Adobe (and others) are in a tight spot called "how do we keep selling our product when we've achieved almost-100% market saturation".
A sort of silver lining is that with the rentier model companies will have an interest to produce more reliable products, rather than ones which break exactly one day after the warranty ends.
Not just 100% market saturation, but often "no real reason to upgrade". Adobe CS2 is actually offered for free download off Adobe's website, and it does 98% of what anyone needs Creative Suite for anyways. The biggest problem is it doesn't recognize some features of newer Creative Suite files, like folders of layers in Photoshop.
I have a Photoshop CS5 license, and I can't ever conceive of any reason I'd pay for CC. I have gotten my money's worth out of Photoshop CS5, and I'll continue to get that value, but I don't use Photoshop nearly enough to ever justify a monthly cost.
I think that they host CS2 for the sake of letting existing license holders continue using the software, and public access is just an obvious side effect iirc.
Hopefully you are right, certainly previously the incentive was to add new features to drive upgrades, often to the detriment of the product as a whole.
To what extent is that because of price increases? I used to work in higher ed; I think we were able to negotiate a not-as-heart-attack-inducing increase over what we used to pay for the number of licenses we had, but since leaving there I have no idea if there have been further increases. I know the increase at one school was substantial enough that they threw the Adobe rep off of campus.
I teach Maths and don't make much use of Adobe CS but at one centre I teach in they are hanging onto CS v6 on the network.
The UK student monthly fee for a student for their own use at home is a tad under £16. Probably ok for an undergrad but a little steep for a 16 year old in an FE College who needs access to Illustrator now and again at home...
You're preaching to the choir. I've been involved in professional graphic design for over a decade. The vast majority of professionals get a better deal using Adobe CC.
As consumers we don't have any right to demand software at whatever price point we want.
Only non-professionals have a hard time justifying the low monthly price. For them there are plenty of other competitive options. No one is forcing you to buy Photoshop -- use one of the other tools available.
As software developers we should all be able to understand: pay the price for the professional software, or if you think you can do it better, write a competitor.
A sort of silver lining is that with the rentier model companies will have an interest to produce more reliable products, rather than ones which break exactly one day after the warranty ends.