The whole push in the industry is to move everything to cloud, because that delivers better lock-in. The cloud is un-defeatable DRM (as the software is not even local) plus control of your data.
Infuriating on so many levels: 1) creating the largest honeypot imaginable/single point of attack. 2) Potential trust issues as companies put proprietary data on servers that are not theirs 3) People storing deeply personal and sensitive data like photos on servers that are not theirs. 4) Forcing others data and work to be used for monetization without compensation. 5) Ultimately restricting innovation as people have less ability to build locally if they really take this direction to the max.
Lock-in is not the only reason: on-prem/on-pc deployments are more expensive as they have to consider more scenarios. How you install it, what other software is running, what software you want to combine it with (e.g., what database you want to run).
On-prem/on-pc is also harder to debug and support, and harder to keep customers on the latest release, so you have to maintain more releases.
Overall cloud makes sense from a business perspective because it's cheaper and takes less effort, so you can dedicate your developers to add valueable features to your software instead of dealing with customer specific situations.
If there were a solid business around recurring revenue for applications hosted locally, there would be more motivation for improving local operating systems. As it stands there's not much motivation to improve the local OS experience because there isn't demand either from the dev side or the user side.
Well, if there is no demand from the user side, then apparently it's not very important.
For a vendor, creating, maintaining and supporting on-prem software is more expensive than cloud software, which means it will have a higher price. Don't see users willing to pay a higher price, if it's not considered important.
