Comment by rhet0rica
6 days ago
There are plenty of textbook cases of enshittification that are covered by price increases—just look at Adobe and AutoCAD selling credits that are used just to launch the program. As long as it fits with the "claw back value from your customers and partners to feed your investors" pattern, ∂shit > 0.
Adobe has always been targetted at profressionals price wise. Making it SaaS made pirating harder and the high monthly price (and annoying dark patterns) excluded and alienated the general public which upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life. The problem there is mostly the lack of good competition in spaces like Lightroom but that's starting to change. The everyone-pirates-photoshop so don't bother trying to compete idea is now over.
They're alienating plenty of paying customers as well. Many people will not pay to rent software, and I expect that number will increase as the number of companies trying to collect rent on software increases. Because $10/month (let alone whatever adobe is trying to charge) never sounds like a lot, but multiply by the number of pieces of software (let alone some non-software flirting with the same gimmick) you regularly use and it quickly becomes absurd.
A secondary issue is that rent-a-software stuff is driven by pea counters and they'll never be able to resist constantly raising the price once they can increase revenue x% with an action that, in the short term, will probably result in absolutely no decline in users. Of course in the longer term they're setting the stage for their own disruption, obsolescence, and revenue trending to $0.
I also expect this whole business model will be heavily regulated in the future, because what percent of recurring revenue, especially on things like mobile, is from people who simply forget to cancel or were not aware it was recurring in the first place?
It’s not just software rental. Every online shop or service is turning towards revenue extraction by targeted pricing: Services that look at your IRS records or other public clues, and hop, you train travel, Amazon listing, car repairs are billed higher, exactly at your purchasing power.
Yesterday there was an article saying an AI is used to infer the “right pricing for you”, and suspected it used variables such as your skin color, gender, job and location, probably discriminatory but mangled in a big AI engine.
In fact, I’d sell a REST API for adaptive pricing to mum & pop shops if I had time.
> upset people who decided to pay for it for the first time in their life
It also upset paying customers. It's no longer possible to _own_ Adobe software, and so I don't anymore. Up until just a couple years ago I was still using the copy of Photoshop CS4 I paid for (as part of the Master Collection CS4, Student Edition) in 2008.
A monthly subscription is a complete non-starter for me.
You never owned any Adobe product, you licensed it. And that license could be revoked at any time; while it is unlikely Adobe would go after an individual, the license that you agree to allows them to do so.
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Well the problem with Adobe is that some of the really crucial tools are essentialy abandoned.
InDesing for example is used for every printed book, magazine, packaging, poster… ever. Industry standard with insane amount of users.
Yet InDesign basically didn’t change since CS6. It got some mostly minor features but that is like 12 years of nothing. The app also got more unstable and only thing they work on is making their fileformat incompatible with prior versions.
That means paying 50+ usd month for licensing a software that hates you but you are required to have it. Perfect monopoly capture.
I looked up adobe credits. Aren’t they just used to buy licensed assets like pictures and videos. But not for the core app?
You're right; unfortunately I can't edit my comment to remove Adobe from it. Though they are plenty guilty of 'adding value' in the worst possible ways.
I 'member Adobe's Creative Suite costing hundreds of dollars. Photoshop alone clocked in at 699$, the full CS6 was 2599$ [1]. Either you were a professional and paid dearly every odd year or you were a student and used a cracked/keygen'd CS6.
Today? The full CC license is 70$ a month for individuals (30$ for students) and 100$ a month for businesses. Despite inflation, assuming a two year upgrade cycle you still get the same price for the full Adobe package when comparing CS vs CC.
One may complain a lot about Adobe (RIP Flash, and anything Gen AI can go to hell for all I care), but "enshittification" is one thing that can't reasonably be thrown at them.
As for Adobe Credits, AFAIK that's credits for fonts and assets - and again, I vastly prefer dealing with one storefront (Adobe) than having to buy and license individual font files or stock photos.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/23/2968192/adobe-cs6-pricing...
You just successfully rationalized the exact tactic that Adobe sales team pitched to their leadership: That most users will pay the monthly subscription because the math “evens out.”
Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
> Very very very few people have a legitimate need to upgrade Adobe product versions every 2 years.
I suspect that most, even a lot of professional users, could get along just fine with CS1 or CS2. The core functionality hasn’t changed all that much and in a lot of ways, CS/CC apps have gotten worse. The only reason these individuals aren't still using those old versions is because they aren’t well suited for modern machines.
I’d personally be elated if Adobe started selling a lightly modernized single-purchase Photoshop CS1, even if it cost what single purchase PS licenses used to. The lack of cruft and UI churn alone would be worth it before even getting into the savings compared to a subscription.
The existence proof that people are paying the subscription price when there are other tools out there. Do people must think there is a need for it
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As a hobbyist, I owned CS4 (purchased on sale) and kept using it for ages. Turning it into a subscription might be fine for bleeding edge professionals who care about whatever new bells and whistles every year to finish a job 2% faster, but the ongoing costs cut out anybody who isn’t making money with it.
Thankfully there are better competitors like Affinity in that space now.
RIP Macromedia Fireworks though.
It's enshittification because most people don't need the 2 year upgrade cycle. For most individuals and small businesses, it was more like buy once and use forever.
A majority or at least large minority of Adobe users were/are on Macs.
The Mac version has lived through 68K MacOS pre and post System 7, PPC Mac pre and post OS X, x86 Macs pre and post Carbon support and now ARM Macs. After each transition , there was a limited amount of time that you could use the same version and even a smaller amount of time that you would have wanted to.
But the same argument applies that applies to Figma. It’s a professional tool that should help you generate income far greater than the cost
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From a financial point of view I think Adobe’s enshittification is working pretty well.