(a) CC's price make sense only when compared to the price of upgrading the Creative Suite at every release (under the old model). But I did not do that; I used to upgrade every two/three releases: the Suite is mature software and in most cases there is no need to be on the cutting edge. By the way, I work in the design industry and this was standard practice. So for a lot of people the subscription model is much more expensive.

(b) With perpetual licenses, one can stop upgrading and he will still be able to open the old files in the future if a need arises. With the subscription model, you are locked out of your own files. (Ironically, it has been noted, cracked software is more reliable, as it lasts forever).

(c) Generally, then, this policy is clearly about Adobe's monopolistic greed and nothing else. There was no regard for the wish of users, as perpetual licensing was suppressed after CS6.

Because of all this, I have put Adobe in my personal blacklist. I discourage people from using their products when possible.

The flip side of the argument, of course, is that more profitable companies have more room to innovate and experiment (Bell Labs, Kodak, Google, etc.) and Adobe isn't exactly resting on its laurels and allowing their products to stagnate. There is a valid argument about the additional engineering time being devoted to the necessary anti-circumvention and subscription services instead of better products for customers, but I'm not sure those criticisms stick in this particular case. I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.

The thing is, if Adobe had been consistently developing valuable new functionality and making it available in newer versions, their customers would have been paying them to upgrade in the previous model as well. The fact that so many people didn't see enough added value to buy each major upgrade suggests objectively that the products were stagnating.

Contrary to your argument, it therefore seems that having customers locked into the subscription model so the money is coming in anyway is a disincentive for Adobe to do better now, at least as long as the industry momentum and relative lack of competition keep customers signed up.

I don't do much design work, so I may be wrong here, but my understanding is that Adobe products are the industry standard because they are unquestionably the best tools to accomplish most tasks.

How Adobe products came to dominate parts of the industry is, as usual, a combination of actually being good at what they do and other, more commercial factors. However, the switch to a subscription model has opened up interesting and viable opportunities for disruption in the market. Credible competition is starting to appear and apparently do quite well in some niches previously dominated by Adobe's big titles, so that "unquestionably" is looking more questionable by the day.

If that is anything close to accurate -- and I stress the "if", because the data is probably at least third-hand here -- then Adobe would have lost more than half of their previous customer base in the transition, and still not regained them several years later. If a significant proportion of those they have gained are ex-pirates, that's an even stronger suggestion that their own permanently licensed products prior to CC might still be their biggest competition.

The situation with pirates seems less relevant for most of Autodesk's products, as their market is much more likely to be professionals than hobbyists anyway. But the implications of earlier permanent offerings potentially representing ongoing competition for their new subscription-only model even several years later would be just as unpleasant as they are for Adobe. Anecdotally, one of my companies has some big name Autodesk software for use with a specific part of what we do, and we've just decided that we'll make do with the existing systems and not buy any more or any updates if they're only going to rent new versions to us and won't let us buy any more copies of the existing version we already use. If significant numbers of larger businesses that already have spare capacity in their volume licensing deals decide to take a similar approach, that definitely won't be good news for Autodesk's new strategy, but I guess time will tell.

Looks like the transition has been good so far.

Given this one links to data straight from the source, I'm going to assume it's reliable and therefore the previous report I mentioned with lots of caveats was actually off by about a factor of 2-3.

The most interesting detail here might be that while they've been steadily increasing their subscriber base for CC so far, they're also still only at around half of their previous installed base for Creative Suite even today, around 3.5 years after launch. To put that in perspective, a little under half of that previous installed base was on CS6, while a modest majority were still on CS3-CS5.5. That suggests it may become harder for them to continue growing their CC subscriber base at the same rate if they approach a saturation point within the industry or at least within those parts of it willing to keep spending money on regular updates.

The other thing we should probably consider is that Adobe had almost a free ride in the early days of CC, as there was relatively little serious competition left in the industry. Now they're starting to face credible threats, albeit mostly on a small scale or in specific niches for now, and if they lose mind share and eventually the critical mass that means everyone has to use CC because everyone uses CC, that could cause them some problems.

The next couple of years will be interesting for them. Presumably time will tell whether they can find ways to drive significantly more people to regular subscriptions than they used to get upgrading anyway, and whether they'll be able to hold off any emerging competition.

That's the funny thing. The software it still cracked like crazy so this nuisance, as always, just hurts the people that actually bought the software.

David Wadhwani was responsible at Adobe for the switch to the SaaS business model. Because of that he got a job as CEO of AppDynamics, to make them ready for an IPO.

CC got a lot of heat when it was introduced, a lot customers complained, but one just has to look at the numbers to see why it was the right move for Adobe, the profits literally exploded!

It's no surprise every other vendor would want to move to a subscription model. But Adobe was able to pull it off BECAUSE they have a monopoly and people in the industry are stuck with Photoshop and Illustrator. There is some competition but it's nowhere near 25 years of tech contained in Photoshop. On the other hand if one is using a product and Adobe decide to discontinue that CC product, one is kind of, f..cked, because one doesn't own the software anymore.

> Looks like this is to focus on their subscription model or something along those lines.

It also mean they might discontinue some products, which is never good for the customer. That's what bother me with these monopolies, and Autodesk kind of own every relevant 3D software in the industry.

When your company requires the software to do its daily business, any misstep by the software company is a serious liability.

When you 'buy' a copy of the software it is yours to run, and if the parent goes out of business you may not be able to reactivate it, at least it still runs.

With the rental model, you are in much the same boat as a person who rents a house, when the landlord wants to charge more you pay it or get evicted.

Except that in the case of software, if either your data is locked up in some proprietary way or there is no competing software with a similar feature set anyway, you get evicted and there's no other landlord offering you an alternative place to live.

I don't. :( Hopefully I'm wrong. :)