Like I don’t understand why this even became a thing and who even thought of it?
In: Economics
Having worked at several software companies, there are different types of software as well as more recent changes to this that I think you are talking about.
Take for example Microsoft Office, it used to be back in the day, you could buy a copy of Microsoft Office from Best Buy (or wherever) which came with a CD you installed. Way way back in the day, you probably just had a single computer in your house, so just one place you could install it. But then you could also give it to say a friend and they could also install it. Or if you did have multiple computers, you could pay for one copy, but use it on all of them.
To try to address this, companies like Microsoft came up with the idea of a license key, which meant that as part of the install, you would input the license key, and as part of the install, it would send something to Microsoft to tell them this key was used, so if you tried to install this same CD on another computer with the same key, it would fail. This also meant though if you got a new computer, you might need to buy a new copy of Office to work on that.
Now think of a company where they have a thousand workers and they want to install office on all of their workers computers, but they also will need to be able to handle turnover, both to personnel and to computers. So they have an idea of rolling licenses to say that a company can have say 1500 licenses, and they can move these licenses around.
Now, Office doesn’t come like this. Office365 is downloadable from the internet, and Microsoft realizes that people have multiple devices and might want to use it on all of them like they used to do for companies. But instead of just running, it’s a subscription model. That means now you are right, you don’t own the software, you own a license to use the software. As to why a company would want to do that, they can hide behind ease of updates and transferring the subscription, letting multiple family members use it, etc, etc, but honestly it’s all about money. Instead of charging $200 for software that someone might use for 5 years or more, charge them $100 a year. The price sounds cheaper to them as the initial is less, but if they use it for 5 years, they are paying way more.
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