Subscription / SaaS

«No more buying software.» Salesforce, founded in 1999, raised the No Software banner — not a logo but a campaign, which ran as far as a whack-a-mole game — and offered SaaS billed monthly through a browser. The same year, Netflix launched a flat-rate plan for DVDs by post; streaming came eight years later, in 2007. Incidentally, «subscription» is a word more than six centuries old, and by the eighteenth century it covered regular deliveries not only of newspapers but of water and fruit. From ownership to use — follow this river upstream past the periodical, past the club, and you arrive at a medicine chest in an Edo-period house. The red line of revival is there to be traced.