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Photoshop used to be a piece of software you could buy once and then use. You could pay to upgrade each year, or you could keep using your current version and n

Photoshop used to be a piece of software you could buy once and then use. You could pay to upgrade each year, or you could keep using your current version and not have access to the new features. Not anymore, its keep buying the new features whether you need them or not. Stop paying, and you have to stop using all of it. The consumer doesn't get a choice. The worst part I think about many subscription models, is that they can force changes on you that actually make the product WORSE. Hey this new version of the software does X, and I hate X. I want to keep using the older version but I can't and I have to pay to get something I don't want. If you HAD to subscribe to other things like software makes you, like you have to have an office chair subscription and you had to pay for whatever nonsense changes they made to your chair or you get no chair at all, you'd probably find that a bad deal. Especially if all the chair companies operated the same way.

adventured 4y ago
> The consumer doesn't get a choice. The consumer always has an obvious choice: don't use Photoshop. It's not a monopoly product. Use something else. Consumers are not entitled to access to Photoshop as a birthright.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
  What if it is a monopoly product, as more and more products are becoming? It need not even be a monopoly, just a situation where the supplier has vastly more power than the consumer. Are they not allowed to see that its a bad deal and want better? There can be more options than just take or leave it. Suppliers are not entitled to screw over consumers as a birthright.
  - Synthezoid 4y ago
    No, no, no. To a free market apologist, there's no such thing as inelastic demand. Every item is a completely optional luxury item that you can choose to walk away from without consequence. Nothing is ever a Hobson's Choice. It's a great world, living in an Econ 101 textbook. The hilarious thing is that a core tenet of conservatism used to be that widespread private property ownership is the cornerstone of liberty. Rental models, which keep the maximum number of people in debt in the form of eternally-owed rent, were bad. In today's Ayn Rand-worshipping neoconservative free-market religious dogma, the core tenet is The Supply Side Gets What It Wants, NOW, And It's Your Fault If You Don't Like It. And the ultimate socioeconomic effects, any sort of principled view beyond "If the people it costs the most to don't like it, they can lump it", don't matter anymore.

adventured 4y ago

> The consumer doesn't get a choice. The consumer always has an obvious choice: don't use Photoshop. It's not a monopoly product. Use something else. Consumers are not entitled to access to Photoshop as a birthright.

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
What if it is a monopoly product, as more and more products are becoming? It need not even be a monopoly, just a situation where the supplier has vastly more power than the consumer. Are they not allowed to see that its a bad deal and want better? There can be more options than just take or leave it. Suppliers are not entitled to screw over consumers as a birthright.
- Synthezoid 4y ago
  No, no, no. To a free market apologist, there's no such thing as inelastic demand. Every item is a completely optional luxury item that you can choose to walk away from without consequence. Nothing is ever a Hobson's Choice. It's a great world, living in an Econ 101 textbook. The hilarious thing is that a core tenet of conservatism used to be that widespread private property ownership is the cornerstone of liberty. Rental models, which keep the maximum number of people in debt in the form of eternally-owed rent, were bad. In today's Ayn Rand-worshipping neoconservative free-market religious dogma, the core tenet is The Supply Side Gets What It Wants, NOW, And It's Your Fault If You Don't Like It. And the ultimate socioeconomic effects, any sort of principled view beyond "If the people it costs the most to don't like it, they can lump it", don't matter anymore.