Adobe doesn’t primarily sell products, Adobe primarily rents its products to consumers. Adobe is a literal actual real world example of a rent seeking company.

Simply renting out products is not necessarily the same as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of uncompensated value from others without increasing productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift the chain.

Ostensibly Adobe's customers are paying for continual improvement and support of its product and maintenance costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer. That's not rent-seeking.

True. The distinction is just not always as obvious, because rent seekers often don't start out as rent seekers.

They usually gain market share based on merit. Over time, structural factors such as network effects allow them to grow the rent-seeking part of their income while the merit based part declines.

Rent-seeking is a very entrenched idea though. Even the tiniest bit of merit in the distant past is enough to justify renting out inherited land for instance.

"Rent seeking" is an economic term where you sell access to something with a fixed supply. Classically land. The landlord does not need to do anything to gain money and it isn't possible to make any more land.

It doesn't really apply to any SaaS.

The landlord has to defend his claim and undermine competition