I don't agree with this at all. If a software product doesn't get upgraded you have
1) time to look for an alternative according to your own priorities
2) ways of mitigating potential risks (if it's a security problem, like airgapping the solution)
3) the ability to make value-based calls on the risks of not having updates
With SaaS you have all of these same constraints (as there's no guarantee they update the service either), plus the risk that they just turn it off one day on a timeline you can't control, plus potential risks that they will leak your data if they don't maintain security (or want additional money), and with the added risk/cost that they may decide to no longer support something you need due to a forced "upgrade" (like API compatibility).
Anecdote: A company I know used to have an on-premise product. The customer paid for a yearly license*. Then they developed a cloud based offering, a SaaS. In order to force customers over to this solution they simply stopped updating and giving support to their old product.
* Sometimes we forget that the old software model of offline or customer-installed (client, or server, on premise) also has fees attached to it, in the form of a license you have to keep maintaining. Often yearly.
If the customer wanted to keep using the product, they could not stop paying the license fee just because the vendor stopped updating and supporting it.
> Sometimes we forget that the old software model of offline or customer-installed (client, or server, on premise) also has fees attached to it, in the form of a license you have to keep maintaining. Often yearly.
A lot of the enterprise on-premises software that I use (from Atlassian, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.) come with perpetual licences. The annual maintenance cost is for support and for updates. I can think of a few exceptions that only have term licences, like IBM PurifyPlus, but based on my personal experience, a majority of on-premises software falls under the former category.
Yes but basically all of that software is so mission critical that you simply cannot not pay for support and upgrades. Ergo you have an annual license fee to be able to actually operate it.
With SaaS you have all of these same constraints (as there's no guarantee they update the service either), plus the risk that they just turn it off one day on a timeline you can't control, plus potential risks that they will leak your data if they don't maintain security (or want additional money), and with the added risk/cost that they may decide to no longer support something you need due to a forced "upgrade" (like API compatibility).