Why? The subscription model made their software much cheaper. CS used to cost something like 3.5k, now it's 720 a year including all updates. Sounds OK to me....
By your reasoning you're not expecting people to use the same software for more than ~4 years.
I bought Adobe Master Collection CS4 (student edition, for $1000) way back in 2008 and have been using it for the past ten years. It runs even better than it did back then because of the better hardware available now! The subscription model would have been much more expensive for a user like me.
You were lucky. Apple doesn't guarantee long-term compatibility of applications on Mac OS. You bought just after the latest Mac transition, so your ten years didn't happen to cross any big one (OS X, 2001; x86, 2006).
I bought some Adobe software in 2001, and it was a gigantic pain to get it working under early OS X (hours on the phone with Adobe), and wasn't usable under Rosetta, 5 years later.
If the rumors and historical trends are to be believed, we're on the verge of another transition. I would not buy an expensive binary blob for Mac today without an assurance I could get an upgrade, if/when there's another architectural transition.
I ran into this yesterday. I use Illustrator infrequently, in spurts, to do mapping work for a non-profit that donates our volunteer time to work on mountain bike trails in parks. I last purchased CS6 on a non-profit license because my of minimal use --- a week or two at a time every six months or so --- which really doesn't fit with the subscription model.
I hadn't fired it up since updating to Mojave, and last night when I went to update one of our maps I found that Illustrator CS6 pretty much isn't usable. It's so ridiculously slow that trying to type out a string of text on a blank artboard beachballed and took almost a minute for the 20 characters to display.
The workflow can't move to Affinity Designer because it's not really compatible with AI files[1], and I really don't want to get into the subscription model because even the non-profit license is $200+/year. Thankfully the CS6 perpetual license is for Windows as well, so I can spin it up in a VM... And MS is really good at backwards compatibility.
But it really sucks not being able to use it natively as I have for years.
[1] It'll open the PDF portion, but for a map with lots of complicated lines, these get changed from single paths in Illustrator to lots of curves in PDF. It's a mess trying to put these back together.
Their pricing is way too high as developer tools just because they have near monopoly.
Top of the line programming tools like Jetbrains give you their entire list of about 10 apps for $12 or so a month from 3rd year (Starting from about $20 a month for the 1st year) and of course individual apps are even cheaper.
Heck, even MS gives you the entire office suit for $10 a month with 1TB of cloud storage which I think is a good deal.
We need more competitors to drag Adobe's monopoly down. Their apps are built on ancient code, the performance is so bad compared to apps like Affinity Photo and they put folders and icons all over the Application folder on Mac I can't believe its annoyance.
I do find it somewhat rich that on a forum where the overwhelming advice for entrepreneurs is "Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.", people complain about pricing. I guess it's different when you're on the other end :)
I don't know, man. I guess they will charge what the market lets them get away with. It's a for-profit business, and if they do one thing right, it's marketing & sales. You might be pissed off about the pricing, but the market stands behind it - there was a lot of skepticism even internally on the subscription model, but I think the executives were proven right on this one. You may hate them for it, and anecdotally it's easy to find Adobe haters... but not all the market does. AFAICT, far from it, there are still way more promoters than detractors. And the subscription pricing opened up a large market that nobody even thought existed - not to mention the fact that it made revenue streams more predictable. At this point, I think it's really hard to argue that the pricing is hurting the company in any way - if you look at the numbers that is, not at anecdotes about how one particular person/ set of persons feels about it.
Assuming an 8 hour day and two days worth of billable work, that assumes you are making or your company is billing you out at $45/hour. Not exactly highest average salary.
But if you aren’t a professional designer, you no more need Adobe’s high end offering than a non professionally developer needs to spend thousands on an MSDN license.
not even close. Maya and 3dsmax start at $1500 a year. I'm pretty sure most other professional 3d software is in a similar ballpark or more. The apps are complex and the market for them is arguably not large enough to support the development costs at a lower price point. AutoCAD is another example. Even Unity is $1500 a year. Pro Audio tools are in a similar category.
A lot of people and small businesses updated very rarely. Often only when forced to by something like an OS upgrade. It’s only cheaper if you were a person or business that could afford an annual upgrade cadence.
While you are right in practice, your reasons are wrong. It’s not because these companies can’t afford it, as mentioned it’s actually cheaper. The part you referenced, about forced upgrading, is often more costly than simply having a subscription that routinely keeps the software updated. The problem is three fold:
1. Small businesses don’t upgrade because they fear change in general. Buttons disappearing, functionalities changing and new things like cloud integrations scare/confuse a lot of them. They also don’t want the pain of paying people for time to relearn what used to work just fine.
2. Subscription costs are very much more visible on P&L’s than one time expense charges. When the eventual tight times come, recurring costs are the first thing on the chopping block.
3. As you know, cutting most subs means cutting functionality as well. For small places like photography studios, they don’t want their core software to be beholden to a required recurring expense. They want to own it, so if all else goes away, at least it still gets the job done.
It’s often simplified to be a cost thing, but it almost never really is. They can afford it, but they don’t like what they give up in the model.
I think people fear change in software because updates have a habit of making the user experience worse. Think of the troubling trend in web design where they take away customization options and add more padding to everything to be "mobile friendly".
This is a valid concern but your comment really highlights a big problem with these discussions: your wording implies that this is universally bad but your examples are both things where it's impossible to say whether a given move is a win, loss, or wash without fairly detailed data. An increasing percentage of people are either mobile-only or mobile-primary, so making things mobile/tablet friendly is probably a good idea for most sites. Similarly, customization has significant training and support costs and removing infrequently used features to add things more people care about is a classic business trade-off.
There's no real reason for a customer to care about these trade offs. They want to get work done, nor worry about the business model behind one of their tools.
That's looking at the problem backwards: if you have one customer who has a bunch of customization requests you need to weigh their business against what other work you could be doing with the same development time. It's not a win if you keep one customer but lose others to a competitor whose product is easier to use or cheaper to develop, especially since I've probably seen at least a 1:10 ratio for arcane features and customizations which a customer swears up and down are mission critical to things which actually are — usually it's more like one guy doesn't want to consider changing the way he works in the slightest until forced.
Adobe software became notably worse (IMO) shortly before they went to subscription model. I remember the change from Illustrator CS2 > CS3, they totally ruined the flow. It feels like they make changes just for the hell of it sometimes.
It depends on how quickly they add things which matter to you. The break-even point for their pricing was a little over a year – e.g. Lightroom used to cost $150 new / $80 for upgrades and it's $10/month so if they are regularly shipping improvements you want the subscription is a good deal but if it's fluff or support for hardware you don't have you're still paying.
Yeah, that was basically my point: if you actually use most of what you get it's a good deal. If your usage has been stable for awhile you're probably overpaying for the possibility that your usage will change.
I bought Adobe Master Collection CS4 (student edition, for $1000) way back in 2008 and have been using it for the past ten years. It runs even better than it did back then because of the better hardware available now! The subscription model would have been much more expensive for a user like me.