This is exactly it. On-prem deals were generally large perpetual license fees based on some quantity of software installed, and then a % of that as an annual "maintenance" fee which would provide access to support and software updates.
The problem was that the maintenance revenue was valued at a much higher multiple by investors than their Perpetual Licensing revenue because it was recurring. Cue the thought... "What if the whole thing was recurring?"..."Hmm how could we justify that?"..."We make it a SERVICE that WE host!"... and then here we are now where if you want to actually own software, chances are you're out of luck.
It can also be how difficult it is to support on-premise software installations especially when customers use leverage to keep from updating to recent releases that had bug and security fixes, etc…
I ran a SaaS and PaaS for fintechs and we had annual events where we had to hard negotiate with customers who didn’t want to incur the employee training burden for upgrading to newer releases with new features etc. Instead of accepting the rolling releases they would do one or two updates/year and we would stand up monolithic support programs to accommodate them. Moving away from this customer model was about headaches and release/support debt.
There are a lot of challenges with complex on-perm solutions that hosting-for-customers can alleviate. Staffing for every customer hosting variation gets unduly complicated — and impossible — very quickly.
The problem was that the maintenance revenue was valued at a much higher multiple by investors than their Perpetual Licensing revenue because it was recurring. Cue the thought... "What if the whole thing was recurring?"..."Hmm how could we justify that?"..."We make it a SERVICE that WE host!"... and then here we are now where if you want to actually own software, chances are you're out of luck.