It’s about control

On June 23, 2026, Bryan C. Del Monte wrote:

Years ago, when Bob Woodward published State of Denial, I emailed him to tell him it was one of the most illuminating books I’d ever read. Not because it revealed things I didn’t know, but because I had actually been around some of those people, some of those discussions, some of those events.

And somehow I understood more after reading the book than I did while living through it. He laughed and thanked me. I was serious.

The context of his words centered on his reading the Haberman-Swan book, Regime Change. Things he knew because he was there, in the room, suddenly made sense when he read someone else’s take on the same situations. Even when the authors themselves may have missed the nuance or the framework. (Thank you, Bryan C. Del Monte !)

That’s how I felt after Tuesday’s call with a T-3 level agent at Microsoft. I will name him and give him credit where credit is due, because he fixed the issue: Nishant. Nishant, thank you!

I’ve long seethed about SaaS, about data loss when a software company suddenly disables access you were told you’d have for another year. That was my experience with Intuit and QuickBooks. A perpetual license for QuickBooks 21 Desktop was converted without my knowledge or permission to SaaS. I still have the QB21 licensed software. Intuit has blocked its *.exe file. I’m keeping it just in case the law catches up with SaaS.

Almost every bit of software on the market has followed the example set by Intuit, Microsoft, and the rest. In the good old days, prior to 2017 (in Intuit’s case, prior to 2022!), a user would shell out a set amount of money for software. Price was relative to number of users, typically sold in packages of five. Singler-user versions, such as those needed for the very small businesses like mine that are the backbone of the United States of America, were relatively inexpensive.

Occasionally the software vendor would notify its users of security patches or related. Intuit backdoored the software by having an option for “automatically run updates.” Until then, Intuit had been one of the most trustworthy companies in the USA, thanks to Scott Cook and his ethical approach to software.

There were no signs in the stars, no explosions, announcing that things had changed. Sometime, somehow, permission to automatically update bug fixes and security patches became, “We are now removing your perpetual license without your permission and you have to pay us annually to access your own data.”

And of course, the prices doubled, then tripled that doubling. QuickBooks went from being $350/year to $650, then in one fell swoop for a single user, $1800 annually. No justification. No new bells and whistles. Simply because they could. Because there is no legislation preventing price gouging or extortion.

Also in the olden days before 2017 or 2022, once you had a perpetual license you could choose whether you wanted the next release. For example, QuickBooks 12 (2012) was a very, very good bit of accounting software. In 2013, they released QB13 (2013) which included inventory management and purchase orders.

If you ran a nonprofit and didn’t need that functionality, no one held a gun to your head and forced you to purchase QB13. You could keep using QB12 as long as you wished. The only thing that tended to force an update to a newer release: Incompatibility with the latest version of Microsoft Windows. But Intuit was pretty good about working with Microsoft to ensure that happened rarely.

And: Intuit had a 75+% market share of small- to mid-sized businesses. Their ethics and “intuitive” software made very loyal followers of most of us. I used QuickBooks—not Quicken, but QuickBooks—since 1991. The data I lost last year dated back to 1999. That year I only transferred balance forwards, not all data.

Just like that, in less than a day, over twenty-five years of data gone. Held hostage by an unethical company that did not give me an opt-out to their conversion to SaaS.

Since the Intuit experience, I have viewed the SaaS “revolution” as techbros greed and little else. Big software companies found a way to extort their customers by extolling the virtues of the nebulous cloud, without telling you that the data is now their property, that it does not exist in a format that you can back up and use in case of disaster. Except with their software.

This week, I understood that although greed is a big part of the SaaS revolution, a revolution perpetrated on us as we slept, it’s about more than that.

It’s about control.

It’s about who controls the data.

If you think you do, think again. I’m currently backing up everything in Microsoft 365 two ways: First to a non-Microsoft cloud, second to an external hard drive.

This may be giving me a false sense of security, who knows? Because if Microsoft runs WordPerfect, LibreOffice, and others out of business, same as Intuit did with Peachtree and other accounting software for small business, and if DOCX and XLSX files are no longer compatible with any other software, I’m up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

It’s about who controls the machines.

This was my aha! moment while working with Nishant. Part of the issue I was having revolved around the parts of the Microsoft June 10, 2026 update (KB5094126 if you’re keeping score) changing the settings of my laptop/computer to whatever Microsoft deemed best for me. Microsoft best practices, the best practices of someone sitting in California or India, not of Denise Elaine Heap, a 71-year-old woman who needs her second monitor and real keyboard to be productive.

Although Nishant fixed quite a few things, I am making a list of the changes Microsoft made that were not fully repaired or returned to normal. Things that worked properly before June 10. Things that were set up as I like them, as I need them, to write and research productively. We have a follow-up meeting scheduled for next week.

It’s about who controls time and productivity.

This point gets overlooked by almost everyone who writes about AI—and note please that a great many of these issues with Microsoft updates are AI-generated. Because of Microsoft, I lost two weeks of work. It took me well over two hours to write my Father's Day post this year. Had I had my full keyboard, large Asus monitor, and normal setup, that would have taken forty-five minutes or less.

In addition to the extra time it took to write, I also have had massive headaches the last two weeks from squinting to see a tiny screen, as well as backaches from sitting hunched over as close as I could get to the laptop. Just three or four hours of attempted work were enough to make me hurt the rest of the evening and pull out my heating pad.

Now think about what happens when, not if, Microsoft (or Intuit or Starlink or whatever) pulls the plug completely. They have the absolute power to shut down entire companies, if not industries. They can go beyond making it hard to work, to making it impossible to work.

The first part of my Microsoft issue turned out to be part of this scenario. My M365 licenses renewed in November 2025. In June 2026, Microsoft decided to raise the price of the licenses. They did not send out an email in advance with a mid-contract increase, which is unethical if not outright illegal. They simply shut down my licenses.

And they are still threatening to shut them down again, even though they’ve not presented me with justification for a mid-contract term price increase. For now, they are simply being silent, with that sword of Damocles hanging over me.*

I hate being so far behind on my legislative research project. It’s mid-burnered for now. Too much going on, and a two-week outage hasn’t helped. But the section on AI, SaaS, cybersecurity, data security, and guardrails is among the most critical. At least for now.

Because we have zero legislation that lays out consequences for illegal behavior. We have zero guardrails that say, This far and no further. It’s all self-regulation. And that has never, ever worked.

So yes, SaaS is to a great extent greed. Have to justify exorbitant salaries somehow. But the control factor is the one we should worry about most.

Denis Stetskov wrote a disturbing and depressing post about this on a different, scarier level. It’s about more than just the software companies controlling our machines, our data. In his words, the cost of reading everyone just hit zero.

I am just a 71-year-old woman who “started using computers” in 1981. Leardata. On a mini-computer with 18” “floppy” disks. We had a $60,000 Xerox word processor for financial footnotes and legal documents. Employer bought our first PC in 1984, a Compaq portable that weighed fifty pounds. I bought my first home PC in 1986. In 1987, I programmed our Compaq portable in Basic (wooooo) to generate production reports. Started using Prodigy and its life-changing email in 1991, at the same time I bought QuickBooks accounting software.

Almost every employer has been cutting edge when it comes to technology. Often my accounting and finance team has been responsible for creating the SOPs that govern IT. Just because. A former employer was a beta user for Microsoft Teams in 2017. In its early iteration, Teams was an optional bit of software. If you wished to be connected. If you didn’t, no biggie.

So I am hardly a Luddite.

However, I do not want Big Brother having access to my data, which is the case with every SaaS product. I do not want AI feeding my information to the FBI. I do not want a software company deciding how I work best. I do not want companies to have the ability to change a license from perpetual to SaaS without my explicit consent, nor do I want a company to cram AI down my throat as Microsoft did when it installed ai dot exe in their November 2022 update (it cannot be uninstalled). I don’t want Pushwoosh, a Russian company, having all the data from push notifications on my iPhone (I stopped push notifications).

In all the talk about artificial intelligence, the aspect that tends to be most overlooked is lost productivity. I’ve just lost two weeks because a Microsoft update made inaccurate decisions regarding my device settings. Multiply me by how many? Also, how many companies must keep a large staff of Microsoft Gold-Certified SysAdmins and tech support on staff or retainer so they don’t lose weeks and weeks of productivity?

Not to mention cost. I purchased TurboTax (an Intuit product) one more time for my 2025 personal tax return, because there are a few complex transactions I need to report. In less than ten years, the exact same edition of TurboTax has gone from $39.95 to $127.20. Because… SaaS instead of perpetual license.

I don’t have anyone I can pass those costs along to. But a mid-sized manufacturer using QuickBooks will have to put the exorbitant amount of an SaaS license into its overhead costing. A nonprofit with many donors and volunteers and locations will have to spend far too much of its funds—funds that could help promote their mission—on SaaS. Despite TechSoup, software is rarely free these days. And also because of TechSoup, licenses are never perpetual.

I doubt these costs are accounted for in inflation statistics. We focus so hard on groceries, gasoline, and housing, that we overlook the astounding increases caused by SaaS. Or by software outages.

So yes, this will be my last Microsoft and SaaS post for a while. I need to get back to Middle Earth Houston. To travel posts and Texas history posts. To glimpses into 1960s Houston. To White Rose and informed dissent.

The things that matter most to me have been crippled because Microsoft issued software update KB5094126 with its 206 (two hundred and six) line items, like XBox, which I neither have nor want, but which Microsoft dumped onto my hard drive anyway. Or display changes.

Self-regulation will not work with this industry. If our legislators don’t stop feeding at the techbros trough, American industry may be taken down. Not because we aren’t good at business. But because we will have ceded control of our businesses to those who do not care.

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*In May 2025, Microsoft sent out a notice that they would be raising some prices for the particular license I have. In November 2025, I received an email: “We have renewed your licenses.” They are now trying to claim that the May 2025 email supersedes the November 2025 renewal notice and that they have the right to raise prices now. Mid-contract.

And yes, I am Denise. I kept the documentation.

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I also want to stress that Nishant truly represented Microsoft well. The problem: The anguish required to survive before you can reach a T-3 level tech support person. It should not be this hard. Instead of going through T-1 and T-2 people who insist it’s not their problem… wasting precious time. I had to file a Better Business Bureau complaint to reach T-3.