[mardifoufs]

Rent seeking? Seriously? You realize that rent seeking actually has a definition and it isn't "any business model I don't like" . This is the opposite of rent seeking, you pay for a monthly subscription to a product line that keeps getting updated and supported. That's a directly & mutually beneficial transaction.

Take video editing as an example. The tech it involves (such tracking or object detection) usually improves pretty quickly and the improvement can be drastic . Not having to shell out hundreds of dollars outright every new CS version just to keep up with the tech is a pretty big benefit for a lot of people and makes the ecosystem more accessible. That's true for almost every other software included in the Adobe subscription.

Now, it's absolutely okay to still dislike subscription based business models (I do too) but in this case it's non sense to argue it's rent seeking.

[harimau777]

It's definitely rent seeking. Seriously.

If the updates and support were valuable to people, then Adobe could simply charge for them directly (e.g. by requiring users to periodically pay a fee to upgrade to the updated version). Instead they only allow people to buy a subscription.