[robocat]

> Everything slowly degraded when they moved to the subscription model

The main benefit of SaaS to a customer is that theoretically the company should care enough to keep their customers therefore the company should want to keep the product evergreen (functional and features and support).

Churn is such a measurable figure.

[rurp]

That's the public sales pitch, sure. In practice it's a way for the company to charge more for the same product and quality usually declines faster than non-SaaS software.

[robocat]

I am part owner of a plain SaaS company, and our financial motivation is very very strongly to keep our business customers happy. Churn is highly expensive for us.

Churn is even more expensive for growth SaaS companies, due to equity multipliers.

I remember working for old-school software companies and the incentives were drastically misaligned in the past before SaaS. Existing customers were treated awfully - new customers or updates were where the money was.

Your opinion is a tad too cynical. Although perhaps warrented for twilight products like Evernote getting sold to Bending Spoons. Or the VMware/Broadcom debacle.

[rmunn]

I suspect large companies vs. small companies is another big part of the problem. What I mean is that in small companies, there's usually only one or two layers between the owner(s) and the lowest-level employees. Which means that usually, everyone making management decisions is well aware of the needs of the company and where the company's profits actually come from. It's (usually!) only in large companies with half-a-dozen (or more) layers between the CEO and the workers that you can end up with the kind of empire-building, turf-guarding management that turns a company sclerotic, and makes decisions like selling off / discontinuing a service that was a key part of what their clients needed.