> Why, after the many years the problem has been repeatedly reported, doesn't Adobe fix their apparently terribly designed and maintained web site, which sends many of their customers who are trying to unsubscribe into a frustrating infinite loop, instead of manually unsubscribing the few persistent squeaky wheels who one by one eventually find their way to the forum to complain and demand a refund?

Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one. How can eliminate market uncertainties in our cash flows? Easy! Auto billing! People are busy and miss line items on their credit card records.

I sort of hope card companies start to look into people's frustrations regarding recurring revenue and implement policies based on it. Or the FTC. Policies such as 3 click cancellation, or maybe even higher merchant fees for recurring transactions.

I'm not afraid to report recurring transactions to credit card company. They just block your number with the charging company if you explain to them that their site didn't allow you to. Eventually they're bound to set a nice letter to Adobe if we all start doing this.

> Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one.

Both statements absolutely true. But the problem here is shady unsubscribe, not recurring revenue per-se, right?

What Adobe is doing is pretty low and shitty, and I'm as averse to signing up for subscriptions as anyone, but software businesses do have recurring costs. The recurring part is actually simpler and more straightforward these days than the buy version 4.0 for $199 model of yesteryear, so I can see why it's popular from the business perspective. Updates and releases are continuous now, they didn't used to be. Forums, online help, support, upgrades, patches, servers, cloud storage & backup, etc. all things that cost and all things that consumers have much higher expectations for than we used to a decade or two ago. Saas businesses all run on AWS or whatever other cloud provider, and AWS charges monthly for their services.

For a business to make the buy it once for a fixed price model work these days, they have to do the equivalent of an actuarial table, and use statistics to guess how much a customer will cost on average, in order to set the purchase price. Customers that cost the company a lot in terms of support and upgrades are actually being subsidized by customers that cost the company less. It starts to sound a lot like insurance.

Looked at this way, a subscription might appear more fair, because the customer is charged for what they use, as opposed to the average of what everyone uses.

I fail to see how subscription vs one time purchase costs are any way related to how much a customer costs to support, both situations have edge cases of demanding customers eating up support staff time endlessly.

If anything per-customer support costs go way up in a SaaS situation because of the (mostly artifical) introduction of having to run the software on your own servers.

Alternatively - it might be typical big company bureaucracy. These staff members might simply not have an effective way to communicate with anyone that could fix the underlying problem - without going seriously out of their way and maybe missing a few targets as a result.

Such theories can easily be tested with a simple thought experiment: suppose there were a similar bug at the other end of the pipeline, in the subscribe feature. How long would it take for the bug to be fixed?

The excuse of "our sales people have no way to contact the web developer who's on vacation, and we don't have a bug tracking system in place" might work for a dentist's office, but not a company that prides itself in developing online software and tools for maintaining web sites, and brands its products with the buzz-word "Cloud".

When one works for companies of such size, discovers there is a huge difference between how things should be and how they actually are.

I agree, the sales / support staff is probably a different department. They probably don't even know who to contact. I'd imagine it would work something like this. I need to contact my manager, who then has to contact their boss. The boss will have to find the head of the support department in charge of this. Crap, it went to the wrong department. You have to email this person instead. Then it has to trickle down again. It's basically a game of telephone.

WTF. Every product should have an internal bug tracker, and support should especially be able to file bugs against products. Those bugs have just cost the company money by using support resources. I don't understand how this can be hard to understand.

I think what it boils down to is that it's just a low priority for them to fix, versus working on their products. They probably have a fix in the works as part of some new redesign and have judged the current annoyance to not cost enough money to fix immediately. I'd chalk it up to incompetence versus malfeasance.

This has gone on for too many years, and makes them too much money, to be a mistake. They completely ignored and refused to acknowledge the original subject of the thread, which states explicitly: "how to cancel monthly subscription to photoshop? Website leads you in a loop".

I don't think Adobe's incompetent when it comes to maintaining their own web site. It's the business they're in, and what the tools they make do.

So to be charitable, I'd chalk it up to competent malfeasance.

But on the other hand, maybe they're suffering from eating their own dog food! Perhaps ColdFusion web sites are so buggy and hard to maintain that they can't even fix their own infinite looping problem after all these years. Perhaps it's so hard to hire competent ColdFusion programmers and interaction designers, that even Adobe doesn't have any on staff.

Maybe like Valve / Steam they do it because they can... until someone with a lawyer drags them through court and they're held accountable for building theft and fraud into their business model.

http://www.pcmag.com/news/350574/valve-fined-3m-in-australia...

Before it even went to trial they globally overhauled their refund system, presumably after realizing EU, USA, CA etc also have consumer protection laws designed to protect consumers from companies that are committing fraud.

I ran into a similar issue with Spotify. Reported a bug in their unsubscribe process and they would only respond with "don't worry about that, I'll do it manually" as if that was the norm.

> systematically fucking their customers on a large scale

The linked thread seems to be 20-ish people scattered over three years. Does the issue described really happen every time anyone tries to cancel?

If you really want to make Adode dance and fix this issue right away, file a complaint with your state attorneys general office and that of state Adobe is incorporated in (appears to be California). They'll immediately address your issue and potentially feel the legal pressure from the state government(s) to actually fix the larger over arching issue or face being sued by an entity with "unlimited" resources (rather than just a little peon consumer like you or me).

I think it is more along the line to make more money: replace engineers with sales

Maybe sign up with a stored value card, instead of a credit card.