You can afford to move more slowly and carefully. As the CAD market approaches saturation in terms of the number of new CAD seats that are available as potential sales, software developers must come up with other ways to generate revenue. One way is to provide frequent software upgrades and charge an upgrade license fee. Software subscription is another revenue strategy designed to assure software developers a regular cash flow. In this scenario the upgrade revenue is collected before the software ships.
Companies even use it to finance the upgrade's development effort.
A subscription service, such as Autodesk's VIP subscription plan, can help a firm with consistent budgeting from year to year, but doesn't otherwise provide much economic benefit. Nothing could be further from the truth when you look at the installation, testing, customization upgrades, and training costs that accompany any new software. When those identifiable cost factors are combined with the inevitable difficulties you encounter when implementing any new software, you might decide to leave the newly arrived software on the shelf for a while. It used to be common in the AutoCAD world to upgrade every other release. The economics of the subscription plan assumes that you will install and use every release and thus it's not likely that anyone will skip a release, even if that might be the best option.