Cloud computing changed the enterprise IT landscape forever. Cloud computing was a significant milestone in the subscription age. As a form of consumption, subscriptions have become common in IT and in our daily lives. There are so many subscriptions now that sometimes it feels like being pecked to death by hungry ducks. The monthly bills stack up.

For enterprise IT, the feeling is much the same. But vendors, telcos, cloud providers, and Wall Street have all concluded that the steady, predictable income of subscriptions, particularly long-term subscriptions is beneficial. Subscriptions can accelerate the lifecycle of hardware. In many cases the management software to run the hardware is a subscription – but if the software no longer supports the hardware, customers have little to no choice but to upgrade.

Subscriptions, with their vaunted free and constant updates, may also roll back features or functionality, often with little or no warning. Many will argue that these are unlikely outcomes, and that companies genuinely want to offer a quality product to the customer and would not engage in such practices. That may be true, but at some point, it comes down to the dictates of profit and growth – which do not always align with the best interests of customers.

Don’t believe that? It happens. Author and commentator Cory Doctorow characterized how platforms change over time to the worse with the term ‘enshittification’ in this essay at Locus Magazine. Doctorow’s piece was more about consumer internet platforms, but it easily applies to nearly any subscription service used by enterprise IT. Pay particular attention to the section where Doctorow discusses switching costs and how it traps users. Enterprise IT is no different, it can and does fall into the same traps.

The other issue with subscriptions is the comparative history. Since the major rise of subscriptions, there has not been a major economic crisis, outside of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a clear outlier. There has been no 2008 market crash, no dot-com crash, nothing that has had the downturn effects of those events. It is patently unclear how enterprise IT will handle the need to reduce expenses when so much of what it does is based on subscriptions.

In the past, companies could stretch their investments, drop support contracts, run software that wasn’t on the latest revision, put off upgrades. Subscriptions take away those options. Enterprise IT can’t just bunker up and try to weather an economic storm using the same tactics. Nor have the purveyors of those same subscriptions really have an answer. The party never ends, right?

This isn’t meant to show perpetual licenses and hardware ownership with rose-colored glasses, nor is it meant as a warning against subscriptions. The zeitgeist in the enterprise market today is that subscriptions are inevitable, all products will have them, and that enterprise IT should just get used to it. The reality is that enterprise IT needs to be aware of the pros and cons of subscriptions. For some IT functions, a SaaS or other *aaS subscription may be the exact right thing to do. But not every service can or should be a subscription, just as every application doesn’t have to be a cloud application, just the ones that are served best by that model. Understanding and scenario-planning for disruptions or enshittification of subscription services needs to be a part of every enterprise IT purchasing decision.