They aren’t evil, it’s just when companies move to subscription they turn into mini insurance companies focused on the spreadsheets. They model out your lifetime value and know that every $1 they chisel out of you is worth $1.40 in 5 years.

They are brutal in the enterprise space, looking for 10-15% price escalations. They also turn over sales leadership so if you are big enough you can pull stunts for concessions. Just do some recon and figure out what they get paid the most on. Last time, we hired a few interns specifically to do a public PoC of how we were getting rid a key product in the portfolio. Made sure they heard about it and got significant confessions. Basically 10x the intern and PoC investment. We ended up hiring the interns as well for an extra bonus.

As a consumer, you need to be really aware of the motivations of your suppliers business model and model your business accordingly. Understand your costs and use OSS strategically, or understand where you just need to take what they offer (ie AWS). Things in the middle, like Adobe in my case, you need to be ready to walk away or play chicken and make a deal at the 11th hour.

"it’s just when companies move to subscription they turn into mini insurance companies focused on the spreadsheets. They model out your lifetime value and know that every $1 they chisel out of you is worth $1.40 in 5 years."

The term for that is "evil".

"Evil" is normally used for people that do worse actions than overbill their customers. "Fraudster" applies better here.

Nah, evil is fine. It's a low grade evil, sure, but it's still evil. To cite a lovely paragraph from Carpe Jugulum that feels appropriate -

“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’ ‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’ ‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

― Terry Pratchett, Carpe Jugulum

> They model out your lifetime value and know that every $1 they chisel out of you is worth $1.40 in 5 years.

Even more. Every $1 in MRR is worth around $216 in company market cap. (assuming their current multiple)

The CEO can also claim credit for the stock price increase and get his bonus. Fixing it would reverse the effect and put the bonus at risk. So not only will such ‘small evils’ become intrenched there is also a powerful insensitive to find even more of them.

Evil is thrown around way to much. If you are going to use it for dishonest business practices what’s left for ISIS?

It's an adjective. Adobe is bad. ISIS is bad. That doesn't equate the two (or imply that it's the same degree) any more than calling them evil is. Evil is just an adjective that means "deliberately very morally wrong".

You could easily make the argument of ISIS being less evil than Adobe, given that many of them have conviction that they're doing the right thing, but Adobe couldn't possibly believe that this is anything but duplicitous, misleading, and scummy. Killing for religious beliefs is much more complex than simple "evil". Scamming your paying customers by intentionally misleading them with dark patterns is a very simple and obvious evil.

There's not a limited number of slots for who gets to be called evil.

It's a threshold, not a competition. Sometimes the threshold changes, but crossing it is enough. No matter that other people might be even worse.

Indeed not. Contemporary society has infinite capacity for moral condemnation.

Is black and white thinking considered a compliment now?

It's not black and white thinking, it's a threshold, as stated.

For an average income person

- A Porsche is expensive - A Ferrari is expensive

The fact that a Ferrari costs a lot more than a Porsche does not make a Porsche "not expensive", because there is a line (for the buyer) beyond which they consider a car expensive. There's problem a grey are below that line in which a car may cost more than they are comfortable spending, but have enough useful features that they will consider sacrificing for it. And there is a large area to the right of the expensive threshold where a lot of such cars lie.

The fact that lots of cars are past the "expensive" threshold for someone doesn't mean they're thinking in black and white.

This is true. It’s a threshold. So sometimes when I think to myself “Should I be spending time fighting to ensure people are not dying at the hands of a fundamentalist religious organization or should I be spending my time lowering prices for a high end graphics editor?” I always try to remember that these are equivalent tasks. It doesn’t matter which I do. I am bringing the same amount of good to the world.

Pears are sweet. Yet Coca-Cola is sweeter. Both deserve the label, that doesn't mean some things can't be even sweeter than other.

Similarly, there are shades of evil. Inventing some new greater evil does not invalidate the regular kind.

A fair point, and I must concede to it.

Were I to crack Photoshop and provide it to 10s to 100s of business in my local city, should Adobe stay quiet and not complain, because there are people doing the same and uploading it to pirate bay where it's available to millions?

I think the answer is clearly not. There is no reason why it should be invalid to criticise any act, just because it is not the worst act.

You are evil for saying “doing to the same”. In a categorical sense, you and Hitler are similar: eeevilll

“Evil is thrown around way to much. If you are going to use it for dishonest business practices what’s left for ISIS?”

I love captain crunch cereal. It is so good— “NOW I HAVE NO WORDS TO DESCRIBE CHARITIES!”

Communications have context. To apply a word to Adobe (as a loose refernce to "Don't be evil.") and then say ISIS is evil, doesn't mean or even imply Adobe === ISIS.

Context, it matters.

Let’s do literally evil next. That adjective doesn’t get nearly enough use.

Well, blame Google. Knowing about historic references to Axis of Evil and such they should have left the word out of SV / start up lexicon.

As it is, they didn't. The best the rest of us can do is further develop our capacity for context.

https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Axis_of_evil

ISIS' actions are far far worse, but most Daesh are motivated by the desperation of being a religious minority associated with a deposed dictator in a resource-constrained desert infected with religious fanaticism.

Daesh's actions require a more drastic response, but I'm more confident that the average Adobe CSR, rather than the average drafted Sunni kid from Al Qaim, is going to hell.

> most Daesh are motivated by the desperation of being a religious minority associated with a deposed dictator in a resource-constrained desert infected with religious fanaticism.

Eh, not really. They are pretty much all a religious majority in the regions they controlled and moreover Syria is pretty predominately Sunni.

If you're going to use evil for ISIS, what's left for the Nazis?

Inform yourself on what happen to Yazidis recently and you will not do this sort of humor anymore.

What sort of humor? I'm showing the ridiculousness of the claim. The Nazis can be evil as well as ISIS.

Sorry if I misunderstand you but you could just say that it's ridiculous if you think it's ridiculous. I personally don't like there is comments with "isis" and "nazi" inside in a discussion about Adobe (and I don't specially like Adobe at all).

If you are going to use evil for the Nazis what’s left for the Romans?

What have the Romans ever done for us?

A gradation of evil is still evil.

I love living in a time moral absolutism and self righteousness. Nothing better than having conversations with people that have zero doubts about the correctness of every single one of their many, many ethical positions and that anyone who disagrees is evil.

Good times. If only I could have witnessed the Spanish Inquisition.

Ironically, the point is that evil is relative and there are different scales of evil. That isn’t absolutism.

“moral absolutism”

How dare people make judgement calls on actions they feel are morally wrong! Why, that’s like burning people at the stake!

It is not a very ambiguous moral stand versus Adobe here.

Yes. It’s all rooted in narcissism. Calling something “evil”, makes you a hero when you fight it, whether that means going on patrols in the streets of Raqqa or calling out a shitty SaaS pricing scheme on an internet bulletin board.

Bad take. Calling something evil is a moral judgement and that’s it. I do t need to fight it, be a part of it, or hell, I could be evil myself. It’s a judgement call and nothing more.

You may disagree with my moral standards, and that’s cool.

They used to be but then competitors sprang up so Adobe got less attention.

Back in the early days they were really good, I remember phoning about some PostScript problems I was having and whoever I spoke to clearly knew it inside out. Now I can't even get a response about obvious bugs in their software.

It's not just Adobe though, this is an industry wide problem.