About 25 years ago, working at one of those dot com bubble internet consultancy firms, I was told by an Adobe rep that they knew everyone at home had a pirated copy of their software but the company view was that they thought that was a good thing. It meant people learnt their software at home and then insisted on using it at work, where it would be a paid for license.
It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.
When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop ever again?" type of product.
Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it. The big difference today is that instead of people returning to the high seas and continuing to use adobe software, they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.
This is the entire issue with these kinds of things. They always launch at a good value because they know they can capture the market. Yes if they were benevolent or whatever it'd be fine, but these things almost ALWAYS turn into cluster fucks.
They couldn't launch at worse value than the current product line because they need full adoption before they can put the screws to you.
agree but I would reverse the cause and effect.. launch great experience on the web+cloud to gain traction.. then Because it is so Easy to Do It, change the terms of service, the benefits, the longevity, the billing practices, the prices.. etc
IMO pathetic to see a well-loved brand degenerate in the public.. especially while Apple counts that cash (and ways they ran rough over their former "friend" )
Maybe I'm misreading somehow but you seem to be saying the exact same thing as the person you replied to, without reversing anything?
Or you do what everyone else does, which is force everyone to adopt the SaaS model by revoking their licenses or otherwise bricking the software.
That's why it's important to own your own data in a way that can be reused and adapted when they try and screw you later. You see this all the time with video games nowadays. Everyone wants their own launcher and subscription services.
Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
It's not. The quality stayed the same, even improved. It's run of the mill monopoly pricing.
It is 100% enshittification. The definition is even in the linked article:
The core point here is "abuse the user", not "make features worse". Price gauging would be included in that definition.
They should release a home-user version with some restrictions unpalatable for commercial use - eg. "Can only edit 5 files per month" or "All edited images get non-commercial use licenses attached".
Or even "May only be used during evenings and weekends".
I like this idea,
Or even better it could run on credits. 100 credits per month, and then various things in the software cost a credit each. Load a file = 1 credit. Save a file = 1 credit, etc.
You could even turn this into an ecosystem by itself, so instead of buying or 'renting' the software users are buying credits to actuallyt operate the software.
Newer features like AI could cost more credits up front. There could be sales on credits etc.
Somebody please show me a downside to this model?
I think there's multiple downsides, but the biggest one is that it makes it a massive pain in the ass for any price-conscious users to decide whether it's worth paying for.
Right now if I want to install some software to edit images on my PC, I can look at how much Photoshop costs, how much rival 1 costs, and look at Free Alternative 2, and decide what I'm willing to pay.
But under your scenario, I have no clue how much more (or less) expensive Photoshop will be than the paid or free alternatives, unless I can first forecast all the individual steps that will be needed to do the editing I have in mind, and then spend time adding up each action's costs to get an idea of the total price. Not only would it be extremely hard to accurately list every action that would be needed before actually doing them, but even if I thought that were possible then the amount of hassle would be a big enough deal breaker that I just wouldn't be willing to bother with it.
Not for students. CS6 single product was up to $250, CS6 DS $350, CS6 MC $800 compared to CC 1st year $240 increasing to $360. If you only needed a single product you were off worse after one year. Even doing a bachelors which required all products would have been less expensive with the one time fee if you had the money.
Back in the day (a decade ago) you would go to the lab which had Autodesk/Solidworks/Matlab/Adobe/$expensive-software installed instead of buying it for your personal (and probably underpowered) device. It was one of the few things that your tuition actually paid for.
And you'd have to learn time management to make sure you could get your project done on time instead of crunching at the last minute, because the lab would be filled with people who didn't.
</grumble>
Your wording reminds me of this infamous video where Adobe's CEO refuses to answer a question about them overcharging customers in Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnrMhbWG0Pc
I only pay 32/mo for creative cloud.
Sign up for the free trial, then "cancel" you'll get a screen that says "offers" and you can choose a realistic price plan.
Remember to "cancel" before your year is up or else you'll be automatically charged the full price the following month.
I haven't used any Adobe products since they started doing the subscription-only model. I want to use it, they typically make good enough software, but I have a line in the sand that I will not pay for a subscription. I want to buy my software and own it and use it for as long as I want.
Basically my options if I don't want top pay a license fee for forever is to find alternatives, or pirate the software. I've opted for the former, but either leads to Adobe getting $0 from me, where they could have gotten >$0 if they had had a "pay outright" program.
I have generally found good enough alternatives with their competitors (Toonboom is generally good enough for basic animation, Krita is good enough for artsy stuff, Final Cut Pro is good enough for video editing).
You'd pay $1500 or whatever for a perpetual Photoshop license? I wouldn't
I wouldn't pay $1 for Photoshop when GIMP is free and open source. It's been my daily driver in a personal and professional capacity for ages, and Photoshop offers nothing special for me.
If GIMP is a replacement for you, you're not Adobe's target customer.
That's dirt cheap for a software you can make a living off. For FEA or CFD one would need to shell off in the order of 50-100k plus 20k per year. 1500? I would.
But not all of us make a living off of Photoshop.
I'm a programmer. I periodically need to make a tiny tweak in a file that's been created by a real artist, or I want to edit a photo I took, or whatever.
It's insane to spend $1500, or even $500 (the CorelDraw buy-it-outright price) for hobby and occasional-use software like that.
And yeah, I use other things like Affinity Photo, which is Good Enough for many of my purposes, but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists--unless they flatten the image before giving it to me, it's a crap-shoot whether I can import it in anything but the exact version of PhotoShop they were using.
It feels like extortion: I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file, or I have to pay Adobe an outrageous sum to do it myself. Lose-lose.
I mean, sure, there's probably an upper bound of a number I'd pay, and I don't do enough photo editing to justify paying really any amount of money for Photoshop.
For software I'd actually use though? Upper bound is probably $600 judging by what I paid for Toonboom Harmony. Honestly if I had known about Moho at the time I probably would have gotten that since it's considerably cheaper and on Humble Bundle fairly often.
I'm not in a creative industry so it's tough for me to know "fair" numbers, just "what can I justify as a toy" numbers. I like to occasionally whip out an animation tool and draw stuff with stick figures, and I like having that readily available, and I don't want my tool to change from under me so I don't want transparent updates. I just want to buy my software once.
Adobe software isn't quite "good" in my experience. The company is an Oracle: all-in on giving the right bullet points to pointy-haired managers but with a palpable paucity of technical merit.
I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird, painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own servers.
Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5 minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.
They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia - we might still have it around if they invested in it properly and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount of old Flash content.
Creative Suite is fine and mostly functional from what I hear, but they didn't make that codebase either, and I've never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)
I don't think Vegas has been Sony for quite awhile has it?
Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it). For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for subscriptions.
I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks, I've used it before and it seems fine.
"ToonBoom, is generally good enough for basic animation".
What? This is the premier 2D animation package used by most of the top studios.
Oh no question, bad phrasing on my end, I sort of meant it inverted.
Toonboom is excellent if you're a professional. I'm very much not a professional, I barely know what I'm doing. I think Flash/Animate appealed to someone like me, because I found it easier to draw some goofy thing really quick and animate it.
I feel Toonboom has a much higher learning curve and isn't really for people like me. It's not insurmountably difficult or anything, just that I'm not really the target audience and as such I don't know that it's a good fit for "basic" stuff, if that makes any sense.
I don't want to pay for a subscription for software I use thrice a year. I was looking forward to having Affinity's suite be the replacement, where I could buy it, and use it.
However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription. Since they've been bought by canva, it's just a matter of time.
I even went so far as to get Affinity Photo being able to start on Wine. But lost interest since their acquisition.
(I'm sure people will question why I don't just use inkscape, krita, or gimp. And its because all of them have a subpar vector experience IMO)
Completely agree! I also refuse to put gas in my car because I know that prices will go up later...
Or on a more serious note: I use Affinity professionally (previously PhotoShop). Why would I care the slightest about what they might or might not do with their pricing model in the future? I need software that delivers right now.
For the same reason that you would care with Photoshop or Premier or Lightroom; you're investing money in learning and building your workflow around a tool that is guaranteed to go down the subscription and enshittification path.
Your computer will not explode if or when Affinity changes to a subscription model. You'll still have the software and can use it until the next ice age if you please.
I don't want to pay for the car nor the gas. Let's not let the same hostage situation extend to other aspects of our lives it we can avoid it.
Corel's (or whatever they call themselves now) stuff is generally pretty ok, and most of their stuff still lets you buy it outright.
I don't know much about Affinity Photo but Paint Shop Pro and Aftershot have been "good enough" for the limited uses I have for photo editing (though I'm definitely far from a professional). CorelDraw is, I think, a very decent vector drawing program if nothing else.
CorelDraw is great, but for years they were also subscription-only. In the last six months or so they finally started offering a single-price license again--at a prohibitive level.
I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.
Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.
All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.
But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).
I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.
Fair enough. I've never paid full price for any Corel product. They're frequently on Humble Bundle where you get a bunch of them on the order of like $30 total. It looks like right now there's even a sale going on: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-cre...
My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date, but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials package.
I bought the Affinity suite and have gotten good value out of it. If at some point in the future new versions go to a subscription model, I just won't buy them.
I ended up grabbing the Affinity bundle since it's half off despite concerns about Canva. I'd expect even if they end up moving to a subscription I'd at least have the versions I bought for an extended amount of time. I still have a working copy of Photoshop CS 5 as well. Hopefully we see Affinity remain committed to affordable non subscription plans but if they don't I think the one time purchase will last me a long time. If they put out a version 3 without subscription and it's compelling i'll upgrade, if not i'll continue to use 2 for I'm sure years to come.
Is that the exact situation that subscription pricing (in principle) solves? If you only use it thrice a year then you can pay for it as you go instead of needing pay for the thing outright.
I have a full paid license of acrobat pro. I want to pay for the 2020 version as that's the last one before it became rental software crap. I refuse to pay monthly for this software.
That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not paying for cloud crap.
<sarcasm>Dear lord, did you stop to think of the shareholders before you wrote that screed?!</sarcasm>
SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative to more of Adobe's CS software.
SaaS itself is fine. A lot of software has recurring costs for the saas company (think clarifai, chatgpt, or circleci)
Subscriptions for software that you run on your own machine is a little much tho.
The word for the activity occurring in your second sentence used to just be called "hosting".
The problem is that there are fewer and fewer pieces of software that aren't hosted somewhere.
Gotcha capitalism with a side of rent-seeking.
If indies need it, then sure, it can be necessary to sustain smaller shops that have to support backend/cloud features and multiple OSes that churn APIs faster than a newspaper.
Genuine question; what does Acrobat Pro buy you over the free versions and/or OSS competitors?
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?
The only problem is that ADobe is making the adobe engine incompatible with older versions. I've had PDFs that were made less than 10 years ago indesign etc that refused to load in Edge, which is where we work.
I recommend a one-time Fox-it PDF pro purchase. While they too are getting into subscriptions they still make a one-time purchase available.
Haven't found any significant deficiencies, nice tool overall.
The number of graphic artists working from home well before COVID definitely put a kibosh to that theory.
Were they not working for a company?
Presumably they mean gig economy aka artists are vastly undervalued.
For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's that people think you don't need to pay a license for generated images, even when they were clearly and provably stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered. If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock people think that's legal now.
So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro. But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and content is made by people from developing economies on Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.
And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.
Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the maximally enshittified manner.
No, this is not what I meant at all. I meant the independent artists that work without being attached to a firm or anything. The number of small owner/operator type places in the graphics/marketing type of world is apparently a much more common thing than the readers of this forum are familiar.
Many graphic artists operate as independent contractors/consultants.
An independent contractor using Adobe is still helping cement Adobe’s perception as a must-have for business. If you worked in that space at all, it was super common to have things like Illustrator or Photoshop specified in contracts for designers and print shops, and pretty much everyone needed Acrobat Pro for sone proprietary feature which didn’t exist in the alternatives.
Adobe wasn’t going to risk bad publicity going after some freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than switching at the threat of a lawsuit.
Anybody remember the Business Software Alliance[0] from years ago threatening to audit your company for using unlicensed software? I cannot believe any business would be dumb enough to allow them on their premises to even conduct an audit. Anyone with two brain cells would just laugh in their face.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance
And yet it was only last week we started hearing of Oracle sending nastygrams to Java users:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/10/fortune_200_oracle_ja...
As covered here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40639943
So this is not just a thing of the past, sadly.
It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).
Not so minor nitpick, but afaik you never got to purchase and own the software, you only purchased a license to it.
That license used to be perpetual, and only enforced locally (i.e. without connecting to the internet). That's about as close to "owning" as anyone gets in software.
If you need to put "owning" in quotation marks it isn't owning.
They drove me off Lightroom, I was just a causal user. The upsell spam and ads in Adobe Reader has also driven me away from that too. I would have considered buying an upgrade for both, but the price was never right for casual home use. Now I don't use any Adobe products at all.
As someone looking to drop Lightroom, what did you move to? Last I checked everything else sucked pretty bad.
I switched to Capture One. Not as easy to use as Lightroom, but the RAW processing is actually superior. It's a one time purchase. The professionals can choose to upgrade every year, the casual users can upgrade less frequently.
I strongly dislike paying for subscription software that I don't use very frequently[1], but I do pay for the Photoshop & Lightroom bundle. At ~$10 / month, it ends up being a lot less than I paid for updating "perpetual" licenses to those products frequently enough (every two years?) to get the new features.
[1] I'm a hobbyist photographer, but not a pro.
What have you replaced lightroom with? That's the one thing Adobe makes that I haven't found a good replacement for.
I've not really done enough with "real" photography to have strong opinions on this, but Aftershot (which was included in a Humble Bundle a few years ago) has been ok for the stuff I used it for.
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.
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.
Figma’s pricing is extremely exploitative too, it’s essentially designed in a way were trivial actions can instantiate new subscription seats that have to be manually removed.
That's also why so many companies practically give their software away through educational licenses.
Somewhat reminds me of netflix's policy on sharing accounts. The CEO used to straight up say they don't care, and it's not really feasible to enforce account-sharing rules. Fast forward to today, and they "figured out" how to enforce it.
I was an architecture undergrad (bricks , not bits) in the early 00’s and everyone had pirated software. And then we all got hired and brought our quiver of technical skills with is into industry and convinced our managers to purchase the tools we knew so well.
Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience (cost, bugs, support, tactics).
I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running releases from 10 years ago.
new executives coming in, while the well connected ones leave completely to chase unicorns? maryhodderetc
VMware and Citrix had a gentleman's agreement: they pirated each-other's stuff, and agreed not to break users' stuff in production and keep licensing issues to warnings.
[I think you didn't mean 'except']
I haven't had an installed copy of Adobe Reader on any computer I've used in the last 15 years.
Bill Gates once expressed a similar view about rampant piracy of Microsoft software in China [1]:
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...