Adobe deletes Bluesky posts after backlash

I’m always the first one to criticize companies for exploitative and evil business practices. Adobe is far from innocent. However, I will argue their subscription model itself is actually better than the previous model.

The reality is that Adobe has a large team of engineers to create and maintain several high end professional digital art creation tools. They also frequently add new and excellent features to those tools. That costs money. This money has to come from somewhere.

With the old model Creative Suite 6 Master Collection cost over $2600. They updated that software every two years. The maximum Creative Cloud subscription today costs $1440 for two years. They even have a cheap Photography plan for $20 a month with Photoshop and Lightroom. That’s $480 for two years. Photoshop 6 cost $700+ alone all by itself with no Lightroom.

Why would Adobe allow for much lower prices, even considering inflation? Because they get reliable cash flow. Money keeps coming in regularly. That’s much easier for keeping people employed and paid than a huge cash infusion every other year and a trickle until your next release. It’s just not feasible to sell software that way anymore.

Of course the argument is that with the old model you didn’t need to update. You could just pay for CS5 or 6 and use it forever without ever paying again. That’s true. And I guess that’s viable if you are want software that is never updated, never gets new features, and never gets bugfixes and support. I would argue that a user that can get by without updating their tools, and has no use for new features, is not a professional. They can get by with free or cheap competitors, and they should.

Professional digital artists do need and want those updates. They are the kind of people that were buying every version of Creative Suite in the old model. For those users, paying a subscription is a huge improvement. It keeps the updates and bugfixes coming regularly instead of rarely. It funds development of new and powerful features. It keeps Adobe solvent, so the software doesn’t die. It lowers the overall price paid by the user significantly.

Plenty of things we can criticize with Adobe. Bugs they haven’t fixed. Crashy software sometimes. Products they come out with and then give up on. Doing dark patterns and fees to prevent people from unsubscribing. But the subscription model itself is a net positive compared to the old way.

> than a huge cash infusion every other year and a trickle until your next release

It’s a very good incentive to keep the entire company on their toes. Adobe will have to keep making new features for people to justify paying for a new version, instead of rehashing the same software, and then rent-seek with a subscription.

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.

There are plenty of successful subscription based models that allow you to fallback on a perpetual license for the last annual version that you paid for, e.g. the Jetbrains model.

As a "professional" I have zero interest in renting the tools of my trade.

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.

You wouldn't ever rent kit like a body or lens or lights? You'd just always buy something outright?

While time goes on, any software toolchain needs maintenance, too. What's the ideal model for sustaining that?

Is renting a problem in principle or financially or something else?

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.

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”.