[basseq]

People tend to want to best of both worlds. They want to "own their software" (i.e., pay once, use forever) but they also want the benefits of SaaS: low up-front investment, cloud services, continual evolution, network effects, etc.

Photoshop is an easy example: would you rather pay $400 up front to have version X.X forever, or $10/mo forever to always have the latest version. That's a tradeoff! Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2.

Cloud services are even harder because you start talking hardware. "Owning Photoshop" is easy because it runs on my computer. I'm maintaining my computer for me and only me. What would "owning their software" even look like for, I donno, Github? Are you running your own AWS instance? Are other people running their own instances?

There are ways to build P2P software, or on-prem enterprise stuff... but no one really wants to buy it. They're ok paying $10/mo for the billions of dollars of infrastructure because there's really no other way to do it.

[turtledragonfly]

> Photoshop ... Consumers have voted with their wallets on #2.

Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not?

I'm partly being facetious, but it's also partly a genuine question. Is there some research you know of that shows a majority of people genuinely choosing #2, when both are on the table?

For a long time the standard model was "pay $X for the current version, then $Y to upgrade to the next version, if you want." That is pretty close to the best of both worlds, IMO, from a customer standpoint.

[tveyben]

> Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not?

Completely agree! I purchased CS6 around 2012 and use it to solve graphical tasks for a client even today. I know that Adobes stock went up with ~25% (or was it more) when they announced the new subscription/robbery model, but I'm sure a lot of customers would like to do like me and keep getting value from the old investment by "owning" not renting CS<x>.

Only if you HAVE to be using the latest and greatest SW features, then the math might also work for the customer.

PS.: Too bad that my Macs are no longer able to execute CS6 as there is some 32bit code in CS6 and the newer Mac OS's only want to play with 64bit apps, that's a shame (but here Windows shine, by always(?) being backwards compatible (my client is a Windows business, so here that's not a problem…

[basseq]

> Did they? Or did Adobe just stop offering #1, forcing customers into #2 whether they like it or not?

I'm recalling that they did run both models in parallel, but couldn't find a reference in a quick search.

Regardless, the 25% stock price jump would indicate that from a "voting with their wallet" perspective, subscriptions were a rather unequivocal winner.

There are certainly pay-once-use-forever models out there, though my perception is that they're niche pricing models for a reason. (And still not outright ownership!)

Does that mean prospects and customers were happy about it? Maybe not. But I suspect the only answer that would have really satisfied the majority would be the unattainable "best of both worlds".