If you think newspaper subs are bad try looking at some specialist software. Maintenance costs for software like Ansys and Matlab are insane and can run into th

If you think newspaper subs are bad try looking at some specialist software. Maintenance costs for software like Ansys and Matlab are insane and can run into the tens of thousands a year. The situation with Ansys has gotten so bad many research groups are moving to OpenFOAM and Python and I doubt they'll be back once they figure out how much more powerful their new tools are. We're seeing something similar with Adobe. Their Creative Cloud suite is now subscription based and ends up costing much more than buying the older software did for a perpetual licence (but a drop in the ocean compared to the above). Everyone seems to hate it. There aren't even enough new features to warrant updating from your old CS6 license other than the required 64-bit support (several components of their management software still aren't even 64 bit). The only good thing is that their team licence is pretty permissive if you're not a heavy user, we were able to share three license across a larger team, the sales guy even suggested it. Now we're seeing developers like Serif come out with apps like Affinity Photo and Designer to challenge Photoshop and Illustrator with exceptionally polished desktop and iPad apps with a once off purchase per OS. The apps are performant and can do 99% of what Adobe can. With a full version of Photoshop coming to iPad it'll be interesting how users respond. Adobe don't have a great track record on iOS not that their desktop backend is much better. In fact I'd say that the standard set by Photoshop and Illustrator in terms of primary features and UX over the years has become relatively easy to replicate on modern devices, even with web apps, that Adobe have painted themselves into a technical debt corner with their awful backend (compare raw performance of Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X). Then there's the video streaming fragmentation. Now I need Netflix, Amazon and HBO subs to watch the shows I want to see, if they're even available in my country and I also need to pay for a VPN. There's no way I can afford that so if I'm selfish I'll just torrent the ones not on my preferred platform. Unless these services introduce some form of syndication where popular shows appear on competitors platforms after a period of exclusivity then they'll burn what ground they have taken from piracy.