Quote: Last step in this chain of events will be PLC as a Service where you never really own it and instead rent it from Rockwell.
Ah... Just another way to extract the last few ml of blood off the customer, wonder how long they will take to go this route.
not that long. new development environment will be 100% online, all programs stored online until compiled into an unreadable enduser program that can be put into the PLC, but not taken back out. continue paying for the service if you want to keep having access to the development environment where your programs are editable.
that is, until the I(d)IOT things get worse and PLC become like the new rental computer scheme.... if the PLC can't receive a signal to restart it's internal serial# time-bomb, then it will shut itself down at 2am on a tuesday and never come back up until the subscription is paid and it's connected to the internet for re-enabling.