[dmix]

Adobe has always been targetted at profressionals price wise. Making it SaaS made pirating harder and the high monthly price (and annoying dark patterns) excluded and alienated the general public which upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life. The problem there is mostly the lack of good competition in spaces like Lightroom but that's starting to change. The everyone-pirates-photoshop so don't bother trying to compete idea is now over.

[somenameforme]

They're alienating plenty of paying customers as well. Many people will not pay to rent software, and I expect that number will increase as the number of companies trying to collect rent on software increases. Because $10/month (let alone whatever adobe is trying to charge) never sounds like a lot, but multiply by the number of pieces of software (let alone some non-software flirting with the same gimmick) you regularly use and it quickly becomes absurd.

A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.

I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?

[eastbound]

It’s not just software rental. Every online shop or service is turning towards revenue extraction by targeted pricing: Services that look at your IRS records or other public clues, and hop, you train travel, Amazon listing, car repairs are billed higher, exactly at your purchasing power.

Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.

In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.

[benrbray]

> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life

It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.

A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.

[p_ing]

You never owned any Adobe product, you licensed it. And that license could be revoked at any time; while it is unlikely Adobe would go after an individual, the license that you agree to allows them to do so.

[egg1]

Adobe can say whatever they want in their EULA; whether it's legally enforceable in court is another matter.

Imagine how these you-own-a-license-not-the-thing-itself shenanigans would play out for any other product we purchase. "No, you didn't buy that $40k car in cash upfront! You only bought Toyota's permission to operate the car, and we reserve the right to repossess it at any time."

[s1mplicissimus]

reminds me of the teslas that got downgraded because the new owners only paid for the cheaper subscription

[ssbash]

I’m not sure what the cheaper subscription you’re referring to is.

Only “Premium Connectivity” aka the internet data plan (streaming media, live traffic, and live sentry video feeds) is exclusively a subscription.

Tesla has always offered the option purchase the Full Self Driving upgrade outright. The option to subscribe monthly to FSD was added later.

Maybe you’re thinking of the free trial of FSD that new vehicles come with?

There is a lot of criticize Tesla for, but they aren’t locking features behind subscriptions.

In the past, BMW has locked heated seats, wireless Apple CarPlay, even software updates behind their ConnectedDrive subscription.

[lesuorac]

first page result for "reminds me of the teslas that got downgraded because the new owners only paid for the cheaper subscription".

https://electrek.co/2022/07/26/tesla-ransom-customer-over-80...

[omnimus]

Well the problem with Adobe is that some of the really crucial tools are essentialy abandoned.

InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.

Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.

That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.