The most glaring one: search. Which is verifiably worse UX now.
Other text entry fields don't seem to suffer from this problem. AFAIK this wasn't a problem before the switch to Electron.
Whoa, I didn't know that one. Was that functionality around in earlier version?
If Adobe worked like that I’d be like 75% pissed off at their products and pricing.
Recently they started to add more cloud/collaboration services/a web app and switched to a regular old subscription model, but you can bet your ass i'm staying on the legacy model for as long as I can.
The one reason why I tolerate IntelliJ's subscription/pricing model is that unlike Adobe, they actually do deliver constant and worthwhile updates. Their software also rarely crashes, and their universal workflow (across different languages, themes, key bindings, plugins) also works as promised.
If not for the above the subscription would be a very hard sell for me.
There’s also an unspoken but important accounting detail here - if you run an online software business and offer a one-time, lifetime purchase for your product, you are now contractually on the hook to provide that service to customers forever, even if your business stops growing, which means that the liabilities of your business are not capped. This is bad if you operate with a lot of cloud expenses, and it means that these businesses are unsustainable unless new customers keep coming in, whereas a subscription model scales with utilization.
The real rule is not pissing off your customer base by taking important services offline while they still use that particular product. Doing so would be a PR blunder, and obviously effect sales of future products.
You are paying for both the content and the software bundled together. And no, you don't get it "for free".
Ever-growing my ass. I've had lots of songs on my playlists removed because they were taken off the platform. And not some obscure acts, for example Westbam's Götterstrasse (which features anybody, from Brian Molko and Iggy Pop to Kanye and Lil' Wayne).
But I guess you have to keep in mind they are in an ongoing pivot to cloud and that understandably disgruntles those of their customers who have a strong aversion to cloudy products. If you look at 1Password as a standalone app for managing local vaults synced via dropbox, I guess you could argue it's kinda shitty by now and getting worse, and every cloud feature is a net-negative in that view. If I had to guess I'd say most people want a cloud solution these days, but I guess that may be what's behind a lot of the negative sentiment. Or maybe not, but as someone who buys 1Password Family for the cloudy features, has used it a lot at work and doesn't have a single local vault, I'm a very happy customer and I've yet to run into a non-trivial bug with v8.
For services, it might make sense. Even so, what exactly is "getting better all the time" about Spotify the software? It's been the same for like 5 years now.
As for the rest: 1Password declined (turned to Electron shit), Creative Cloud keeps adding bloat while not adressing decades standing issues, IntelliJ is, I guess OK, Figma I don't use so can't tell.
And I know (even use) many more software that turned into subscriptions and now sit on their asses or deliver minimum value - and of course will stop working the moment you had enough with their lack of progress end your subscription.