08/07/2026
YOU KNOW WHAT REALLY BUGS ME? I USED TO BUY SOFTWARE ONCE AND OWN IT FOREVER. NOW I RENT IT UNTIL I DIE.
I bought Microsoft Office on a disc in 2007. Installed it. Used it for years. Nobody sent me a monthly bill. Nobody threatened to cut off my access to my own spreadsheets. It was mine. Done.
Now you cannot buy it. You subscribe. You pay every single month for access to something you will never actually own and the moment you stop paying you lose everything you built inside it.
And it is not just Microsoft. It is everything. The photo editing software. The antivirus. The cloud storage. The music. The TV shows. The video games. The project management tool. The grammar checker. Even the GPS on some cars now requires a subscription to keep working.
They took products we used to purchase and converted them into revenue streams we pay into forever with no equity, no ownership, and no exit that does not cost us access to our own work.
I am genuinely bothered by this. Not in a small way. In a this-is-a-fundamental-shift-in-who-owns-what kind of way. We went from a world where you bought things to a world where you rent everything indefinitely and the companies decided that was better for them without once asking if it was better for us.
It was not better for us. We just ran out of alternatives.
