This is the entire issue with these kinds of things. They always launch at a good value because they know they can capture the market. Yes if they were benevolent or whatever it'd be fine, but these things almost ALWAYS turn into cluster fucks.
They couldn't launch at worse value than the current product line because they need full adoption before they can put the screws to you.
That's why it's important to own your own data in a way that can be reused and adapted when they try and screw you later. You see this all the time with video games nowadays. Everyone wants their own launcher and subscription services.
"CREATIVE SUITE 2, 3, AND 4 You can no longer reinstall Creative Suite 2, 3 or 4 even if you have the original installation disks. The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired. "
Those poor servers.
I assume it worked this way so people with airgapped machines could still be sold the software.
Source: have Offline CS3 Master Collection and use PS CS3 daily to clean up my flatbed scans https://i.imgur.com/8tS8ced.png
If the distributor no longer provides the software, or does not allow activation, I should be allowed to use any and all means to make it usable.
Any software that is no longer sold, should be free for anyone to get, by any means, regardless of prior legality.
Reminds me of an issue I had recently with Milkshape 3D. I needed to re-acquire some old 3D models out of an old game. But their service does not appear to work anymore.
But yeah, trying to make sure anything else I have control over.
People spend thousands of dollars on 3D printers or CNC mills, but the idea of spending several hundred bucks on "buy-to-own" software is so outmoded...
The other reason you have all these subscription models is that they obscure the total cost of ownership. Spending $300 on photo editing software seems like a big commitment. Paying $20/mo for a decade is easier. But when you add Amazon Prime, Netflix, Spotify, Creative Suite, Office365, Squarespace, and whatnot, it's all of sudden a big chunk of your disposable income.
IMO pathetic to see a well-loved brand degenerate in the public.. especially while Apple counts that cash (and ways they ran rough over their former "friend" )
what I meant to say is.. that the driver to launch a great experience is first, then it is easy and tempting to change the cloud terms.. not compared to the deal you get with desktop purchase.. not because you captured the single license customers with better deals in the cloud.. but because the cloud is just so easy to change, the money so tempting..
maybe the anecdote.. when Apple stopped caring so much about the desktop, after the iPhone.. they did not "capture" the single sale customers.. they just walked away to focus completely on the new, more profitable model
That includes Photo/Designer/Publisher, which are competitors to Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign respectively.
It's not a drop-in replacement and if you're collaborating with other people who are in Adobe-land then you'll need to stick with Adobe too. But for people who occasionally need an image editor for solo work and have been priced out of all the Adobe products, it's a solid option.
One caveat is they're now owned by Canva, things haven't gone to shit yet but they might in the future.
Sadly, Adobe is still the only option in the market for this.
This is what stops me. I've experienced too many instances of a full version upgrade with a sunset on previous versions.
And when they actually release version 3 you can decide whether to upgrade or just stay on V2.
[1] Contrast that to a company like Salesforce, which charges every year for its core product then adds most of the interesting new features to outside products with separate subscriptions.
It's so much cheaper that I'll take that trade any day. I'm guessing v3 will be an eventual AI focused update since that's an area where they haven't tried to compete with Photoshop in v2.
And you'd have to learn time management to make sure you could get your project done on time instead of crunching at the last minute, because the lab would be filled with people who didn't.
</grumble>
On the Autodesk side, they give out free access to student accounts, so I had that stuff both in the lab and on my home computer.
Or even "May only be used during evenings and weekends".
You can actually buy the software, not just rent it.
I use Affinity Photo the least though — for pixel-based drawing I prefer Pixelmator Pro.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-press-...
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/affinity-and...
Or even better it could run on credits. 100 credits per month, and then various things in the software cost a credit each. Load a file = 1 credit. Save a file = 1 credit, etc.
You could even turn this into an ecosystem by itself, so instead of buying or 'renting' the software users are buying credits to actuallyt operate the software.
Newer features like AI could cost more credits up front. There could be sales on credits etc.
Somebody please show me a downside to this model?
Right now if I want to install some software to edit images on my PC, I can look at how much Photoshop costs, how much rival 1 costs, and look at Free Alternative 2, and decide what I'm willing to pay.
But under your scenario, I have no clue how much more (or less) expensive Photoshop will be than the paid or free alternatives, unless I can first forecast all the individual steps that will be needed to do the editing I have in mind, and then spend time adding up each action's costs to get an idea of the total price. Not only would it be extremely hard to accurately list every action that would be needed before actually doing them, but even if I thought that were possible then the amount of hassle would be a big enough deal breaker that I just wouldn't be willing to bother with it.
The goal would be to dissociate the software from the price/value. It happens when people are enticed to get loyalty points for things like grocery purchases. No one would move if the deal was "save 30cents" but they would for "and get 300 bonus points!" (See McDonald's or every other loyalty system). Entire ecosystems have been created around inflated point value too.
Adobe should just call them "Adobe points" and make it essentially a digital currency that can also be used for stock photos, etc too. Or maybe even for cloud computing for fast render farms of your increasingly complex video/3Dworks. Heck, it could be blockchain based too (AdobeCoin?)
They're already trying the kind of "buffet" model with their cloud subs. Maybe they can shift to a credit system to encourage other users.
https://www.autodesk.com/buying/flex?term=500&tab=flex
Looks like they do it per day per user, so 1 token allows 1 user to use the software for 1 day. Really good idea for licensing teams to use expensive industry software IMO
For whom? The user? It's an absolute clusterfuck. Always online video games have already done this shit, and it's been a nightmare for the end user, and that software doesn't do anything "important".
Can you imagine not being able to open or save your file because the servers are overloaded? Or getting charged a premium at the end of a long day because you weren't carefully counting your credits and you need to save your file?
I was just suggesting that something like this could be offered alongside existing models, and so offer a cheaper alternative to people who only want to edit a few files per month.
>Can you imagine not being able to open or save your file because the servers are overloaded?
This happens all the time in business since the world moved to the cloud. Microsoft is down? No opening or saving office files, say goodbye to email. Amazon down? Your website is now not currently taking customer orders.
That having been said, not being able to save a file you've worked on because you ran out of credits would be a serious issue.
Yeah I agree with that, I think I went down the wrong path with credits = individual functions. Ive since seen that Autodesk does a credits system where tokens are used for time using the software. I think thats a much better idea than mine.
Sign up for the free trial, then "cancel" you'll get a screen that says "offers" and you can choose a realistic price plan.
Remember to "cancel" before your year is up or else you'll be automatically charged the full price the following month.
it might be regional though (I'm US).
Maybe I could also look at another location? My YouTube sub is from Venezuela.
Your wording reminds me of this infamous video where Adobe's CEO refuses to answer a question about them overcharging customers in Australia.
So it's not "ensh*ttification", which is when prices go up while the product gets worse.
Nobody can seriously argue that Premiere hasn't been getting better overall. It has been. And it's continuing to.
(Which is totally separate from how scummy their subscription cancellation/renewal practices are.)
> Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, (..)
The core point here is "abuse the user", not "make features worse". Price gauging would be included in that definition.
Adobe doesn't really run a platform, they're selling a product and finding ways to raise the price.
IMO inkjet printers where the front runner here before online platforms really took off.
That stuff is not new, enshittification was coined to refer to the relatively new ways that platforms started to squeeze people.
Walmart finding the minimum product quality they can sell is no different than Facebook finding the maximum number of Advertisements people will tolerate.
> "I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them." (emphasis mine)
All I'm saying is that citing back to the original definition (which is talking about platforms) does not bolster the case that what Adobe is doing counts, because it plainly doesn't fall under that definition. Adobe is not running a two-sided market. For it to be enshittification you need to use a much more expansive definition. Which is fine, but in that case you can't cite the original definition!
In his own words the enshitificstion of Google is: “curse of bigness.”
> With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, “growth” has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.
Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much.
How did a company like Unity — … — turn into a protection racket?
So, while he may describe Enshittification as platform decay he’s not limiting its use to such.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-...
However, because he’s using ‘platforms’ so broadly it’s not just marketplaces but basically any business. It’s hard to draw a meaningful circle around Facebook, Amazon, Uber, Google, and Unity that excludes Walmart’s online store.
It's enshittification. Why defend a multibillion dollar corporation who doesn't care about you one bit?
If enshittification is anything a company does that involves delivering a worse product for more money, that's fine, but then it becomes a less useful concept.
My attitude in general is that diluting useful ideas to the point where they encompass an entire vibe is unhelpful. If anything anti-consumer a company does is enshittification, the causes are so disparate that solutions seem impossible. If you draw a tighter boundary around it, you can try to nail down causes and solutions.
Just because there's a new buzzword, doesn't mean it applies. In fact, it usually doesn't.
And being a quasi monopolist meant keeping working with that old CS6 version was less and less of an option. So what are you going to do? Complain? Suck it up?
Even back then it was clear they are going for the slow-warming-the-water temperature-till-it-boils-strategy.
I probably would only have used Photoshop and in two months of my subscription money I could have instead bought/owned Affinity Photo.
I might use Photoshop for a week and then not use it again for 6 months. Did I just pay $120 for that one week?
Renting software will always suck.
photographers make that subscription fee in 10 minutes?
It made Affinity happy, I imagine.
Adobe makes all of this insanely hard to understand and fully grasp as a consumer. It's also almost completely unique in software licensing. I tried to find out when my current 'contract' was up a couple months ago and it was nowhere in their website account section nor in the Adobe Creative Cloud app on my PC that I could find. I had to call them and wait something like 30 minutes on hold to find out.
I wound up getting an extremely discounted rate for a year, but I now know the date it will end and have set reminders to cancel before and have begun transitioning to DaVinci Resolve now and will start transitioning to Affinity soon.
Software rent seeking. Not even the greatest dystopian sci-fi writers could come up with this one.
It reminds me of the shenanigans that Sirius radio does, esp here in Canada where there is less protections against it.
It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop
ever again?" type of product.
None of that justifies renting the newer versions from Adobe. Were I using LR professionally I'd just have buy something capable of running Windows 7 and keep it air gapped instead of upgrading.
Sadly, as bad as Adobe is, they still way ahead of the competition. Some come close with photo editing capabilities, but nothing touches Lightroom for library management. DxO comes with a rootkit (and has for years). DarkTable and Raw Therapee suffer the open source curse of mediocre (yet strongly opinionated) user experience.
Counterpoint - most management teams undersell their sales relative to what the market is willing to pay them. Adobe is figuring out where that local maxima is (still).
> they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.
Are they though? Source?
These figures would suggest otherwise:
Year Active Subscribers
2013 1.4 million
2017 12.0 million
2020 19.5 million
2021 22.0 million
2022 24.5 million
2024 29.5 million
if you don't block it, they may be able to use the associated card payment token to charge you even after the card has been deleted. on one of my banks i can even see the associated tokens and delete them individually.
they can sue me, sure, but nobody will do that for 10€/month.
Photoshop is $35/mo. If you sign up for a year, it's $23/mo.
Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it. The big difference today is that instead of people returning to the high seas and continuing to use adobe software, they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.