Thats not what rent seeking means.
This is demonstrably not true. Take Microsoft Office for instance. I got my first Mac in 1992. Office was $600 for the Mac. You were only suppose to use it on Macs you owned, and you definitely couldn’t get a Windows version for free if you owned the Mac version.
Now, for $100 a year, I can get Office and run it on my Mac, Windows PC, iPhone, iPad, web and Android device if I had one. I also get one terabyte of storage and add up to five additional users with the same benefit.
The usual counterpoint is that you could spend the $600 a month and own it “forever”. But if I had bought Office in 1992, I would have had to have an emulated version in 1997 for the PPC Macs, if I had bought it in 1997, I would have had a non native classic MacOS version.
Today the situation would have been worse with the iOS release cycle if I were stuck on an older version.
The same could be said about Adobe.
It seems like a win/win. Microsoft gets more money from me and I get more value from Microsoft.
From my perspective (as a consumer and employee of a large software company) all the innovation is centered around the demand for perpetual earnings growth. Few people seem to actually be trying to move the needle forward or truly improve a process, it's just making bills go up a little bit more every month.
Google just announced an unprecedented $25 billion in share buybacks. We're getting so good at extracting every penny as efficiently as possible from every segment that we literally have no idea what to do with all the cash anymore.