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You're right - for a professional it is more expensive and it absolutely was a move by Adobe to capture more of the value of their products (read: increase prof

You're right - for a professional it is more expensive and it absolutely was a move by Adobe to capture more of the value of their products (read: increase profit). The flip side of the argument, of course, is that more profitable companies have more room to innovate and experiment (Bell Labs, Kodak, Google, etc.) and Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. There is a valid argument about the additional engineering time being devoted to the necessary anti-circumvention and subscription services instead of better products for customers, but I'm not sure those criticisms stick in this particular case. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.

Silhouette 11y ago
...Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. The thing is, if Adobe had been consistently developing valuable new functionality and making it available in newer versions, their customers would have been paying them to upgrade in the previous model as well. The fact that so many people didn't see enough added value to buy each major upgrade suggests objectively that the products were stagnating. Contrary to your argument, it therefore seems that having customers locked into the subscription model so the money is coming in anyway is a disincentive for Adobe to do better now, at least as long as the industry momentum and relative lack of competition keep customers signed up. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks. How Adobe products came to dominate parts of the industry is, as usual, a combination of actually being good at what they do and other, more commercial factors. However, the switch to a subscription model has opened up interesting and viable opportunities for disruption in the market. Credible competition is starting to appear and apparently do quite well in some niches previously dominated by Adobe's big titles, so that "unquestionably" is looking more questionable by the day.
- rdudek 11y ago
  Also note, Adobe's products are known to be some of the most pirated pieces of software around. During my high school and college times, everyone I knew owned pirated copies of Photoshop or Creative Suite. Same folks now just pay the monthly fee to have the fully updated and activated product because they can't be assed to fight activation issues periodically.
  - Silhouette 11y ago
    That might be even worse news for Adobe, though. It's hard to find reliable information about how successful their SaaS model has been, but the most plausible arguments/data I've seen would suggest they have very roughly half as many CC subscribers by now as they sold full copies of the main CS6 suites. IIRC the figures did not take into account sales of individual CS product licences, nor allow for existing customers who had say CS5 or CS5.5 and had chosen not to upgrade to CS6. If that is anything close to accurate -- and I stress the "if", because the data is probably at least third-hand here -- then Adobe would have lost more than half of their previous customer base in the transition, and still not regained them several years later. If a significant proportion of those they have gained are ex-pirates, that's an even stronger suggestion that their own permanently licensed products prior to CC might still be their biggest competition. The situation with pirates seems less relevant for most of Autodesk's products, as their market is much more likely to be professionals than hobbyists anyway. But the implications of earlier permanent offerings potentially representing ongoing competition for their new subscription-only model even several years later would be just as unpleasant as they are for Adobe. Anecdotally, one of my companies has some big name Autodesk software for use with a specific part of what we do, and we've just decided that we'll make do with the existing systems and not buy any more or any updates if they're only going to rent new versions to us and won't let us buy any more copies of the existing version we already use. If significant numbers of larger businesses that already have spare capacity in their volume licensing deals decide to take a similar approach, that definitely won't be good news for Autodesk's new strategy, but I guess time will tell.
    - r00fus 11y ago

Silhouette 11y ago

...Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. The thing is, if Adobe had been consistently developing valuable new functionality and making it available in newer versions, their customers would have been paying them to upgrade in the previous model as well. The fact that so many people didn't see enough added value to buy each major upgrade suggests objectively that the products were stagnating. Contrary to your argument, it therefore seems that having customers locked into the subscription model so the money is coming in anyway is a disincentive for Adobe to do better now, at least as long as the industry momentum and relative lack of competition keep customers signed up. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks. How Adobe products came to dominate parts of the industry is, as usual, a combination of actually being good at what they do and other, more commercial factors. However, the switch to a subscription model has opened up interesting and viable opportunities for disruption in the market. Credible competition is starting to appear and apparently do quite well in some niches previously dominated by Adobe's big titles, so that "unquestionably" is looking more questionable by the day.

rdudek 11y ago
Also note, Adobe's products are known to be some of the most pirated pieces of software around. During my high school and college times, everyone I knew owned pirated copies of Photoshop or Creative Suite. Same folks now just pay the monthly fee to have the fully updated and activated product because they can't be assed to fight activation issues periodically.
- Silhouette 11y ago
  That might be even worse news for Adobe, though. It's hard to find reliable information about how successful their SaaS model has been, but the most plausible arguments/data I've seen would suggest they have very roughly half as many CC subscribers by now as they sold full copies of the main CS6 suites. IIRC the figures did not take into account sales of individual CS product licences, nor allow for existing customers who had say CS5 or CS5.5 and had chosen not to upgrade to CS6. If that is anything close to accurate -- and I stress the "if", because the data is probably at least third-hand here -- then Adobe would have lost more than half of their previous customer base in the transition, and still not regained them several years later. If a significant proportion of those they have gained are ex-pirates, that's an even stronger suggestion that their own permanently licensed products prior to CC might still be their biggest competition. The situation with pirates seems less relevant for most of Autodesk's products, as their market is much more likely to be professionals than hobbyists anyway. But the implications of earlier permanent offerings potentially representing ongoing competition for their new subscription-only model even several years later would be just as unpleasant as they are for Adobe. Anecdotally, one of my companies has some big name Autodesk software for use with a specific part of what we do, and we've just decided that we'll make do with the existing systems and not buy any more or any updates if they're only going to rent new versions to us and won't let us buy any more copies of the existing version we already use. If significant numbers of larger businesses that already have spare capacity in their volume licensing deals decide to take a similar approach, that definitely won't be good news for Autodesk's new strategy, but I guess time will tell.
  - r00fus 11y ago