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It's weird to watch Adobe make these fundamentally short sighted decisions. I can only assume the ultimate cause is the individual motivations of executives and

It's weird to watch Adobe make these fundamentally short sighted decisions. I can only assume the ultimate cause is the individual motivations of executives and managers. "Oooo, if we raise subscriptions $10/mo, we'll make lots of money, and it'll look really good on my annual review." "Oooo, this cancellation fee will really help our retention, which will look really good on my annual review." "Making Photoshop subscription only will do amazing things for our revenue." When you have complete market dominance, you have little opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming up using your tool. That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.

alt227 2y ago
When you make the industries best software and pretty much have a monopoly on the market, the only place left to go is adding markup to your product.
- callalex 2y ago
  That’s not true, you can also expand to new markets. For example Adobe doesn’t really have many offerings for musicians.
  - gabeio 2y ago
    > That’s not true, you can also expand to new markets. For example Adobe doesn’t really have many offerings for musicians. Ah yes, the google style of offerings. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ LoopStart: Expand into so many markets to then be unmaintainable, then randomly decide to focus on your main stream of revenue again and kill off the side offerings GOTO LoopStart.
  - alt227 2y ago
    > Adobe doesn’t really have many offerings for musicians. I dont know about that, Ive made many songs in Adobe Flash in my time! /s
  - chaosite 2y ago
    It's more for sound engineers than musicians, but Adobe Audition exists.
- CobrastanJorji 2y ago
  Having a monopoly like this is like having a goose that that lays golden eggs. The right thing to do is nothing except to guard the goose and keep it happy and well fed. But what Adobe has done is a series of aggressive egg laying hormonal supplements and force feeding. Yes, it might get them even more eggs for a bit, but it's also a big risk for killing the goose for not a whole lot more eggs, with the side effect of definitely making everyone angry with you. But I think Adobe, and most companies, would inevitably make this decision. If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    > If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years. That pretty much sums up all of what business and investment is. Play with money to get more money to play with.
  - eru 2y ago
    > If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years. If the shareholders, who management has a fiduciary duty to, are well-diversified, this might even be the right decision. Basically, if it's mostly index funds and mutual funds holding your stock, you probably should push that button every so often.
    - jamesknelson 2y ago
      That assumes that once a golden goose dies, there’s an infinite supply of replacements. There’s a reason we’re comparing these companies to a mythical creature after all: if sustainable businesses producing valuable things were easy to create, this website wouldn’t exist. The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive. Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
- lmm 2y ago
  You could cut costs and let the money roll in. But unfortunately even if that's the smart move for the company, it's unlikely to be the smart move for the individual decisionmakers.
  - eru 2y ago
    Empire building is fun! And the press you get for hiring more people is infinitely nicer than when you announce layoffs and other cost cutting measures.
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      It looks like the US software companies replace all of their employees every 6 years without any action, whether they want it or not. You don't need a layoff to migrate a product into minimum maintenance.
      - eru 2y ago
        Natural attrition is unlikely to leave you with the kinds of people you want for effective maintenance.
godelski 2y ago
It's always easier to play these types of games than it is to actually perform innovation. So while competition is not necessary for growth, it clearly often helps. There's another way I like to think about what you said: cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did it previously (or the person before you) the less you have available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend of enshitification we see. > "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion. It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation. Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should change when your environment does. I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
- bheadmaster 2y ago
  > I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points? Money is relative. I bet there are things $1bn can buy that we aren't even aware of because we were never exposed to it. Some of those things are probably non-tangible, like the ability to influence politics and change the world.
  - godelski 2y ago
    I doubt it. Things that cost hundreds of thousands are, for the most part, extremely resource intensive, which is part why they're expensive in the first place. Even rare gems which are small but many of these things are big. The more well known exception to this is luxury items which are just costly for costly sake. The other is art, which can be expensive because desire (like luxury) or scams/tax evasion. Of course this doesn't mean everyone is aware of these things but they're still publicly known.
treflop 2y ago
I've been using Photoshop for 20 years and they absolutely still add features all the time. For example, they just added a ton of AI content fill features and you could make a debate about how AI is ruining artists, but you can't say that Adobe is doing nothing.
- Breza 2y ago
  I'll give Adobe credit for integrating AI features into its products without charging extra. I imagine it's not cheap for them to support that much generative AI on an application that has traditionally run 100% on users' local machines. Maybe Adobe's worried about AI making Photoshop irrelevant. Here's the cautionary note from its latest quarterly report: "While we have released new generative artificial intelligence products, such as Adobe Firefly, and are focused on enhancing the artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities of such products and incorporating AI into existing products, services and solutions, there can be no assurance that our products will be successful or that we will innovate effectively to keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI across our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. If we do not successfully innovate, adapt to rapid technological changes and meet customer needs, our business and our financial results may be harmed."
- adzm 2y ago
  Pretty much everyone who talks about Adobe stagnating doesn't actually use the suite to it's full extent in the first place, I'm pretty sure. It's glaringly obvious when people talk about competitors; there is nothing near Photoshop. DaVinci Resolve is a good one for video though.
  - victor106 2y ago
    Agree 100%. Photoshop is a great product. That doesn't mean that Adobe can follow dark practices to cancel subscriptions.
  - queuebert 2y ago
    What's missing in Gimp? How far away is it from being a viable competitor?
toyg 2y ago
You underestimate the power of SaaS. Companies do SaaS precisely because it allows for this sort of capricious rent-seeking at wildly-unregulated levels of greed. That's just the name of the game. If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
- teeray 2y ago
  The new goal of a company is really to just capture some percentage of your total economic output on a recurring basis.
  - nijave 2y ago
    Infinite growth!
  - interludead 2y ago
    Sustained revenue growth
- scarface_74 2y ago
  No part of the definition of “rent seeking” is selling your product directly to the end user who pays you money.
  - zadokshi 2y ago
    Adobe doesn’t primarily sell products, Adobe primarily rents its products to consumers. Adobe is a literal actual real world example of a rent seeking company.
    - sushibowl 2y ago
      Simply renting out products is not necessarily the same as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of uncompensated value from others without increasing productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift the chain. Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.
mbesto 2y ago
It's no coincidence that after Adobe introduced a subscription in 2013 that this was the inflection point in which the stock grew 10x over the following decade. The previous decade it only grew 3x. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/
- eru 2y ago
  Well, the previous decade also includes the Global Financial Crisis. If you want to make any meaningful statement at all, I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index. (Oh, and be sure to look at the total performance, ie with dividends re-invested. Don't look just at the share-price.)
  - mbesto 2y ago
    > I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index. So why not just comment with exactly this? Here is a comparison of ADBE and SPY, which ADBE correlates very strongly to SPY, and also in this analysis is AAPL which severly outperformed the SP500: 2003 -> 2013 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=1b6Oa4aNN4OtmnEq1VkSj2 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&s... 2013 -> 2023 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=6OnvTZXxSKBuz5Zfi8Zfnv https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&s... See the difference?
    - hamburglar 2y ago
      Yeah, Apple managed to enter the far more lucrative hardware-as-a-service market. It’s a subscription you only pay every couple of years to have the latest iPhone.
      - katbyte 2y ago
        By that logic everything that comes out with new versions is a “subscription” Guess I’m a Toyota subscriber as in 10 years I’ll be buying a new Tacoma
ta-ciciauau 2y ago
One of the guys responsible named in the lawsuit reports directly to Adobe’s CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwadhwani https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwadhwani
dreamcompiler 2y ago
There seems to be a perception in big companies that if you're not pissing off your customers enough to drive them away, you're leaving money on the table. So there's this constant pseudo-optimizer running to get the maximum profit possible. Thank you Harvard Business School.
- harha 2y ago
  As an upside, once you’ve pissed off enough customers, you can also quit and provide them with an alternative that packages an open source tool with some enterprise features with marginally better terms
  - interludead 2y ago
    Yeah, it feels like I saw an example somewhere
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I once read that business is the art of ripping someone off without pissing them off. For better or worse, I agree. If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table, but if you go too far and piss them off they're going to take away all the money on the table with them.
  - amelius 2y ago
    Well you can piss people off in some ways, yet in other ways give them value.
  - alickz 2y ago
    > If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table You're leaving money in their pocket that you might get later How do you quantify loyalty? Because it seems to me that it's very easy for individuals to prioritise short term gains at the cost of medium and long term losses due to trust erosion I wonder how much client satisfaction and trust would be worth on the quarterly report, if it could be calculated. I think it would be immense for most companies
newaccount74 2y ago
The fundamental problem with increasing prices is that you create an opportunity for competitors. If Photoshop would cost 5€ a month, then everyone would buy it because it is the best. If Photoshop costs 50€ a month, they make more money, but they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product. I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem. There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top, but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo -- none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo. Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there are now.
- intended 2y ago
  This assumes a fair market. Most (all?) arguments that depend on competition depend on a fair market. However, no industry or government lives in a vacuum. Firm X develops enough market dominance to constantly collect vast sums of money to build their war chest. This war chest is used to buy out competitors, and kill off competing ideas. Firm X creates clones of lower priced alternatives, then outcompetes the smaller firm. Firm X uses war chest to fob off or weaken regulators (if any exist), extending the time they can extract rents. —— Little guys have to survive by getting enough money fast enough to beat the Big guy. Why bother? Get moderately sized, get bought out, and live with your wealth. PS: I have butchered economics somewhere, forgive me.
- wolpoli 2y ago
  > leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product. Best of all, if the competitor becomes a threat, the company with 50€ a month product can just buy them out.
  - Andrex 2y ago
    Less so thanks to (recent) strong antitrust enforcement, see Figma.
winternett 2y ago
CS6 has been running for me well, and likely will keep running long after the company collapses on my offline PC that I don't do Microsoft OS updates on... Great job on that one Adobe!
anoncow 2y ago
Side question: What should companies, listed on the stock exchange, and who have complete market dominance do?
- thombat 2y ago
  Be careful about looking as if they're abusing that dominant position. Back at the highwater of the "Wintel" dominance, early 2000s, Intel staff reportedly found Microsoft hair-raising, boasting openly of crushing the competition, choking off their air supply, undercutting then till they bled to death, etc. Intel had already had the antitrust stick brandished at it and had made sure the troops all understood the importance of the marketplace at least looking like a fair fight.
- Two4 2y ago
  exist, innovate, maximise long-term value for shareholders and users, eliminate inefficiencies, externalise risk, internalise sources of value, monitor the business environment for new opportunities and threats
- polski-g 2y ago
  Issue dividends and return profits to their shareholders. They don't need to increase revenue by n% every year. Lots of electrical distribution companies are publicly traded and do just this.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    Share price appreciation is like crack. I think a large part of the investment market is looking for the share price to increase or they aren't interested. There are inexpensive stocks yielding close to 10% from dividends, but you are told not to expect an increase in share price. Instead, people go after stocks that yield far less (0-3% dividend with a much higher stock price) but which may experience a growth in share price.
    - sirwhinesalot 2y ago
      That's because in many places capital gains are not taxed while dividends are, hence a preference for stock price increases. This distortion should be corrected somehow otherwise the economic incentives will continue to be to milk the cow dry at the expense of everything and everyone.
troyvit 2y ago
Man I want to believe it's short sighted, but Adobe's stock price in 2012 was $30.95. It's at $518 today[1], outperforming SPY. What drives me crazy is that there are plenty of Adobe alternatives that are pretty good, but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base. [1] https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY
- devmor 2y ago
  Stock price in the modern market is not a measurement of company health and long term well being - it's a measurement of speculators' willingness to bet on short term performance.
- banannaise 2y ago
  The stock price growth looks wonderful until the day it doesn't. The point of this discussion is that Adobe is essentially stealing from its future self by making short-sighted decisions. To a significant extent, they're cashing out their customer loyalty, and that loss of loyalty makes them much more vulnerable to attrition. Gradual attrition will slow their growth; a major attrition event, which they're now making possible, could rapidly reverse it.
  - troyvit 2y ago
    But if it has looked wonderful -- like really wonderful -- for the last twelve years that also says something. I would've argued that Adobe was stealing from its future ten years ago when they started started using this model and I would clearly have been wrong. I don't see what's different for them over the next 10 years either because I've apparently underestimated peoples' complacency with being fleeced.
- inversetelecine 2y ago
  > but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base. Hello, Autodesk
- katbyte 2y ago

alt227 2y ago

When you make the industries best software and pretty much have a monopoly on the market, the only place left to go is adding markup to your product.

callalex 2y ago
That’s not true, you can also expand to new markets. For example Adobe doesn’t really have many offerings for musicians.
- gabeio 2y ago
  > That’s not true, you can also expand to new markets. For example Adobe doesn’t really have many offerings for musicians. Ah yes, the google style of offerings. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ LoopStart: Expand into so many markets to then be unmaintainable, then randomly decide to focus on your main stream of revenue again and kill off the side offerings GOTO LoopStart.
- alt227 2y ago
  > Adobe doesn’t really have many offerings for musicians. I dont know about that, Ive made many songs in Adobe Flash in my time! /s
- chaosite 2y ago
  It's more for sound engineers than musicians, but Adobe Audition exists.
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
Having a monopoly like this is like having a goose that that lays golden eggs. The right thing to do is nothing except to guard the goose and keep it happy and well fed. But what Adobe has done is a series of aggressive egg laying hormonal supplements and force feeding. Yes, it might get them even more eggs for a bit, but it's also a big risk for killing the goose for not a whole lot more eggs, with the side effect of definitely making everyone angry with you. But I think Adobe, and most companies, would inevitably make this decision. If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years. That pretty much sums up all of what business and investment is. Play with money to get more money to play with.
- eru 2y ago
  > If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years. If the shareholders, who management has a fiduciary duty to, are well-diversified, this might even be the right decision. Basically, if it's mostly index funds and mutual funds holding your stock, you probably should push that button every so often.
  - jamesknelson 2y ago
    That assumes that once a golden goose dies, there’s an infinite supply of replacements. There’s a reason we’re comparing these companies to a mythical creature after all: if sustainable businesses producing valuable things were easy to create, this website wouldn’t exist. The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive. Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
lmm 2y ago
You could cut costs and let the money roll in. But unfortunately even if that's the smart move for the company, it's unlikely to be the smart move for the individual decisionmakers.
- eru 2y ago
  Empire building is fun! And the press you get for hiring more people is infinitely nicer than when you announce layoffs and other cost cutting measures.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    It looks like the US software companies replace all of their employees every 6 years without any action, whether they want it or not. You don't need a layoff to migrate a product into minimum maintenance.
    - eru 2y ago
      Natural attrition is unlikely to leave you with the kinds of people you want for effective maintenance.

godelski 2y ago

It's always easier to play these types of games than it is to actually perform innovation. So while competition is not necessary for growth, it clearly often helps. There's another way I like to think about what you said: cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did it previously (or the person before you) the less you have available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend of enshitification we see. > "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion. It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation. Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should change when your environment does. I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?

bheadmaster 2y ago
> I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points? Money is relative. I bet there are things $1bn can buy that we aren't even aware of because we were never exposed to it. Some of those things are probably non-tangible, like the ability to influence politics and change the world.
- godelski 2y ago
  I doubt it. Things that cost hundreds of thousands are, for the most part, extremely resource intensive, which is part why they're expensive in the first place. Even rare gems which are small but many of these things are big. The more well known exception to this is luxury items which are just costly for costly sake. The other is art, which can be expensive because desire (like luxury) or scams/tax evasion. Of course this doesn't mean everyone is aware of these things but they're still publicly known.

treflop 2y ago

I've been using Photoshop for 20 years and they absolutely still add features all the time. For example, they just added a ton of AI content fill features and you could make a debate about how AI is ruining artists, but you can't say that Adobe is doing nothing.

Breza 2y ago
I'll give Adobe credit for integrating AI features into its products without charging extra. I imagine it's not cheap for them to support that much generative AI on an application that has traditionally run 100% on users' local machines. Maybe Adobe's worried about AI making Photoshop irrelevant. Here's the cautionary note from its latest quarterly report: "While we have released new generative artificial intelligence products, such as Adobe Firefly, and are focused on enhancing the artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities of such products and incorporating AI into existing products, services and solutions, there can be no assurance that our products will be successful or that we will innovate effectively to keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI across our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. If we do not successfully innovate, adapt to rapid technological changes and meet customer needs, our business and our financial results may be harmed."
adzm 2y ago
Pretty much everyone who talks about Adobe stagnating doesn't actually use the suite to it's full extent in the first place, I'm pretty sure. It's glaringly obvious when people talk about competitors; there is nothing near Photoshop. DaVinci Resolve is a good one for video though.
- victor106 2y ago
  Agree 100%. Photoshop is a great product. That doesn't mean that Adobe can follow dark practices to cancel subscriptions.
- queuebert 2y ago
  What's missing in Gimp? How far away is it from being a viable competitor?

toyg 2y ago

You underestimate the power of SaaS. Companies do SaaS precisely because it allows for this sort of capricious rent-seeking at wildly-unregulated levels of greed. That's just the name of the game. If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.

teeray 2y ago
The new goal of a company is really to just capture some percentage of your total economic output on a recurring basis.
- nijave 2y ago
  Infinite growth!
- interludead 2y ago
  Sustained revenue growth
scarface_74 2y ago
No part of the definition of “rent seeking” is selling your product directly to the end user who pays you money.
- zadokshi 2y ago
  Adobe doesn’t primarily sell products, Adobe primarily rents its products to consumers. Adobe is a literal actual real world example of a rent seeking company.
  - sushibowl 2y ago
    Simply renting out products is not necessarily the same as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of uncompensated value from others without increasing productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift the chain. Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.

mbesto 2y ago

It's no coincidence that after Adobe introduced a subscription in 2013 that this was the inflection point in which the stock grew 10x over the following decade. The previous decade it only grew 3x. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/

eru 2y ago
Well, the previous decade also includes the Global Financial Crisis. If you want to make any meaningful statement at all, I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index. (Oh, and be sure to look at the total performance, ie with dividends re-invested. Don't look just at the share-price.)
- mbesto 2y ago
  > I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index. So why not just comment with exactly this? Here is a comparison of ADBE and SPY, which ADBE correlates very strongly to SPY, and also in this analysis is AAPL which severly outperformed the SP500: 2003 -> 2013 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=1b6Oa4aNN4OtmnEq1VkSj2 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&s... 2013 -> 2023 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&sl=6OnvTZXxSKBuz5Zfi8Zfnv https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&s... See the difference?
  - hamburglar 2y ago
    Yeah, Apple managed to enter the far more lucrative hardware-as-a-service market. It’s a subscription you only pay every couple of years to have the latest iPhone.
    - katbyte 2y ago
      By that logic everything that comes out with new versions is a “subscription” Guess I’m a Toyota subscriber as in 10 years I’ll be buying a new Tacoma

ta-ciciauau 2y ago

One of the guys responsible named in the lawsuit reports directly to Adobe’s CEO: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwadhwani https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwadhwani

dreamcompiler 2y ago

There seems to be a perception in big companies that if you're not pissing off your customers enough to drive them away, you're leaving money on the table. So there's this constant pseudo-optimizer running to get the maximum profit possible. Thank you Harvard Business School.

harha 2y ago
As an upside, once you’ve pissed off enough customers, you can also quit and provide them with an alternative that packages an open source tool with some enterprise features with marginally better terms
- interludead 2y ago
  Yeah, it feels like I saw an example somewhere
Dalewyn 2y ago
I once read that business is the art of ripping someone off without pissing them off. For better or worse, I agree. If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table, but if you go too far and piss them off they're going to take away all the money on the table with them.
- amelius 2y ago
  Well you can piss people off in some ways, yet in other ways give them value.
- alickz 2y ago
  > If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table You're leaving money in their pocket that you might get later How do you quantify loyalty? Because it seems to me that it's very easy for individuals to prioritise short term gains at the cost of medium and long term losses due to trust erosion I wonder how much client satisfaction and trust would be worth on the quarterly report, if it could be calculated. I think it would be immense for most companies

newaccount74 2y ago

The fundamental problem with increasing prices is that you create an opportunity for competitors. If Photoshop would cost 5€ a month, then everyone would buy it because it is the best. If Photoshop costs 50€ a month, they make more money, but they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product. I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem. There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top, but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo -- none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo. Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there are now.

intended 2y ago
This assumes a fair market. Most (all?) arguments that depend on competition depend on a fair market. However, no industry or government lives in a vacuum. Firm X develops enough market dominance to constantly collect vast sums of money to build their war chest. This war chest is used to buy out competitors, and kill off competing ideas. Firm X creates clones of lower priced alternatives, then outcompetes the smaller firm. Firm X uses war chest to fob off or weaken regulators (if any exist), extending the time they can extract rents. —— Little guys have to survive by getting enough money fast enough to beat the Big guy. Why bother? Get moderately sized, get bought out, and live with your wealth. PS: I have butchered economics somewhere, forgive me.
wolpoli 2y ago
> leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product. Best of all, if the competitor becomes a threat, the company with 50€ a month product can just buy them out.
- Andrex 2y ago
  Less so thanks to (recent) strong antitrust enforcement, see Figma.

winternett 2y ago

CS6 has been running for me well, and likely will keep running long after the company collapses on my offline PC that I don't do Microsoft OS updates on... Great job on that one Adobe!

anoncow 2y ago

Side question: What should companies, listed on the stock exchange, and who have complete market dominance do?

thombat 2y ago
Be careful about looking as if they're abusing that dominant position. Back at the highwater of the "Wintel" dominance, early 2000s, Intel staff reportedly found Microsoft hair-raising, boasting openly of crushing the competition, choking off their air supply, undercutting then till they bled to death, etc. Intel had already had the antitrust stick brandished at it and had made sure the troops all understood the importance of the marketplace at least looking like a fair fight.
Two4 2y ago
exist, innovate, maximise long-term value for shareholders and users, eliminate inefficiencies, externalise risk, internalise sources of value, monitor the business environment for new opportunities and threats
polski-g 2y ago
Issue dividends and return profits to their shareholders. They don't need to increase revenue by n% every year. Lots of electrical distribution companies are publicly traded and do just this.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Share price appreciation is like crack. I think a large part of the investment market is looking for the share price to increase or they aren't interested. There are inexpensive stocks yielding close to 10% from dividends, but you are told not to expect an increase in share price. Instead, people go after stocks that yield far less (0-3% dividend with a much higher stock price) but which may experience a growth in share price.
  - sirwhinesalot 2y ago
    That's because in many places capital gains are not taxed while dividends are, hence a preference for stock price increases. This distortion should be corrected somehow otherwise the economic incentives will continue to be to milk the cow dry at the expense of everything and everyone.

troyvit 2y ago

Man I want to believe it's short sighted, but Adobe's stock price in 2012 was $30.95. It's at $518 today[1], outperforming SPY. What drives me crazy is that there are plenty of Adobe alternatives that are pretty good, but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base. [1] https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY

devmor 2y ago
Stock price in the modern market is not a measurement of company health and long term well being - it's a measurement of speculators' willingness to bet on short term performance.
banannaise 2y ago
The stock price growth looks wonderful until the day it doesn't. The point of this discussion is that Adobe is essentially stealing from its future self by making short-sighted decisions. To a significant extent, they're cashing out their customer loyalty, and that loss of loyalty makes them much more vulnerable to attrition. Gradual attrition will slow their growth; a major attrition event, which they're now making possible, could rapidly reverse it.
- troyvit 2y ago
  But if it has looked wonderful -- like really wonderful -- for the last twelve years that also says something. I would've argued that Adobe was stealing from its future ten years ago when they started started using this model and I would clearly have been wrong. I don't see what's different for them over the next 10 years either because I've apparently underestimated peoples' complacency with being fleeced.
inversetelecine 2y ago
> but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base. Hello, Autodesk
katbyte 2y ago