About 25 years ago, working at one of those dot com bubble internet consultancy firms, I was told by an Adobe rep that they knew everyone at home had a pirated copy of their software but the company view was that they thought that was a good thing. It meant people learnt their software at home and then insisted on using it at work, where it would be a paid for license.
It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.
It's weird to watch Adobe make these fundamentally short sighted decisions. I can only assume the ultimate cause is the individual motivations of executives and managers. "Oooo, if we raise subscriptions $10/mo, we'll make lots of money, and it'll look really good on my annual review." "Oooo, this cancellation fee will really help our retention, which will look really good on my annual review." "Making Photoshop subscription only will do amazing things for our revenue."
When you have complete market dominance, you have little opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming up using your tool.
That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
There seems to be a perception in big companies that if you're not pissing off your customers enough to drive them away, you're leaving money on the table. So there's this constant pseudo-optimizer running to get the maximum profit possible.
For another example of the same behaviour, watch the development of Sports in European cable - Viaplay for example. Starting 2016 the headlines of the press has been "Viaplay chockhöjer priserna" ( Viaplay shockingly raise their prices )
They have now jacked up their prices to a level where customers are now not only leaving(1), but actively hating the company online(2 - see comments), as well as teaching friends about pirate IPTV alternatives. At the same time the management of Viaplay have raised their compensation levels to ridiculous levels. The company itself is suffering financially from all this, but management is richer and fatter than ever before(3).
The same thing happend with Netflix raising prices. Probably everyone nobody canceled their subscription after the increased price just becouse it’s not worth the effort. And the price raise is incremental just so nobody will complain.
That story actually came about from a scientist doing experiments on frogs. Frogs with removed brains.
Arguably the frogs are not smarter than we thought
Where I live Viaplay bought the licenses for showing football matches on all levels for the next years. Previously we could see the football WC and European championships, and national games on the national tv channel. With the new viaplay deal the games would only be possible to see on their platform or whatever it is.
Fortunately they fell into financial troubles before the deal became active.
They massively overpaid for showing all of the matches, to force everyone interested in football to get a subscription. But probably most people just watch it on tv, because "hey, why not, national team of x country (or our own team, for whom winning a match is a miracle) is playing, lets watch it". Not "I will happily pay tens of € each month to some company to watch stuff".
At a certain size company, you being a professional asshole is a requirement for any position. Also being very good at lying and deceiving. The danger begins when those people start believing their own lies.
I once read that business is the art of ripping someone off without pissing them off.
For better or worse, I agree. If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table, but if you go too far and piss them off they're going to take away all the money on the table with them.
> If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table
You're leaving money in their pocket that you might get later
How do you quantify loyalty? Because it seems to me that it's very easy for individuals to prioritise short term gains at the cost of medium and long term losses due to trust erosion
I wonder how much client satisfaction and trust would be worth on the quarterly report, if it could be calculated. I think it would be immense for most companies
Money in their pocket is not money on the table. You are in fact reinforcing my point: Client loyalty and trust is critical in business, you're a lousy businessman if you've damaged that by ripping off your clients too hard angering them.
The most effective business is getting all the money on the table and making your client happy. Thusly the art of business, ripping off your client without pissing them off.
Absolutely nobody gets ahead in business by selling wares cheaper than what they could have gone for, unless you are deliberately underselling the market to gain share by sheer force of will. Likewise by selling wares higher than what they could have gone for, clients will just look elsewhere because you're just another one of many merchants.
Costco makes the majority of profit from membership fees, they've already profited from you before you have even made your first purchase. Arguable any profit they make from what you purchase is where you are being 'ripped off' but because the savings and return policies are better than the competition they avoid the 'pissing off'.
Are you sure about that? Their average markup is around 10%, so that would mean that the average member would be spending $600 or less in the store per year.
As an upside, once you’ve pissed off enough customers, you can also quit and provide them with an alternative that packages an open source tool with some enterprise features with marginally better terms
It's important to recognize that the only thing that matters is how big of a bag you can get. Making money is the only point of tech. Get in, get your bag, and get out!
You underestimate the power of SaaS. Companies do SaaS precisely because it allows for this sort of capricious rent-seeking at wildly-unregulated levels of greed. That's just the name of the game. If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
Please explain why you think that’s apples new goal? The link doesn’t
There is nothing I am aware of that Apple has done indicating this and plenty to show they are not (e2e cloud backups, on device llm) they continually find ways to provide services without needing access to your data or keeping your data on device
What is 'wildly-unregulated levels of greed' supposed to mean?
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
Google has never charged for search, nor has Facebook charged for their social network.
They arguably have bigger reach and market dominance than Adobe has.
There are good reasons Google and Facebook behave in different ways, of course. They aren't stupid, nor do they lack greed.
I am here just arguing that your comical assertion of mono-causality.
'If other companies don't do it yet', perhaps they have good reasons?
> However, I understand your point, it's the truth of many businesses that if you're not paying, you're the product not the customer.
No, that wasn't my point. My point was that the mono-causal point
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
was wrong. Clearly, there's more than one reason that determines how companies behave.
Google sells eyeballs to advertisers, they don't sell to consumers. They've largely baked their pricing strategies in algorithms that self-adjust to increase costs as advertisers invest more, so that they don't have to expose themselves, but they still push prices up when they feel like it. They're also so brazenly exploitative that they were investigated and fined by the EU multiple times for doing bad things to their customers.
So yeah, they behave exactly the same - towards their actual customers, which are advertisers, not you.
Great example of this is to google simply name of most businesses. And then see first links in results being adds. While they same links are in result slightly down?
How did we end up in situation were anyone would be paying in this case? Seems like just pure exploitation of their position having combination of add network and popular search engine...
Adobe doesn’t primarily sell products, Adobe primarily rents its products to consumers. Adobe is a literal actual real world example of a rent seeking company.
Simply renting out products is not necessarily the same as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of uncompensated value from others without increasing productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift the chain.
Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.
True. The distinction is just not always as obvious, because rent seekers often don't start out as rent seekers.
They usually gain market share based on merit. Over time, structural factors such as network effects allow them to grow the rent-seeking part of their income while the merit based part declines.
Rent-seeking is a very entrenched idea though. Even the tiniest bit of merit in the distant past is enough to justify renting out inherited land for instance.
"Rent seeking" is an economic term where you sell access to something with a fixed supply. Classically land. The landlord does not need to do anything to gain money and it isn't possible to make any more land.
The fundamental problem with increasing prices is that you create an opportunity for competitors.
If Photoshop would cost 5€ a month, then everyone would buy it because it is the best.
If Photoshop costs 50€ a month, they make more money, but they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product.
I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem. There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top, but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo -- none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo.
Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there are now.
Most (all?) arguments that depend on competition depend on a fair market.
However, no industry or government lives in a vacuum.
Firm X develops enough market dominance to constantly collect vast sums of money to build their war chest.
This war chest is used to buy out competitors, and kill off competing ideas.
Firm X creates clones of lower priced alternatives, then outcompetes the smaller firm.
Firm X uses war chest to fob off or weaken regulators (if any exist), extending the time they can extract rents.
——
Little guys have to survive by getting enough money fast enough to beat the Big guy. Why bother? Get moderately sized, get bought out, and live with your wealth.
PS: I have butchered economics somewhere, forgive me.
Man I want to believe it's short sighted, but Adobe's stock price in 2012 was $30.95. It's at $518 today[1], outperforming SPY. What drives me crazy is that there are plenty of Adobe alternatives that are pretty good, but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base.
The stock price growth looks wonderful until the day it doesn't.
The point of this discussion is that Adobe is essentially stealing from its future self by making short-sighted decisions. To a significant extent, they're cashing out their customer loyalty, and that loss of loyalty makes them much more vulnerable to attrition. Gradual attrition will slow their growth; a major attrition event, which they're now making possible, could rapidly reverse it.
But if it has looked wonderful -- like really wonderful -- for the last twelve years that also says something. I would've argued that Adobe was stealing from its future ten years ago when they started started using this model and I would clearly have been wrong. I don't see what's different for them over the next 10 years either because I've apparently underestimated peoples' complacency with being fleeced.
Stock price in the modern market is not a measurement of company health and long term well being - it's a measurement of speculators' willingness to bet on short term performance.
Well said. Back when people pirated Photoshop, there wasn't much competition. Here's a newspaper quote from 1999: "GIMP, an Image editing program like the $899 PhotoShop, is free. I must be fair here and say that PhotoShop is in many way a superior program to GIMP. Still, there's that free thing to think about."
Compare that to the Affinity suite, which is an amazing collection of programs, especially for the price. They're currently running a sale where you can get everything for $83. If my daughter becomes interested in digital design, I'd be happy to spent that kind of money to encourage her. I'd be very hesitant to subscribe to the Adobe suite, even though that's what I use at work.
It's no coincidence that after Adobe introduced a subscription in 2013 that this was the inflection point in which the stock grew 10x over the following decade. The previous decade it only grew 3x.
Well, the previous decade also includes the Global Financial Crisis.
If you want to make any meaningful statement at all, I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index. (Oh, and be sure to look at the total performance, ie with dividends re-invested. Don't look just at the share-price.)
> I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index.
So why not just comment with exactly this?
Here is a comparison of ADBE and SPY, which ADBE correlates very strongly to SPY, and also in this analysis is AAPL which severly outperformed the SP500:
Thanks for providing the data. Sorry, I was on mobile, so had a harder time finding the numbers in a way that I can share.
> See the difference?
For anyone following at home, here's the important bit for the earlier period:
> The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe], measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.57. Whereas the Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.57.
And for the later period:
> The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe], measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.93. Whereas the Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.69.
Yeah, Apple managed to enter the far more lucrative hardware-as-a-service market. It’s a subscription you only pay every couple of years to have the latest iPhone.
I mean, it’s a joke based on the fact that they have tricked their customers into obsessively buying upgrades, which makes the revenue stream very service-like, but it loses its punch when you explain it.
What is the trick? every 2-3 years Apple usually has hardware improvements motivating it. Is the trick just making better products?
For me I got a 14 for upgraded GPS and satellite, no plans for a 15. My dad is on a 12 and my mom a 10 and totally content. I think my brother has an 11. Most people I know don’t obsessively buy upgrades and those I know who do are actually split between Apple and android- and do it with other things too ie it’s the personality behind it not the company “tricking” them. Some ppl even do it with cars wanting the latest
I've been using Photoshop for 20 years and they absolutely still add features all the time. For example, they just added a ton of AI content fill features and you could make a debate about how AI is ruining artists, but you can't say that Adobe is doing nothing.
Pretty much everyone who talks about Adobe stagnating doesn't actually use the suite to it's full extent in the first place, I'm pretty sure. It's glaringly obvious when people talk about competitors; there is nothing near Photoshop. DaVinci Resolve is a good one for video though.
Even the features it does have are behind UX so bad you'd rather cram scattered glass down your urethra than use it. Just yesterday I gave Gimp a go again to do some very basic exposure blending and rage quit 10 minutes later. It's impossible to work with comfortably or with any sort of fluidity, everything is either a fight or a drag.
It's a me problem alright, but I'm in no way unique in refusing to put up with the mountain of grief that the Gimp UX is.
> I've been using it productively for photo editing and web design for two decades+.
I know Gimp must have its share of long term users but they're a miracle to me and I don't know what to say to that. I suppose it's good people reading these threads who are open to giving Gimp a go see there are users for whom it's working out.
Not gonna say gimp is perfect. But, the comment above is a poster child for folks who learned a certain software and refuse to use another with a slightly different interface.
I personally learned Paint Shop Pro first, after baby steps of Mac/MS Paint. Later on didn't find Photoshop particularly intuitive... although liked 3.0 on the Mac. It's even worse now according to professional friends.
I've used many others over the years and never had a problem with basic to medium features. They all work roughly the same—WIMP. Point, click.
Gimp works similarly to every other graphics program, so using it for common tasks is not hard. It's not "full of grief." If you can't do it, you either never learned how to use a GUI program properly[1], proceed by rote, or refuse to consult the manual for more specific tasks.
For one thing, it's a helluva lot easier to learn than Blender, which has no chronic troll posts that I've seen.
[1] Not uncommon in web times. The original Apple HIGs might help.
You are missing the point. Nothing in Gimp I haven't managed to do when I've decided it's important enough to put up with it but not so important I'd renew an Adobe subscription and boot Windows. The UX is simply so bad I'd rather avoid it at all costs if possible, and I get zero enjoyment from using it.
Blender being harder to learn has pretty much zero to do with how great or poor the experience of using it is. On top of missing the point, you're also missing the connection between the lack "troll posts" and what the user experience is like.
But since you're muttering to yourself about troll posts and how it's really just a skills issue, I might as well go and mutter to myself about how great Gimp could be if it had users who had standards instead of being chronic enablers who just cheerfully whistle through the wart fair it is.
I've had my yearly share of discussing Gimp I think. I'll just keep to my routine: see an update, install it in hopes of finding it has changed, and quit it ten minutes later kicking myself for being dumb enough to allow myself to hope.
I'll give Adobe credit for integrating AI features into its products without charging extra. I imagine it's not cheap for them to support that much generative AI on an application that has traditionally run 100% on users' local machines.
Maybe Adobe's worried about AI making Photoshop irrelevant. Here's the cautionary note from its latest quarterly report: "While we have released new generative artificial intelligence products, such as Adobe Firefly, and are focused on enhancing the artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities of such products and incorporating AI into existing products, services and solutions, there can be no assurance that our products will be successful or that we will innovate effectively to keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI across our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. If we do not successfully innovate, adapt to rapid technological changes and meet customer needs, our business and our financial results may be harmed."
Yeah, LR is also a great product. And the subscription turned out to be about the same cost as upgrading every year. There are other tools out there, but nothing comes close with image editing and DAM. The subscription also gets you LR on every device.
I think the dark patterns here are garbage, but Adobe has provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.
You’re assuming they will never raise the rental pricing, which seems unlikely.
And yeah I paid for two upgrades before Adobe moved Lightroom to rental only. The pricing was quite steady. Keep in mind Lightroom had no DRM baked in. No licensing checks, perpetual three seat cross-platform license, etc., etc. That $10/mo is for one seat only.
If the cost to the consumer were close Adobe wouldn't have spent the engineering effort to integrate Lightroom with all of their licensing software and incur the cost of having to keep the rental servers running. You can't predict the future but based on the steady pricing (both rental and perpetual licensed) the rental software is unambiguously more expensive for the consumer.
Also... no one's forcing people to use their products. Photoshop doesn't have a patent on editing images. Lightroom doesn't have a patent on sorting through photo collections. Plenty of paid and free alternatives exist, they're just not as good. But it's a completely free market out there and Adobe can't stop you from building a better version of Photoshop tomorrow to make billions.
No. Were it common you wouldn't see such a large difference in profit between the rental and perpetually licensed versions of Lightroom. Aside from support for newer cameras new versions have few, if any, compelling features. Performance improvements (LR is slooooooow), improved noise reduction, improved handling of video or non-Bayer sensors… all of that mostly fell to the wayside in favor of things like that AI garbage, improved mobile integration, enhanced geolocation support.
Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people. It also included storage space and made it easy to take and edit images on any device. That may not matter to you, but that is the market now.
Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people
lol, no.
The Lightroom CC is the mobile/desktop product. That is and always has been a separate "more accessible" product. Moving Lightroom "Classic" (the desktop only product) to a rental only model simply makes profits more accessible to Adobe.
That may not matter to you, but that is the market now.
Of course it's the market now, there's no other option from Adobe.
Having a monopoly like this is like having a goose that that lays golden eggs. The right thing to do is nothing except to guard the goose and keep it happy and well fed.
But what Adobe has done is a series of aggressive egg laying hormonal supplements and force feeding. Yes, it might get them even more eggs for a bit, but it's also a big risk for killing the goose for not a whole lot more eggs, with the side effect of definitely making everyone angry with you.
But I think Adobe, and most companies, would inevitably make this decision. If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
> If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
That pretty much sums up all of what business and investment is. Play with money to get more money to play with.
Its more like a 90% chance to double the money and a 60% chance to utterly destroy the faucet. Definite short term gain at only a moderate chance of future failure.
> If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
If the shareholders, who management has a fiduciary duty to, are well-diversified, this might even be the right decision.
Basically, if it's mostly index funds and mutual funds holding your stock, you probably should push that button every so often.
That assumes that once a golden goose dies, there’s an infinite supply of replacements. There’s a reason we’re comparing these companies to a mythical creature after all: if sustainable businesses producing valuable things were easy to create, this website wouldn’t exist.
The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
You seem to be making a bunch of somewhat odd assumptions? Eg that investors are idiots, and that it's easy to beat the market?
I was answering the hypothetical example of one company having this magic button. With the rest of the world operating as normal.
If you want to figure out the optimal approach to many companies having such magic buttons, that's a slightly different question.
You are right that creating companies isn't easy nor trivial. That's why the market so richly rewards creating successful companies from scratch. But that's nothing that a well-diversified investor needs to worry about for this particular decision. You just look at market prices.
> The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
> Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
You seem to assume zero competition? And also that the stock market is really bad at evaluating business decisions (at least worse than you)? If the latter is the case, you should become an investor and make a killing!
Especially if you are living in a world where everyone else is stupidly slaughtering their golden geese, you should be able to pick up some disgruntled ex-employees for cheap and just run a steady ship!
Another important consideration: at some level of abstraction a company is just a legal shell. 'Killing' a company might just mean that the old equity (another legal abstraction) is deleted, and the former creditors turn into equity holders. The operations don't even need to be affected by this at all. Of course, you can also 'kill' a company by shutting it down. But again, that doesn't necessarily remove any of the demand for its (type of) products, nor does it remove the experience of the people working there, nor does it break any of the machinery and hardware.
So if Adobe goes belly up, there are already plenty of other companies willing to fill their former niche.
That's what the post-WW2 world looked like: the developed countries had booming economies, but the poor countries fell further and further behind. Some even in absolute terms.
Yet, that time is frequently cited as the golden age that people harken back to.
You could cut costs and let the money roll in. But unfortunately even if that's the smart move for the company, it's unlikely to be the smart move for the individual decisionmakers.
Empire building is fun! And the press you get for hiring more people is infinitely nicer than when you announce layoffs and other cost cutting measures.
LoopStart: Expand into so many markets to then be unmaintainable, then randomly decide to focus on your main stream of revenue again and kill off the side offerings GOTO LoopStart.
CS6 has been running for me well, and likely will keep running long after the company collapses on my offline PC that I don't do Microsoft OS updates on... Great job on that one Adobe!
It's always easier to play these types of games than it is to actually perform innovation. So while competition is not necessary for growth, it clearly often helps.
There's another way I like to think about what you said: cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did it previously (or the person before you) the less you have available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend of enshitification we see.
> "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation. Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should change when your environment does. I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
> I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
Money is relative. I bet there are things $1bn can buy that we aren't even aware of because we were never exposed to it. Some of those things are probably non-tangible, like the ability to influence politics and change the world.
I doubt it. Things that cost hundreds of thousands are, for the most part, extremely resource intensive, which is part why they're expensive in the first place. Even rare gems which are small but many of these things are big. The more well known exception to this is luxury items which are just costly for costly sake. The other is art, which can be expensive because desire (like luxury) or scams/tax evasion.
Of course this doesn't mean everyone is aware of these things but they're still publicly known.
> Not all things are physical things. How much does it cost to have thousands of people click at images of cars for your AI model?
I think you're reaching. The things you're talking about have physical impacts. You can't run computers without building chips, developing power systems, and so on. Yes, things of value need not be inherently physical but there are no things that are not connected to the physical world in some form or another.
What I meant to say is "not all things are physical objects". Since you're still referring to physical objects like chips, power systems, and so on. Things that you can buy with money also be not-physical-objects, such as training data harvested from millions of human work-hours.
Software companies should do the same thing material goods producers do: make the product smaller, faster, and cheaper. Instead they rent seek with half-assed updates and added bloat that 95% of users never need. Adobe is not alone in this.
If microchip producers had done what Adobe has done, computers would be developed by adding a few vacuum tubes each year and bumping the cost by 5%.
Be careful about looking as if they're abusing that dominant position. Back at the highwater of the "Wintel" dominance, early 2000s, Intel staff reportedly found Microsoft hair-raising, boasting openly of crushing the competition, choking off their air supply, undercutting then till they bled to death, etc. Intel had already had the antitrust stick brandished at it and had made sure the troops all understood the importance of the marketplace at least looking like a fair fight.
exist, innovate, maximise long-term value for shareholders and users, eliminate inefficiencies, externalise risk, internalise sources of value, monitor the business environment for new opportunities and threats
Issue dividends and return profits to their shareholders. They don't need to increase revenue by n% every year. Lots of electrical distribution companies are publicly traded and do just this.
Share price appreciation is like crack. I think a large part of the investment market is looking for the share price to increase or they aren't interested.
There are inexpensive stocks yielding close to 10% from dividends, but you are told not to expect an increase in share price. Instead, people go after stocks that yield far less (0-3% dividend with a much higher stock price) but which may experience a growth in share price.
That's because in many places capital gains are not taxed while dividends are, hence a preference for stock price increases. This distortion should be corrected somehow otherwise the economic incentives will continue to be to milk the cow dry at the expense of everything and everyone.
> It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance,
I'm pretty sure Adobe went for subscription model as one of the earliest big companies and then the trend bloomed all around us - especially on mobile devices.
Few years ago my friend had issues with her computer after being forced to upgrade from Win7 to 10 - it was something drivers related. She reinstalled 7 but couldn't activate her CS anymore because servers for that particular version were no more active. She could use crack and activate the software but she didn't want to risk issues if she'd face the visit from Polish tax office (which is permitted to check legality of software in business). Purchasing new license was out of the question because Adobe already introduced subscription at that point and she, as a single-person company couldn't afford it in expenses. A colleague suggested her Affinity and she gladly switched.
I tried switching to Affinity. I'm glad it exists. I use Affinity Designer but Affinity Photo didn't meet my needs and I ended up signing up for a Photoshop subscription. It was small workflow stuff but ultimately, for me needs, some poor UX choices in Affinity meant editing 200+ files would have taking 2-3 hours more. Photoshop was $120 for a 1yr subscription. My time is easily worth more than $120 for the 2-3 hours I saved.
I'm not dissing Affinity Photo. It seems great. And like I said, I use Affinity Designer (never owned Illustrator). all I'm saying is $120 isn't that much money if you actually need the software for work.
If you just need something for a hobby than there's Affinity Photo ($50) as well as gIMP and Krita. There's also Photopea which I find is meeting most of my short term Photoshop needs so I might switch and give them my $$$ instead of Adobe. Though I suspect if I ever have to do 200+ images again I'll find Photopea's workflow to be missing the things that made me pony up last time.
Woman whom I met while being at uni one day calls me and asks for help with installing Photoshop - I ask her why she's doing that. She never was into graphics software and in fact, constantly needed my help with the true computer basics. She said she went to this photography course and the instructor guy ordered everyone to get Photoshop to fine-tune their work. I told her she should be careful because it's likely she'll be maneuvered into a subscription for a piece of software she doesn't need. I also mention Gimp but she refused as they were working with Adobe software only. Fast-forward to a year later: she unsurprisingly cancelled Photoshop sub. Prob with a help of her daughter boyfriend who become the personal tech support guy for the whole family.
There was also a case of finding her a replacement for trial Office she got with her machine with - she was familiar with Word for years. So I suggested OpenOffice and it worked pretty well up until some document formatting issues happen, which were resolved already in LibreOffice. I installed LO but she found its UI hard to use somehow, and in few weeks she opted to redo her papers with some cracked version of Office.
On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if that photography course would be all about getting people trapped within Adobe software and the instructor would be paid for each head he managed to catch.
Then there's my closest friend: for years she was working with pirated Photoshop 7 up until it refused to work on her Win11 machine recently and she had to swap to a yet another pirated CS version. Same goes for managing photos and her drawings pieces - it's always ACDSee 2.xx with the commonly-known-serial-number. I suggested her Affinity giving the example of the woman from my original comment, but she said Photoshop was and is always enough for her and she wouldn't want to learn everything all over again in another UI. Tho, she's enjoying darktable and rawtherapee along with Stellarium for her sky-watching which I suggested her.
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While two examples may be that much, I do believe being committed to familiarizing itself with software in early stages makes the switch harder later.
I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments... That'd be really interesting stuff to read.
> I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments
I learned 3d modeling in 3ds Max as a kid, but many years and a CS degree later, I ended up switching to Blender because the license cost of 3ds Max was absolutely mental for a hobbyist ($3,000ish?). This was after the Blender renaissance where they overhauled their UI and stuff. But it wasn't my first time trying to switch to Blender from 3ds Max. In terms of features and workflow, both are very similar (and I actually like some things in Blender more), but it's the little differences that end up bugging you in my experience. Like some alt-mode of a feature being missing. Or the camera handling differently from how you're used to.
I'm currently going through this again now, switching from Unity to Stride game engine. At a quick glance, they're extremely similar, but that's almost worse. It's like coming home to your house and finding that it was replaced with an identical house.
Anecdotally, they seem to be doing some subtle shenanigans around the install and activatiom of CS versions that still require it (4-6 iirc).
Changing the activation flow in non-obvious ways, dark patterns on the website leading you in circles when trying to download the installers, support chat telling you to just get CC...
> It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits
It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).
That license used to be perpetual, and only enforced locally (i.e. without connecting to the internet). That's about as close to "owning" as anyone gets in software.
It seems like almost half the discussion on this godforsaken website is midwits picking specific words to argue over for no apparent reason. My favorite activation phrases is "AIs can hallucinate and make mistakes."
If we go down this particular philosophical rabbit hole, you don't "own" anything. Stop making payments into the capitalist system we live under, and the bailiffs come and take away your car/house/possessions...
A perpetual license is not meaningfully distinct from ownership in the context of software - you don't "own" open source software either, just license it for the low, low cost of free.
> Stop making payments into the capitalist system we live under, and the bailiffs come and take away your car/house/possessions
Your house/car get re-possessed if you stop making their loan payments since they are listed as collateral for the loan, that's different then you not owning them in the first place.
I don't need my builder's permission to add a sofa, paint the walls, or change the locks. But god help you if Adobe finds out that you've changed the DRM locks on the version of Photoshop that you "own".
> you don't "own" open source software either, just license it for the low, low cost of free.
Depends on the license, ones like Unlicense or 0BSD try to opt out of the default copyrighted licensed state of released code.
This isn’t really saying much. In many places you need permission to paint the outside of your house (and cannot choose whichever color you want). And almost everywhere you need permission to build a house on land you own.
Once the infrastructure and social acceptance was there to allow for subscription based pricing, the bost benefit ratio shifted enough that the benefit of those people using Adobe products at home that weren't paid for changed, since they could now get the specific products they needed for a small fee that only lasted a short while.
I.e. $400-$1200 for a home user is a hard sell for someone that only needs it for a bit, so they accepted the benefit piracy gained them since the sales lost was minimal. Once they could feasibly expect someone to pay $30 for a short term access to some tools (whether true or not, it's the perception of that which matters), I think there's little incentive for them to still allow that piracy.
I'm not sure if this was very forward thinking of them or they just got lucky by allowing the piracy instead of allowing cheap/free home users, but I suspect they would have had a much harder time trying to charge for home users if they had previously offered home user free use licenses to legalize the benefit that piracy was providing. Raising prices is harder than enforcing pricing that was unenforced, and charging something for what was previously free is very hard to get away with without a huge reputation impact.[1]
I was an architecture undergrad (bricks , not bits) in the early 00’s and everyone had pirated software. And then we all got hired and brought our quiver of technical skills with is into industry and convinced our managers to purchase the tools we knew so well.
Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience (cost, bugs, support, tactics).
I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running releases from 10 years ago.
They drove me off Lightroom, I was just a causal user. The upsell spam and ads in Adobe Reader has also driven me away from that too. I would have considered buying an upgrade for both, but the price was never right for casual home use. Now I don't use any Adobe products at all.
I strongly dislike paying for subscription software that I don't use very frequently[1], but I do pay for the Photoshop & Lightroom bundle. At ~$10 / month, it ends up being a lot less than I paid for updating "perpetual" licenses to those products frequently enough (every two years?) to get the new features.
I also use Capture One, and I actually liked it significantly better than Lightroom when I did a side by side comparison of them a couple of years ago.
Lightroom is starting to get some HDR processing capabilities that are interesting to me, but that one feature by itself isn't currently worth paying Adobe's crazy subscription prices just to use a program that I otherwise don't enjoy.
I switched to Capture One. Not as easy to use as Lightroom, but the RAW processing is actually superior. It's a one time purchase. The professionals can choose to upgrade every year, the casual users can upgrade less frequently.
Capture One is just ~5 years behind Adobe pushing people to subscriptions - in fact they are actually quite bit more expensive for what you get now. Perpetual licenses are going away
And they all still only deal with a part of what LR provides. You're going to be upset. LR as a complete package (editing, DAM, apps on all devices, etc...) is hard to beat. I'm about to turn LR back on b/c I find myself taking fewer pictures as to not deal with my non-LR workflow.
Yep, I finally cancelled and didn’t take any of the “two free months” offer because I just don’t trust their billing approach anymore. The “pay monthly but can’t cancel for one year” model ruined it.
It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.