Rent has always been a business strategy. The word (and its roots) are thousands of years old.
Rent is just arbitraging capital to offer fractional ownership of goods/services that are too expensive for some purchasers. I rent living space because I move often enough that buying makes no sense. I do not begrudge the owners of the properties their profit, because I don't want to have to buy/sell property every time I move.
The move to subscriptions is because technology has enabled making them easy. I'm old enough to remember when I had to choose between pirating Photoshop or spending many hundreds of dollars I didn't have (at the time, the argument was that it was overpriced so piracy was morally justified).
People whinge about subscriptions but they are an economic good. When you buy software once, the company is incentivized to focus on selling new users and totally neglecting existing users because they've already made every dollar they ever will from those users. Subscriptions align incentives.
People don't like it because there is less consumer surplus; if a product is worth $20/mo I'll pay $20/mo, $240/year, $2400/10 years. If it's not worth it, I won't pay it. But as long as I am paying I have both a right and leverage to ask for improvements.
I know it's against the HN dogma, but this is actually a really good thing for tech.
