I don't know that the shift was about difficulty, at least not primarily. As best I can tell it's more about profit, and companies usually move to SaaS because it makes them more money and the other pluses and minuses are less important to them.

I know as a consumer I'm much more reluctant to buy a new subscription product than I am to make a single purchase, but the options get less and less every year.

I think it's also about changing expectations and environment. Big customers expect timely updates for the purposes of security, keeping third party integrations working, and bugfixing. They also expect high uptime and prompt outage mitigation. That's really hard to square with on-premise offerings.

Don't get me wrong, it's also hard, but providing on-premise software is less difficult than it used to be in absolute terms. The main things that changed are SaaS driving expectations up, and needing to upgrade faster.

>> because it was so difficult everyone, vendor and customer alike, moved towards SaaS hosted offerings

I actually remember why one company I worked for moved from on-premise to SaaS. They told us that the market valued recurring software revenue at a higher multiple than it did one-time software revenue.

On-prem was a large one-time sale and a small recurring support contract. SaaS was almost all recurring revenue.

On the customer side, it is capital expenses vs. operating expenses.