desktop. This certainly did not "just work" when "we used to have offline everything".