> The problem is that security and policy lockouts are something you can find with any service.
This is one of the reasons I don't like or trust SaaS as an end-user, at least for critical failure points.
It's not just about policy lockouts; the company can go out of business or get sold and the product shut down. Data leaks and breaches can be a greater risk since you're too small to target as an individual but all users collectively is another story. Outages, both locally and service-level, can prevent you from having access to your data when you absolutely need it (doctor or legal appointment etc.). Oh and they will track you, make you a perpetual guinea pig for A/B testing purposes and can change critical features that you depend on at any time of their choosing without notice.
There are trade-offs in the other direction, like the mobility and the convenience to access data across multiple devices. For historically expensive products (like Photoshop and Pro Tools), subscription based models make services more accessible. It's just too bad that we can't seem to land on the best of both worlds as the common case. I'd like a subscription model and the ability to sync data across devices automatically (preferably using e2e encryption) without the software being at all "web based."
This is one of the reasons I don't like or trust SaaS as an end-user, at least for critical failure points.
It's not just about policy lockouts; the company can go out of business or get sold and the product shut down. Data leaks and breaches can be a greater risk since you're too small to target as an individual but all users collectively is another story. Outages, both locally and service-level, can prevent you from having access to your data when you absolutely need it (doctor or legal appointment etc.). Oh and they will track you, make you a perpetual guinea pig for A/B testing purposes and can change critical features that you depend on at any time of their choosing without notice.
There are trade-offs in the other direction, like the mobility and the convenience to access data across multiple devices. For historically expensive products (like Photoshop and Pro Tools), subscription based models make services more accessible. It's just too bad that we can't seem to land on the best of both worlds as the common case. I'd like a subscription model and the ability to sync data across devices automatically (preferably using e2e encryption) without the software being at all "web based."