I don’t agree with this at all. I believe subscription models encourage laziness and/or introduction of unnecessary or complex features (to show that busywork is being done).
Sell a license for applications with support included for a year or whatever, like developers used to and still do. If you continue providing more value to customers, and if you aren’t too greedy to introduce new versions and upgrades for trivial updates often, why would the majority of your customers not purchase a paid upgrade every couple of years or so?
I feel there are many areas that are saturated and that developers struggle to figure out how to add more value...or rather, extract more money from customers (1Password in recent years is an example of this, in my experience).
It could be sold as a paid upgrade. Customers will complain, but they complain more about subscriptions.
Untrue, otherwise they would make their apps free for non commercial use.
It would be smarter, because there are many hobbyists who don't even get started with Adobe these days because of the subscription.
Unfortunately, they do not guarantee that the value added and the extra cost are proportionate, or even have the same sign.
Also, the alternative we're increasingly using now (the Affinity suite) doesn't cost anything like thousands for a permanent licence, so this idea that it's somehow necessary to charge that kind of money to make software development viable in this market is demonstrably wrong.
Adobe expects businessess to pay for the tools of their trade, not hobbyists. Consumers are better served by a front-loaded buy-once model that includes free updates, but Adobe doesn't want to be in the B2C space.
The author also describes Adobe's products as "basic tools". As someone who doesn't use them, they seem anything but.