That’s a good point, but it hasn’t borne out in reality. Creative Cloud is frequently adding new features, some of which are quite incredible. Project Turntable that they demonstrated last year honestly blew me away.

Also, several of their products face stiff competition. They have to keep pushing Premiere to fend off Davinci and Final Cut.

Some of the lower tier individual plans offer generous storage. There's value for having a copy with them vs doing everything yourself.

There's a bit of maintenance even if you just stand still. On the photo side, I notice them updating distortion correction for new lenses that come out, new camera body support, etc -- that's just a few examples of maintaining existing features, separate from the new features they rolled out. Whoever does that has bills to pay, and I think that's just a fact across the industry.

Someone has to get paid to build, maintain, and extend these things, and I don't know if that classifies as rent-seeking.

How is that incentive notably different or better for consumers than the incentive provided by being required to remain better than competitors to retain subscription revenue?

Because switching to a competitors option is a much bigger task that just staying on whichever version you’re on currently, which you can’t do anymore since Adobe only offers subscriptions.

Switching to a different creative software solution is a much bigger task than just buying the new license and installing the program. You have to relearn basic tasks that are second nature in the other thing, change workflows due to different file formats or you might just not have the option to because the rest of the industry depends on the competitors software. This is true for individual professionals as well as big companies, where switching to a different software package also means dropping efficiency for a while and hiring people to teach your employees your new software. This is a step that no company will ever take and Adobe has recognized that and taken away the only opt-out of paying them assloads forever, which was buying a perpetual license and staying on that version.

Thanks, my mind was glossing over switching costs, what you’re saying there tracks to me.

> only opt-out of paying them assloads forever, which was buying a perpetual license and staying on that version.

This I struggle with though - financially there’s no real difference between a perpetual license and a subscription once you work out the time value of money, etc. For any arbitrary subscription price, you could make a perpetual license more expensive, or vice-versa. ergo, the complaints here aren’t really about the license type, at their root they’re simply pricing complaints.

“Monthly pricing for Photoshop 2024 is too high at $x” is fundamentally the same problem (with the same solutions) as “our perpetual license for Photoshop 5.5 is becoming unusable for both technical and HR reasons and the perpetual license (which hypothetically exists) for Photoshop 2024 is too high at $x*500”.