Does that mean you'd be in favor of subscriptions for owning a vehicle, rather than paying outright? Or a house?

The manufacturer/builder gets paid once, and you get value monthly.

Leasing cars and renting houses is already a common practice. So yes I believe these make sense to exist.

The existence of purchasing cars and houses with no ongoing cost to the builder is due to competition.

Also leasing cars isn't usually (ever?) from the manufacturer of the car.

Houses, not sure how it's done in more populous areas, but around here you don't ever rent from the builder. You rent from someone who bought the house from a builder (or bought from someone who did, etc etc).

I disagree. You can read a book or listen to a record, watch a dvd, unlimited times, having fairly paid upfront a price for the item. A computer is general purpose and lets you check your email every day, hell even lets you create new value in the form of new software, without the manufacturer receiving a royalty.

The idea of capturing reward post-receipt is feudalistic.

The existence of products in competitive markets is not a counter example to what my point was. I recommend looking at the terms bottom up pricing and top down pricing. The former is about creating a price based off of how much it costs to do business and then adding a profit margin. The latter is creating price in line with how much value it offers customers. The existence of products using bottom up pricing doesn't mean top down pricing does not exist.

That's not how markets work (and I disagree that it would be reasonable).

Price is usually established based on how much something cost to make (materials, effort, profit), combined with market conditions (abundance/shortage of products, surplus cash/tough economy...).

If you want to continuously extract profit from consistent use of a hammer or vacuum cleaner, somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.

>somebody else will trivially make a competing product at a lower price with no subscription.

And software like photoshop is not trivial to copy so it can survive being priced based off of value provided. There exists competitors that don't have a subscription, but they are not good enough to kill it.