The way people use technology has completely changed. We used to access the internet primarily on a single household computer. Now each member of that household likely has their own computer, we often have separate computers for work and home, not to mention phones, tablets, and other devices. So not only are their more platforms to develop for, but they all need to work smoothly together. So software is more complicated, plus there’s the running costs of cloud computing services, which most cross-platform apps rely on.

If you think about the way software has historically been released, it was usually a single product version. You didn’t get updates, except perhaps for security patches, but certainly not new features. Now, most software developers release new features and overhaul products regularly.