I did so at the beginning of last year. I was on and off the phone within 5 minutes and they refunded the last month.
I was canceling a several years old standalone radio subscription, and not trying to cancel at the end of a car's free trial, and I wonder if that's why I had such difference experience.
I feel like something must have changed, because when we went to cancel ours on a previous car ~3 years ago it was a long-ish process, but only because they kept offering more and more discounts until it was essentially free.
A couple months ago when the trial ran out on a different car it was like you said, over and done with in 5 minutes.
It’s not hard at all. In fact, I use an iPhone, and they have an iMessage “service” or whatever it is called where I just text them for account related things. Every year I text them for a discounted renewal on my wife’s car. Last year I cancelled service on my car because I just wasn’t using it often enough. Of course they started offering a discounted price, but when I countered that I’m just not using it, they completed the cancellation without issue. Guess I’ve been lucky.
I never paid them, but used to receive their mailers.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I called them at.)
One time I was at a mall with my dad. There was a nice new car on display and he wanted to go look at it. The salesman said if Dad filled out a postcard to register to win, we could sit in the car and check it out. Dad took the card and filled it out as “Tom” something-or-another. I watched this and kept my mouth shut.
Afterward I asked him about it. He laughed. Tom was Dad’s favorite cousin’s ex-husband. Whenever something like this came up, Dad would give them Tom’s info. He’d been doing this for years, and occasionally updated the address as needed.
Dad’s no longer with us but I still Tom up for things to this day. Should I ever start getting SiriusXM spam, so will Tom.
Sirius is easy these days, it’s a 2 minute phone call. They’ll offer a discount rate, decline it, canceled and refunded.
Gym memberships and newspaper subscriptions is what needs to get targeted next. They are aggressive and lots of gyms will only cancel in-person, even if you move away.
A lot of people, including myself, consider a phone call an extremely unwanted barrier. If you can sign up without speaking to a person then you should be able to cancel without speaking to a person, no matter what.
Phone call anxiety is a real thing. No idea why I have it, but I do
Not at all. You can go to a website and click a button in less than a minute, and you don't have to do it during business hours, sit on hold, or deal with a pushy sales rep trying to convince you not to cancel (well, unless they do what Adobe is getting sued for).
There is no legitimate reason to limit the options for canceling a subscription or adding barriers to the process. It's always an anti-consumer move. If you don't want your customers to cancel, then don't give them a reason to.
I successfully canceled a newspaper subscription in like 2005, but for a few months, they'd call. The first couple times, I said I wasn't interested and hung up. Then I just stopped answering, but they still called. Then I finally answered once and said "Stop calling me" and they tried to say "If you want to be removed from our call list, you'll need to call our customer service line" and I said "No, that's not how this works. I asked you to stop calling me, so stop calling me." and hung up.
Surprisingly, they actually did stop calling.
SiriusXM never called me, but I got mail from them every damn week. I had even tried telling them to stop sending me mail, but still got it until I just changed my address to some bullshit fake address that didn't exist.
Canceling SiriusXM is pretty easy via phone. Adobe makes the process confusing to make you believe you canceled even you haven't yet. It also charges high cancellation fees and has threatening wording.
I was just having a terrible experience trying to uninstall the "Adobe Creative Cloud". I have used it and paid for it. It's full of anti-patterns to make it difficult to uninstall, and now that I don't pay for it any more it just exists on my computer to nag me to renew my subscriptions.
They have good products and I gladly pay for software I use. But the whole cloud service experience has not been good for me. Cory Doctorow coined a word for this that I am too polite to use.
New York Times. Last year I wanted to cancel my Athletic subscription and not only do they use the positively colored buttons to cancel the cancellation flow rather than continue with cancelling, once you get to what seems like a final confirmation, it doesn't show anything to confirm it actually was cancelled. I ended up needing to wait until the next bill date to make sure I wasn't charged again. Their support was useless too.
Several years ago, the only way to cancel was over the phone. Hallmark of scumbag business.
Planet Fitness requires in-person or a mailed note for cancellation (unless you “move” to California which legally requires companies to provide online cancellation if you can sign up online)
My local gym ducked my calls, ignored my emails, and then after finally canceling, actually restarted my membership two months later. Gyms thrive on those bad with finances, people who don’t know what services they subscribe to.
Ugh that pissed me off so much! Thankfully I used paypal to subscribe, and Paypal allows me to just not pay anymore for a subscription, so I just did that.
Good to know that's not a thing anymore, i don't know how that was ever legal to allow someone to subscribe through one medium, and not allow them to unsubscribe through the same medium.
Stories like this make me thankful for my locally-owned gym, which won't even renew your membership without explicit verbal permission over the phone or in person.
It was a standard subscription from their website -- I had been a subscriber there since The Athletic first started (before NYT bought them and long before they had an iOS app).
Audible is similarly bad. The only notification of my 12mth subscription renewal was after it had occurred. If I cancel, I lose any unused credits plus access the the included-in-subscription content immediately. There's no way to cancel auto-renewal - you're either subscribed or you're not. I have a reminder set to cancel close to the renewal date.
I find it strange because the rest of Amazon seems pretty good in this regard.
From personal experience they refused to cancel subscription or close account as they failed to charge my card after a trial period.
So I just blocked their emails for good :D
It's easy for things like Adobe or Facebook or Twitter because they're mostly one thing.
The others are kind of complicated to me. They're so large that the sins kinda get diluted. How many products does Microsoft have? How many dark patterns do they need to make use of among those products before you can no longer justify working for the corporation as a whole? Can you work on Microsoft Research because the XBox Game Pass subscription cancellation is problematic? I think I could justify that to myself just fine, but I imagine that's a personal call.
I get the gist of your comment, but your specifically chosen example of Microsoft is a bad one. It's not just MS's XBox subscription is bad by itself. The recent news about the forced inclusion of Recall. The forced inclusion of ads into the OS. The horrendous data collection by MS. The list goes on and on that would put Microsoft on a egregiously morally bankrupt company on all levels.
I worked for Adobe and it was very much _not_ "one thing". My work there involved literally tens of thousands of software services across three major segments and hundreds of products.
To answer your question practically: No, it's just a job, gotta pay the mortgage. And you know companies have a legal duty to be amoral in the quest for profit, right?
We live in a time where so many people work at and/or want to work at ethically dubious large tech companies, we experience overwhelming social pressure to see them as more morally-neutral than they are.
We don't want the cogitative dissonance of hanging out with friends and spending the whole time thinking about what it means to have someone in my life that enables $foo for a living. Are you financially and emotionally ready to quit your job as soon as your employer crosses your line? You did spend time developing and reflecting on your own personal line in the sand, right? And are you're comfortable unabashedly sharing that standard over dinner to your 5 closest friends? What if one works at the place you find most-evil?
About 25 years ago, working at one of those dot com bubble internet consultancy firms, I was told by an Adobe rep that they knew everyone at home had a pirated copy of their software but the company view was that they thought that was a good thing. It meant people learnt their software at home and then insisted on using it at work, where it would be a paid for license.
It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.
Presumably they mean gig economy aka artists are vastly undervalued.
For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's that people think you don't need to pay a license for generated images, even when they were clearly and provably stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered. If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock people think that's legal now.
So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro. But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and content is made by people from developing economies on Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.
And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.
Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the maximally enshittified manner.
No, this is not what I meant at all. I meant the independent artists that work without being attached to a firm or anything. The number of small owner/operator type places in the graphics/marketing type of world is apparently a much more common thing than the readers of this forum are familiar.
An independent contractor using Adobe is still helping cement Adobe’s perception as a must-have for business. If you worked in that space at all, it was super common to have things like Illustrator or Photoshop specified in contracts for designers and print shops, and pretty much everyone needed Acrobat Pro for sone proprietary feature which didn’t exist in the alternatives.
Adobe wasn’t going to risk bad publicity going after some freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than switching at the threat of a lawsuit.
Anybody remember the Business Software Alliance[0] from years ago threatening to audit your company for using unlicensed software? I cannot believe any business would be dumb enough to allow them on their premises to even conduct an audit. Anyone with two brain cells would just laugh in their face.
How exactly are you supposed to do that, when your license includes their right to audit your business? If you refuse them they're going to sue you, and they have far more money to spend on lawyers than your business.
You need to have proof that the software is being used. You also have to provide notice and cannot expect to just walk up and demand inspections. Also, this is a private company so they have no authority to do this.
The primary bit of evidence to the BSA was/is from disgruntled employees "ratting" on their employer. Is that sufficient evidence of a crime to justify a warrant for any TLA to do an investigation? If not, that's the only way you're looking at my computers.
Again, laughing in their face would be my response.
> It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits
It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).
That license used to be perpetual, and only enforced locally (i.e. without connecting to the internet). That's about as close to "owning" as anyone gets in software.
If we go down this particular philosophical rabbit hole, you don't "own" anything. Stop making payments into the capitalist system we live under, and the bailiffs come and take away your car/house/possessions...
A perpetual license is not meaningfully distinct from ownership in the context of software - you don't "own" open source software either, just license it for the low, low cost of free.
> Stop making payments into the capitalist system we live under, and the bailiffs come and take away your car/house/possessions
Your house/car get re-possessed if you stop making their loan payments since they are listed as collateral for the loan, that's different then you not owning them in the first place.
I don't need my builder's permission to add a sofa, paint the walls, or change the locks. But god help you if Adobe finds out that you've changed the DRM locks on the version of Photoshop that you "own".
> you don't "own" open source software either, just license it for the low, low cost of free.
Depends on the license, ones like Unlicense or 0BSD try to opt out of the default copyrighted licensed state of released code.
This isn’t really saying much. In many places you need permission to paint the outside of your house (and cannot choose whichever color you want). And almost everywhere you need permission to build a house on land you own.
It seems like almost half the discussion on this godforsaken website is midwits picking specific words to argue over for no apparent reason. My favorite activation phrases is "AIs can hallucinate and make mistakes."
I have a full paid license of acrobat pro. I want to pay for the 2020 version as that's the last one before it became rental software crap.
I refuse to pay monthly for this software.
That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not paying for cloud crap.
<sarcasm>Dear lord, did you stop to think of the shareholders before you wrote that screed?!</sarcasm>
SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative to more of Adobe's CS software.
If indies need it, then sure, it can be necessary to sustain smaller shops that have to support backend/cloud features and multiple OSes that churn APIs faster than a newspaper.
Genuine question; what does Acrobat Pro buy you over the free versions and/or OSS competitors?
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?
In addition to signing documents with Preview, MacOS/Linux/Windows can all print to pdf / pdf/a, and the Notes app on iOS includes a camera-based document scanner that exports to OCR’ed PDF.
I’ve been making PDFs with LaTeX, for decades, but those other tools are more mainstream, and work fine. I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for acrobat these days.
It looked fine on screen, but only printed the first 4-5 pages properly, then lots of stuff was missing on subsequent pages. After that I couldn't print at all and ended up having to remove/reinstall the printer in OS preferences. This was just a few months ago, OS up to date, unremarkable Canon printer.
I think the modern ones are all fine for the basic stuff like that.
For my work, it was the highly detailed low level stuff. Pre-flight checks/profiles, content tree (object level, including text fragment) browsing, flattening, converting, transforming versions, and so on. It was indispensable for some of those operations, working in a printing business where clients would sometimes send in their own problematic PDFs which we'd need to adjust or inspect to find the error.
(Favourite one: a font was embedded in a PDF that mapped a character using // in its name, which was "fine" on PDF, but on the printer's RIP was converted to postscript for one step, and // in postscript precedes an immediately evaluated name so it stopped parsing and tried to look for it and bombed out)
There's advanced features that FOSS equivalents dont do quite as well.
I also wish Microsoft would pull its head out of its rear and make a preview clone for windows because that app basically supplants acrobat for basic use.
The only problem is that ADobe is making the adobe engine incompatible with older versions. I've had PDFs that were made less than 10 years ago indesign etc that refused to load in Edge, which is where we work.
VMware and Citrix had a gentleman's agreement: they pirated each-other's stuff, and agreed not to break users' stuff in production and keep licensing issues to warnings.
They drove me off Lightroom, I was just a causal user. The upsell spam and ads in Adobe Reader has also driven me away from that too. I would have considered buying an upgrade for both, but the price was never right for casual home use. Now I don't use any Adobe products at all.
I switched to Capture One. Not as easy to use as Lightroom, but the RAW processing is actually superior. It's a one time purchase. The professionals can choose to upgrade every year, the casual users can upgrade less frequently.
Capture One is just ~5 years behind Adobe pushing people to subscriptions - in fact they are actually quite bit more expensive for what you get now. Perpetual licenses are going away
I also use Capture One, and I actually liked it significantly better than Lightroom when I did a side by side comparison of them a couple of years ago.
Lightroom is starting to get some HDR processing capabilities that are interesting to me, but that one feature by itself isn't currently worth paying Adobe's crazy subscription prices just to use a program that I otherwise don't enjoy.
And they all still only deal with a part of what LR provides. You're going to be upset. LR as a complete package (editing, DAM, apps on all devices, etc...) is hard to beat. I'm about to turn LR back on b/c I find myself taking fewer pictures as to not deal with my non-LR workflow.
I strongly dislike paying for subscription software that I don't use very frequently[1], but I do pay for the Photoshop & Lightroom bundle. At ~$10 / month, it ends up being a lot less than I paid for updating "perpetual" licenses to those products frequently enough (every two years?) to get the new features.
I've not really done enough with "real" photography to have strong opinions on this, but Aftershot (which was included in a Humble Bundle a few years ago) has been ok for the stuff I used it for.
I've been using Exposure for many years, but it seems like it might be dying/dead - they haven't released an update in a long time, YT and social media accounts are quiet etc.
If you're using a Mac, the new Nitro from gentlemancoders seems quite good. I haven't made the leap yet though because it's missing file/library management and layers.
I've been quite happy with my switch to Capture One. They offer subscription and one-off purchases. I haven't seen the need to upgrade since my initial purchase. The Capture ONE RAW engine also seems to produce better results for my Fuji than Lightroom.
It's weird to watch Adobe make these fundamentally short sighted decisions. I can only assume the ultimate cause is the individual motivations of executives and managers. "Oooo, if we raise subscriptions $10/mo, we'll make lots of money, and it'll look really good on my annual review." "Oooo, this cancellation fee will really help our retention, which will look really good on my annual review." "Making Photoshop subscription only will do amazing things for our revenue."
When you have complete market dominance, you have little opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming up using your tool.
That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
LoopStart: Expand into so many markets to then be unmaintainable, then randomly decide to focus on your main stream of revenue again and kill off the side offerings GOTO LoopStart.
Having a monopoly like this is like having a goose that that lays golden eggs. The right thing to do is nothing except to guard the goose and keep it happy and well fed.
But what Adobe has done is a series of aggressive egg laying hormonal supplements and force feeding. Yes, it might get them even more eggs for a bit, but it's also a big risk for killing the goose for not a whole lot more eggs, with the side effect of definitely making everyone angry with you.
But I think Adobe, and most companies, would inevitably make this decision. If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
> If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
That pretty much sums up all of what business and investment is. Play with money to get more money to play with.
> If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
If the shareholders, who management has a fiduciary duty to, are well-diversified, this might even be the right decision.
Basically, if it's mostly index funds and mutual funds holding your stock, you probably should push that button every so often.
That assumes that once a golden goose dies, there’s an infinite supply of replacements. There’s a reason we’re comparing these companies to a mythical creature after all: if sustainable businesses producing valuable things were easy to create, this website wouldn’t exist.
The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
You seem to be making a bunch of somewhat odd assumptions? Eg that investors are idiots, and that it's easy to beat the market?
I was answering the hypothetical example of one company having this magic button. With the rest of the world operating as normal.
If you want to figure out the optimal approach to many companies having such magic buttons, that's a slightly different question.
You are right that creating companies isn't easy nor trivial. That's why the market so richly rewards creating successful companies from scratch. But that's nothing that a well-diversified investor needs to worry about for this particular decision. You just look at market prices.
> The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
> Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
You seem to assume zero competition? And also that the stock market is really bad at evaluating business decisions (at least worse than you)? If the latter is the case, you should become an investor and make a killing!
Especially if you are living in a world where everyone else is stupidly slaughtering their golden geese, you should be able to pick up some disgruntled ex-employees for cheap and just run a steady ship!
Another important consideration: at some level of abstraction a company is just a legal shell. 'Killing' a company might just mean that the old equity (another legal abstraction) is deleted, and the former creditors turn into equity holders. The operations don't even need to be affected by this at all. Of course, you can also 'kill' a company by shutting it down. But again, that doesn't necessarily remove any of the demand for its (type of) products, nor does it remove the experience of the people working there, nor does it break any of the machinery and hardware.
So if Adobe goes belly up, there are already plenty of other companies willing to fill their former niche.
That's what the post-WW2 world looked like: the developed countries had booming economies, but the poor countries fell further and further behind. Some even in absolute terms.
Yet, that time is frequently cited as the golden age that people harken back to.
Its more like a 90% chance to double the money and a 60% chance to utterly destroy the faucet. Definite short term gain at only a moderate chance of future failure.
You could cut costs and let the money roll in. But unfortunately even if that's the smart move for the company, it's unlikely to be the smart move for the individual decisionmakers.
Empire building is fun! And the press you get for hiring more people is infinitely nicer than when you announce layoffs and other cost cutting measures.
It's always easier to play these types of games than it is to actually perform innovation. So while competition is not necessary for growth, it clearly often helps.
There's another way I like to think about what you said: cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did it previously (or the person before you) the less you have available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend of enshitification we see.
> "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation. Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should change when your environment does. I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
> I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
Money is relative. I bet there are things $1bn can buy that we aren't even aware of because we were never exposed to it. Some of those things are probably non-tangible, like the ability to influence politics and change the world.
I doubt it. Things that cost hundreds of thousands are, for the most part, extremely resource intensive, which is part why they're expensive in the first place. Even rare gems which are small but many of these things are big. The more well known exception to this is luxury items which are just costly for costly sake. The other is art, which can be expensive because desire (like luxury) or scams/tax evasion.
Of course this doesn't mean everyone is aware of these things but they're still publicly known.
> Not all things are physical things. How much does it cost to have thousands of people click at images of cars for your AI model?
I think you're reaching. The things you're talking about have physical impacts. You can't run computers without building chips, developing power systems, and so on. Yes, things of value need not be inherently physical but there are no things that are not connected to the physical world in some form or another.
What I meant to say is "not all things are physical objects". Since you're still referring to physical objects like chips, power systems, and so on. Things that you can buy with money also be not-physical-objects, such as training data harvested from millions of human work-hours.
I've been using Photoshop for 20 years and they absolutely still add features all the time. For example, they just added a ton of AI content fill features and you could make a debate about how AI is ruining artists, but you can't say that Adobe is doing nothing.
Pretty much everyone who talks about Adobe stagnating doesn't actually use the suite to it's full extent in the first place, I'm pretty sure. It's glaringly obvious when people talk about competitors; there is nothing near Photoshop. DaVinci Resolve is a good one for video though.
Even the features it does have are behind UX so bad you'd rather cram scattered glass down your urethra than use it. Just yesterday I gave Gimp a go again to do some very basic exposure blending and rage quit 10 minutes later. It's impossible to work with comfortably or with any sort of fluidity, everything is either a fight or a drag.
It's a me problem alright, but I'm in no way unique in refusing to put up with the mountain of grief that the Gimp UX is.
> I've been using it productively for photo editing and web design for two decades+.
I know Gimp must have its share of long term users but they're a miracle to me and I don't know what to say to that. I suppose it's good people reading these threads who are open to giving Gimp a go see there are users for whom it's working out.
Not gonna say gimp is perfect. But, the comment above is a poster child for folks who learned a certain software and refuse to use another with a slightly different interface.
I personally learned Paint Shop Pro first, after baby steps of Mac/MS Paint. Later on didn't find Photoshop particularly intuitive... although liked 3.0 on the Mac. It's even worse now according to professional friends.
I've used many others over the years and never had a problem with basic to medium features. They all work roughly the same—WIMP. Point, click.
Gimp works similarly to every other graphics program, so using it for common tasks is not hard. It's not "full of grief." If you can't do it, you either never learned how to use a GUI program properly[1], proceed by rote, or refuse to consult the manual for more specific tasks.
For one thing, it's a helluva lot easier to learn than Blender, which has no chronic troll posts that I've seen.
[1] Not uncommon in web times. The original Apple HIGs might help.
You are missing the point. Nothing in Gimp I haven't managed to do when I've decided it's important enough to put up with it but not so important I'd renew an Adobe subscription and boot Windows. The UX is simply so bad I'd rather avoid it at all costs if possible, and I get zero enjoyment from using it.
Blender being harder to learn has pretty much zero to do with how great or poor the experience of using it is. On top of missing the point, you're also missing the connection between the lack "troll posts" and what the user experience is like.
But since you're muttering to yourself about troll posts and how it's really just a skills issue, I might as well go and mutter to myself about how great Gimp could be if it had users who had standards instead of being chronic enablers who just cheerfully whistle through the wart fair it is.
I've had my yearly share of discussing Gimp I think. I'll just keep to my routine: see an update, install it in hopes of finding it has changed, and quit it ten minutes later kicking myself for being dumb enough to allow myself to hope.
Yeah, LR is also a great product. And the subscription turned out to be about the same cost as upgrading every year. There are other tools out there, but nothing comes close with image editing and DAM. The subscription also gets you LR on every device.
I think the dark patterns here are garbage, but Adobe has provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.
No. Were it common you wouldn't see such a large difference in profit between the rental and perpetually licensed versions of Lightroom. Aside from support for newer cameras new versions have few, if any, compelling features. Performance improvements (LR is slooooooow), improved noise reduction, improved handling of video or non-Bayer sensors… all of that mostly fell to the wayside in favor of things like that AI garbage, improved mobile integration, enhanced geolocation support.
Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people. It also included storage space and made it easy to take and edit images on any device. That may not matter to you, but that is the market now.
Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people
lol, no.
The Lightroom CC is the mobile/desktop product. That is and always has been a separate "more accessible" product. Moving Lightroom "Classic" (the desktop only product) to a rental only model simply makes profits more accessible to Adobe.
That may not matter to you, but that is the market now.
Of course it's the market now, there's no other option from Adobe.
Also... no one's forcing people to use their products. Photoshop doesn't have a patent on editing images. Lightroom doesn't have a patent on sorting through photo collections. Plenty of paid and free alternatives exist, they're just not as good. But it's a completely free market out there and Adobe can't stop you from building a better version of Photoshop tomorrow to make billions.
You’re assuming they will never raise the rental pricing, which seems unlikely.
And yeah I paid for two upgrades before Adobe moved Lightroom to rental only. The pricing was quite steady. Keep in mind Lightroom had no DRM baked in. No licensing checks, perpetual three seat cross-platform license, etc., etc. That $10/mo is for one seat only.
If the cost to the consumer were close Adobe wouldn't have spent the engineering effort to integrate Lightroom with all of their licensing software and incur the cost of having to keep the rental servers running. You can't predict the future but based on the steady pricing (both rental and perpetual licensed) the rental software is unambiguously more expensive for the consumer.
I'll give Adobe credit for integrating AI features into its products without charging extra. I imagine it's not cheap for them to support that much generative AI on an application that has traditionally run 100% on users' local machines.
Maybe Adobe's worried about AI making Photoshop irrelevant. Here's the cautionary note from its latest quarterly report: "While we have released new generative artificial intelligence products, such as Adobe Firefly, and are focused on enhancing the artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities of such products and incorporating AI into existing products, services and solutions, there can be no assurance that our products will be successful or that we will innovate effectively to keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI across our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. If we do not successfully innovate, adapt to rapid technological changes and meet customer needs, our business and our financial results may be harmed."
You underestimate the power of SaaS. Companies do SaaS precisely because it allows for this sort of capricious rent-seeking at wildly-unregulated levels of greed. That's just the name of the game. If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
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.
What is 'wildly-unregulated levels of greed' supposed to mean?
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
Google has never charged for search, nor has Facebook charged for their social network.
They arguably have bigger reach and market dominance than Adobe has.
There are good reasons Google and Facebook behave in different ways, of course. They aren't stupid, nor do they lack greed.
I am here just arguing that your comical assertion of mono-causality.
'If other companies don't do it yet', perhaps they have good reasons?
> However, I understand your point, it's the truth of many businesses that if you're not paying, you're the product not the customer.
No, that wasn't my point. My point was that the mono-causal point
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
was wrong. Clearly, there's more than one reason that determines how companies behave.
Google sells eyeballs to advertisers, they don't sell to consumers. They've largely baked their pricing strategies in algorithms that self-adjust to increase costs as advertisers invest more, so that they don't have to expose themselves, but they still push prices up when they feel like it. They're also so brazenly exploitative that they were investigated and fined by the EU multiple times for doing bad things to their customers.
So yeah, they behave exactly the same - towards their actual customers, which are advertisers, not you.
Great example of this is to google simply name of most businesses. And then see first links in results being adds. While they same links are in result slightly down?
How did we end up in situation were anyone would be paying in this case? Seems like just pure exploitation of their position having combination of add network and popular search engine...
Please explain why you think that’s apples new goal? The link doesn’t
There is nothing I am aware of that Apple has done indicating this and plenty to show they are not (e2e cloud backups, on device llm) they continually find ways to provide services without needing access to your data or keeping your data on device
It's no coincidence that after Adobe introduced a subscription in 2013 that this was the inflection point in which the stock grew 10x over the following decade. The previous decade it only grew 3x.
Well, the previous decade also includes the Global Financial Crisis.
If you want to make any meaningful statement at all, I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index. (Oh, and be sure to look at the total performance, ie with dividends re-invested. Don't look just at the share-price.)
> I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index.
So why not just comment with exactly this?
Here is a comparison of ADBE and SPY, which ADBE correlates very strongly to SPY, and also in this analysis is AAPL which severly outperformed the SP500:
Yeah, Apple managed to enter the far more lucrative hardware-as-a-service market. It’s a subscription you only pay every couple of years to have the latest iPhone.
I mean, it’s a joke based on the fact that they have tricked their customers into obsessively buying upgrades, which makes the revenue stream very service-like, but it loses its punch when you explain it.
What is the trick? every 2-3 years Apple usually has hardware improvements motivating it. Is the trick just making better products?
For me I got a 14 for upgraded GPS and satellite, no plans for a 15. My dad is on a 12 and my mom a 10 and totally content. I think my brother has an 11. Most people I know don’t obsessively buy upgrades and those I know who do are actually split between Apple and android- and do it with other things too ie it’s the personality behind it not the company “tricking” them. Some ppl even do it with cars wanting the latest
Thanks for providing the data. Sorry, I was on mobile, so had a harder time finding the numbers in a way that I can share.
> See the difference?
For anyone following at home, here's the important bit for the earlier period:
> The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe], measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.57. Whereas the Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.57.
And for the later period:
> The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe], measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.93. Whereas the Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.69.
There seems to be a perception in big companies that if you're not pissing off your customers enough to drive them away, you're leaving money on the table. So there's this constant pseudo-optimizer running to get the maximum profit possible.
As an upside, once you’ve pissed off enough customers, you can also quit and provide them with an alternative that packages an open source tool with some enterprise features with marginally better terms
I once read that business is the art of ripping someone off without pissing them off.
For better or worse, I agree. If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table, but if you go too far and piss them off they're going to take away all the money on the table with them.
> If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table
You're leaving money in their pocket that you might get later
How do you quantify loyalty? Because it seems to me that it's very easy for individuals to prioritise short term gains at the cost of medium and long term losses due to trust erosion
I wonder how much client satisfaction and trust would be worth on the quarterly report, if it could be calculated. I think it would be immense for most companies
Money in their pocket is not money on the table. You are in fact reinforcing my point: Client loyalty and trust is critical in business, you're a lousy businessman if you've damaged that by ripping off your clients too hard angering them.
The most effective business is getting all the money on the table and making your client happy. Thusly the art of business, ripping off your client without pissing them off.
Absolutely nobody gets ahead in business by selling wares cheaper than what they could have gone for, unless you are deliberately underselling the market to gain share by sheer force of will. Likewise by selling wares higher than what they could have gone for, clients will just look elsewhere because you're just another one of many merchants.
Costco makes the majority of profit from membership fees, they've already profited from you before you have even made your first purchase. Arguable any profit they make from what you purchase is where you are being 'ripped off' but because the savings and return policies are better than the competition they avoid the 'pissing off'.
Are you sure about that? Their average markup is around 10%, so that would mean that the average member would be spending $600 or less in the store per year.
For another example of the same behaviour, watch the development of Sports in European cable - Viaplay for example. Starting 2016 the headlines of the press has been "Viaplay chockhöjer priserna" ( Viaplay shockingly raise their prices )
They have now jacked up their prices to a level where customers are now not only leaving(1), but actively hating the company online(2 - see comments), as well as teaching friends about pirate IPTV alternatives. At the same time the management of Viaplay have raised their compensation levels to ridiculous levels. The company itself is suffering financially from all this, but management is richer and fatter than ever before(3).
The same thing happend with Netflix raising prices. Probably everyone nobody canceled their subscription after the increased price just becouse it’s not worth the effort. And the price raise is incremental just so nobody will complain.
That story actually came about from a scientist doing experiments on frogs. Frogs with removed brains.
Arguably the frogs are not smarter than we thought
Where I live Viaplay bought the licenses for showing football matches on all levels for the next years. Previously we could see the football WC and European championships, and national games on the national tv channel. With the new viaplay deal the games would only be possible to see on their platform or whatever it is.
Fortunately they fell into financial troubles before the deal became active.
They massively overpaid for showing all of the matches, to force everyone interested in football to get a subscription. But probably most people just watch it on tv, because "hey, why not, national team of x country (or our own team, for whom winning a match is a miracle) is playing, lets watch it". Not "I will happily pay tens of € each month to some company to watch stuff".
At a certain size company, you being a professional asshole is a requirement for any position. Also being very good at lying and deceiving. The danger begins when those people start believing their own lies.
It's important to recognize that the only thing that matters is how big of a bag you can get. Making money is the only point of tech. Get in, get your bag, and get out!
The fundamental problem with increasing prices is that you create an opportunity for competitors.
If Photoshop would cost 5€ a month, then everyone would buy it because it is the best.
If Photoshop costs 50€ a month, they make more money, but they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product.
I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem. There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top, but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo -- none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo.
Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there are now.
Most (all?) arguments that depend on competition depend on a fair market.
However, no industry or government lives in a vacuum.
Firm X develops enough market dominance to constantly collect vast sums of money to build their war chest.
This war chest is used to buy out competitors, and kill off competing ideas.
Firm X creates clones of lower priced alternatives, then outcompetes the smaller firm.
Firm X uses war chest to fob off or weaken regulators (if any exist), extending the time they can extract rents.
——
Little guys have to survive by getting enough money fast enough to beat the Big guy. Why bother? Get moderately sized, get bought out, and live with your wealth.
PS: I have butchered economics somewhere, forgive me.
CS6 has been running for me well, and likely will keep running long after the company collapses on my offline PC that I don't do Microsoft OS updates on... Great job on that one Adobe!
Be careful about looking as if they're abusing that dominant position. Back at the highwater of the "Wintel" dominance, early 2000s, Intel staff reportedly found Microsoft hair-raising, boasting openly of crushing the competition, choking off their air supply, undercutting then till they bled to death, etc. Intel had already had the antitrust stick brandished at it and had made sure the troops all understood the importance of the marketplace at least looking like a fair fight.
exist, innovate, maximise long-term value for shareholders and users, eliminate inefficiencies, externalise risk, internalise sources of value, monitor the business environment for new opportunities and threats
Issue dividends and return profits to their shareholders. They don't need to increase revenue by n% every year. Lots of electrical distribution companies are publicly traded and do just this.
Share price appreciation is like crack. I think a large part of the investment market is looking for the share price to increase or they aren't interested.
There are inexpensive stocks yielding close to 10% from dividends, but you are told not to expect an increase in share price. Instead, people go after stocks that yield far less (0-3% dividend with a much higher stock price) but which may experience a growth in share price.
That's because in many places capital gains are not taxed while dividends are, hence a preference for stock price increases. This distortion should be corrected somehow otherwise the economic incentives will continue to be to milk the cow dry at the expense of everything and everyone.
Software companies should do the same thing material goods producers do: make the product smaller, faster, and cheaper. Instead they rent seek with half-assed updates and added bloat that 95% of users never need. Adobe is not alone in this.
If microchip producers had done what Adobe has done, computers would be developed by adding a few vacuum tubes each year and bumping the cost by 5%.
Man I want to believe it's short sighted, but Adobe's stock price in 2012 was $30.95. It's at $518 today[1], outperforming SPY. What drives me crazy is that there are plenty of Adobe alternatives that are pretty good, but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base.
The stock price growth looks wonderful until the day it doesn't.
The point of this discussion is that Adobe is essentially stealing from its future self by making short-sighted decisions. To a significant extent, they're cashing out their customer loyalty, and that loss of loyalty makes them much more vulnerable to attrition. Gradual attrition will slow their growth; a major attrition event, which they're now making possible, could rapidly reverse it.
But if it has looked wonderful -- like really wonderful -- for the last twelve years that also says something. I would've argued that Adobe was stealing from its future ten years ago when they started started using this model and I would clearly have been wrong. I don't see what's different for them over the next 10 years either because I've apparently underestimated peoples' complacency with being fleeced.
Stock price in the modern market is not a measurement of company health and long term well being - it's a measurement of speculators' willingness to bet on short term performance.
Well said. Back when people pirated Photoshop, there wasn't much competition. Here's a newspaper quote from 1999: "GIMP, an Image editing program like the $899 PhotoShop, is free. I must be fair here and say that PhotoShop is in many way a superior program to GIMP. Still, there's that free thing to think about."
Compare that to the Affinity suite, which is an amazing collection of programs, especially for the price. They're currently running a sale where you can get everything for $83. If my daughter becomes interested in digital design, I'd be happy to spent that kind of money to encourage her. I'd be very hesitant to subscribe to the Adobe suite, even though that's what I use at work.
I was an architecture undergrad (bricks , not bits) in the early 00’s and everyone had pirated software. And then we all got hired and brought our quiver of technical skills with is into industry and convinced our managers to purchase the tools we knew so well.
Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience (cost, bugs, support, tactics).
I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running releases from 10 years ago.
Figma’s pricing is extremely exploitative too, it’s essentially designed in a way were trivial actions can instantiate new subscription seats that have to be manually removed.
Somewhat reminds me of netflix's policy on sharing accounts. The CEO used to straight up say they don't care, and it's not really feasible to enforce account-sharing rules. Fast forward to today, and they "figured out" how to enforce it.
> It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance,
I'm pretty sure Adobe went for subscription model as one of the earliest big companies and then the trend bloomed all around us - especially on mobile devices.
Few years ago my friend had issues with her computer after being forced to upgrade from Win7 to 10 - it was something drivers related. She reinstalled 7 but couldn't activate her CS anymore because servers for that particular version were no more active. She could use crack and activate the software but she didn't want to risk issues if she'd face the visit from Polish tax office (which is permitted to check legality of software in business). Purchasing new license was out of the question because Adobe already introduced subscription at that point and she, as a single-person company couldn't afford it in expenses. A colleague suggested her Affinity and she gladly switched.
I tried switching to Affinity. I'm glad it exists. I use Affinity Designer but Affinity Photo didn't meet my needs and I ended up signing up for a Photoshop subscription. It was small workflow stuff but ultimately, for me needs, some poor UX choices in Affinity meant editing 200+ files would have taking 2-3 hours more. Photoshop was $120 for a 1yr subscription. My time is easily worth more than $120 for the 2-3 hours I saved.
I'm not dissing Affinity Photo. It seems great. And like I said, I use Affinity Designer (never owned Illustrator). all I'm saying is $120 isn't that much money if you actually need the software for work.
If you just need something for a hobby than there's Affinity Photo ($50) as well as gIMP and Krita. There's also Photopea which I find is meeting most of my short term Photoshop needs so I might switch and give them my $$$ instead of Adobe. Though I suspect if I ever have to do 200+ images again I'll find Photopea's workflow to be missing the things that made me pony up last time.
Woman whom I met while being at uni one day calls me and asks for help with installing Photoshop - I ask her why she's doing that. She never was into graphics software and in fact, constantly needed my help with the true computer basics. She said she went to this photography course and the instructor guy ordered everyone to get Photoshop to fine-tune their work. I told her she should be careful because it's likely she'll be maneuvered into a subscription for a piece of software she doesn't need. I also mention Gimp but she refused as they were working with Adobe software only. Fast-forward to a year later: she unsurprisingly cancelled Photoshop sub. Prob with a help of her daughter boyfriend who become the personal tech support guy for the whole family.
There was also a case of finding her a replacement for trial Office she got with her machine with - she was familiar with Word for years. So I suggested OpenOffice and it worked pretty well up until some document formatting issues happen, which were resolved already in LibreOffice. I installed LO but she found its UI hard to use somehow, and in few weeks she opted to redo her papers with some cracked version of Office.
On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if that photography course would be all about getting people trapped within Adobe software and the instructor would be paid for each head he managed to catch.
Then there's my closest friend: for years she was working with pirated Photoshop 7 up until it refused to work on her Win11 machine recently and she had to swap to a yet another pirated CS version. Same goes for managing photos and her drawings pieces - it's always ACDSee 2.xx with the commonly-known-serial-number. I suggested her Affinity giving the example of the woman from my original comment, but she said Photoshop was and is always enough for her and she wouldn't want to learn everything all over again in another UI. Tho, she's enjoying darktable and rawtherapee along with Stellarium for her sky-watching which I suggested her.
---
While two examples may be that much, I do believe being committed to familiarizing itself with software in early stages makes the switch harder later.
I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments... That'd be really interesting stuff to read.
> I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments
I learned 3d modeling in 3ds Max as a kid, but many years and a CS degree later, I ended up switching to Blender because the license cost of 3ds Max was absolutely mental for a hobbyist ($3,000ish?). This was after the Blender renaissance where they overhauled their UI and stuff. But it wasn't my first time trying to switch to Blender from 3ds Max. In terms of features and workflow, both are very similar (and I actually like some things in Blender more), but it's the little differences that end up bugging you in my experience. Like some alt-mode of a feature being missing. Or the camera handling differently from how you're used to.
I'm currently going through this again now, switching from Unity to Stride game engine. At a quick glance, they're extremely similar, but that's almost worse. It's like coming home to your house and finding that it was replaced with an identical house.
Anecdotally, they seem to be doing some subtle shenanigans around the install and activatiom of CS versions that still require it (4-6 iirc).
Changing the activation flow in non-obvious ways, dark patterns on the website leading you in circles when trying to download the installers, support chat telling you to just get CC...
That was the best most companies could do before SaaS. Now that we live in a SaaS era, it's much easier and acceptable for corps like Adobe to minimize piracy and increase revenue with subscriptions.
This isn't unique to Adobe—most software companies have followed suit because it just makes sense. What is unique about Adobe is they're doing some really shady things with subscriptions that are abusive to customers, which this suit hopefully ends and serves as a warning for other abusive SaaS corps.
This is exactly right -- Adobe wanted people to pirate Photoshop at home because they knew it wasn't realistic for a lot of home users to pay for an entire Photoshop license upfront. Back in 2010, that was a whopping $700 [1].
SaaS changed that -- you can now get Photoshop for a month (no annual contract) for $10 [2, 3].
Which is truly just an amazing deal -- that $700 in 2010 would be $1015 today, so the subscription will be cheaper until you use it for eight and a half years, plus you get upgrades. It's a lot fairer for everyone. Except when Adobe pulls sh*t like the FTC is suing them over.
But yes -- SaaS absolutely ended the idea of companies wanting home users to pirate their stuff so companies would buy it.
Once the infrastructure and social acceptance was there to allow for subscription based pricing, the bost benefit ratio shifted enough that the benefit of those people using Adobe products at home that weren't paid for changed, since they could now get the specific products they needed for a small fee that only lasted a short while.
I.e. $400-$1200 for a home user is a hard sell for someone that only needs it for a bit, so they accepted the benefit piracy gained them since the sales lost was minimal. Once they could feasibly expect someone to pay $30 for a short term access to some tools (whether true or not, it's the perception of that which matters), I think there's little incentive for them to still allow that piracy.
I'm not sure if this was very forward thinking of them or they just got lucky by allowing the piracy instead of allowing cheap/free home users, but I suspect they would have had a much harder time trying to charge for home users if they had previously offered home user free use licenses to legalize the benefit that piracy was providing. Raising prices is harder than enforcing pricing that was unenforced, and charging something for what was previously free is very hard to get away with without a huge reputation impact.[1]
Yep, I finally cancelled and didn’t take any of the “two free months” offer because I just don’t trust their billing approach anymore. The “pay monthly but can’t cancel for one year” model ruined it.
For after effects they offered monthly, monthly with commitment and annual. Same pricing structure as a gym. I guess they need to make it clear but it was clear to me that a cancellation fee applied.
The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky describes the fall of Behance, the fall of Adobe’s perpetual licensing, and the rise of their cloud subscription offering.
I wonder what he thinks about all that in hindsight, putting the many millions he made aside.
First, free samples, then you must pay, once addicted you pay more and more, no money ? go sell these drugs and be an evangelist for us, now your work is our profit.
They also relied on schools when I was going through school, even before the free license for students offers. My schools would get cheap or free use of office suite, windows, and adobe creative suite, we'd all learn to do our class work on them (or have multimedia elective essentially being 'learn adobe creative suite' class), pirate them for home use, and have it even more entrenched for doing actual work with. Considering when I started at school, computers for student use for my whole school could be counted on one hand and they only had word perfect or something on them, they adapted to that particular changing landscape amazingly.
The idea of "use it at work" may have change drastically with the advent of social media. Nowadays, anyone can become a content creator[1], thereby making their home a place of work. This shift in trend may have compelled Adobe to pursue revenue from individual users, albeit rather aggressively.
[1] On a side note, I lament how this phrasing became over-used by adult content creators, thereby making its connotation strongly affiliated with that industry.
> the last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom
Same. But also because Lightroom hands-down beat out everything else in existence at the time (and possibly still does?) for it's fantastic digital-darkroom workflow.
It also wasn't horribly expensive - I think it was around AUD$300 for the full version, and maybe $99 for an upgrade.
Presumably after a while that didn't ring true. I've worked at at least one company where an engineer flat out pirated the software he used, and I'd say all others have been a bit lax with the terms of the licence
I learned Photoshop on pirated copies. However, as a young professional that couldn't risk any of the malarkey involved with relying on an outdated, pirated tool cracked with a program written and compiled by who knows, I needed a real license-- that's especially true because PDFs were a major vector for malware infections at that point. However, I also could not afford to spend many hundreds of dollars upfront on their products! When they introduced the CC subscription, it was a an absolute lifesaver. Especially for hobby users or professionals with low-collaboration or less involved use cases, it's easily more expensive over the life of the software. But for people that consistently need the latest features in any number of their programs, it's actually a lot better.
(And no, the open source alternatives do not work for my workflow, and they REALLY didn't back then. I might be able to squeak by with inkscape's current tools for typesetting, but having to work between that and gimp to modify type in an interactive layout would be idiotic in a professional workflow. It would be even clunkier than having to quickly develop a native GUI app a la winforms or in X-code but only being able to edit code in a word processor, and then pasting it into the IDE for syntax checking and compilation.)
I removed the last vestiges of Adobe products from my machine a few years ago. It took a while to find all the little bits of cruft and licensing daemons that had been spewed all over my Mac by their installers. What a mess.
The problem is that that does not release you from your contractual obligation to pay every month. The company is still free to (and often does) send you to collections.
Not just a mortgage or car loan. Credit checks[1] are being used by landlords to decide whether or not to allow you to rent. They are being used by employers to decide whether or not to hire you. They are being used by utility companies and insurance companies to decide whether or not to do business with you.
It's slowly getting to the point where a low credit score will bar you from participating in major areas of the economy.
Then it ruins your credit, and technically the three bureaus disallow "pay for delete" agreements between consumers and debt collectors which would get it off of your report entirely (some still do it).
I'd argue that heavily lopsided TOS in favor of the company, that can be changed at any time by said company, and your access can be cut off unless you agree to the updated TOS, does not make a contractual obligation. In a B2C context, the business is the more sophisticated entity so it's up to them to make sure everyone knows what they are agreeing to. They could have put up a bold summary of "this is a yearly contract, you will be charged $79.99 to cancel, please type YEARLY CONTRACT in the box" somewhere in the signup flow. Had they done it, the case could be dismissed.
You mean this case? Why should that get it dismissed?
This is about abusive (and unlawful) business practices, not a lack of knowledge on the consumer's end. If the customer had full knowledge of the terms before agreeing it would still be unlawful, the law generally doesn't care that the two parties consented to an abusive business relationship.
Don't trust changing your card either. I had a predatory LA Fitness membership. When they made me jump through one too many hoops to cancel, I called up WF and had them issue me a new card (Visa). Well, Visa, in their infinite wisdom, gave my new credit card number to LA Fitness and they kept on charging me for almost two years before I noticed. I don't remember the name of that program at Visa, but I'm sure they and other CC companies continue to do this. Should be illegal.
Netflix does this as well, and is how I found out about it. They claim that since you didn't cancel the service, it was clearly a lapse in your updating of the new number so they just helped you out. Of course it is in everyone's favor except yours when this happens.
If someone steals my card, and uses it to pay for Netflix, how will I log in and cancel?
The simplest, safe route is to not give companies the newly updated number. If my Netflix lapses because I forgot to update the number after a card change (whatever the reason), they can email me, and then I will log in to my account and update the card on file.
Do companies that do subscriptions know when multiple accounts are using the same card number? Just curious if they try to use something like that for fraud detection or anything. Then again, I don't think they'd care. Just take the monies and let the card people deal with it.
During the whole clamping down on password sharing era, I'd be very surprised if some folks haven't had to pay for multiple Netflix subscriptions (for summer houses, or their kids off at college, that sort of thing...)
> If someone steals my card, and uses it to pay for Netflix, how will I log in and cancel?
You dispute the charge, just like any other unauthorized transaction. That's quite different than changing your card number under their feet, and will be received as such by Netflix.
Don't trust cancelling your card either. I closed my account at Capital One, paid the final balance, and six months later I noticed a steep drop in my credit score. I had a $3 monthly charge that kept recurring even though I had closed my account.
Also, because my account was "closed," I didn't receive any statements notifying me that I was being charged. I only discovered this issue when my credit score dropped by 100 points.
Closing a personal credit card, in my experience, temporarily drops the score a few points and then it goes back to normal. It's a myth promulgated by banks to keep accounts open.
If so, that just raises the question: of what benefit is it to the banks to keep unused accounts open? The maintenance costs may be low, but they're still nonzero.
You have to report the card is lost or stolen then the new number will not propagate. You likely asked for a replacement card which will propagate the new number through the network.
Allows you to create unique CC#'s for every single company, and you can ship to any address (because the "address verification" will always respond <OKAY>).
Amex will let you permanently block a merchant that has previously charged you from making any further charges, but you have to call and ask for it. Goldman Sachs, under the guise of Apple Card, does not permit this by phone or by app. I have no other experiences to report data on. (Note that this does not exempt you from any contractual obligations to pay ETFs or whatever.)
It doesn't matter, because it's a contract. Even if you cancel your card, Adobe can send it to collections, and it will show up as unpaid debt and negatively impact your credit score, which means you might pay more for your next mortgage or car loan.
This is not uncommon for businesses that use annual subscriptions. Certain gyms are particularly known for this. And with Adobe being so sneaky and aggressive about subscriptions, it wouldn't even surprise me.
Damages are generally limited to the extent to which a contract is performed or not performed, and the non-breaching party generally has a duty to mitigate damages.
So, in other words, you can't continue to perform once the other side has stopped performing and then later claim damages for non-performance you were aware of.
It's possible the contract itself specifies otherwise for this situation, but courts are generally not sympathetic to this sort of end-run around common law contract law.
I'm not saying companies have not tried to collect on this basis. I'm saying that if they were taken to court over the practice that they might lose. If Adobe really does this, it might strengthen the case against them.
The regulations generally have required businesses to respond to written requests.
While GPDR and others vary, at least with CCPA two data points are enough to get a release of data.
What's done is if general info on you has leaked (say email address / date of birth / social etc) then someone can use that to go to Apple and now request a full dump of everything they have on you.
So you can leverage one dump / leak, and now go after lots of players that have to comply with a data export request to get everything you want to know about someone.
Google / Microsoft / Apple / etc can have a surprising amount of sensitive data (every photo you have taken or that's been shared with you) and even though you've been hit by one data leak, you may not want those folks to be able to leverage that for more leaks.
The liability is usually very high if the companies DON'T release data - so the bias moves to releasing data (there are folks who go around putting requests in and complaining if the data dump is not easy to get).
So, this might be fixed, but you could get around the cancellation fee by changing your plan to the Dreamweaver monthly plan and then cancelling that. You'd get a prorated refund when you changed plans and then an additional refund for the monthly plan when you cancelled it.
A reminder that like all good companies adept at scamming folks they have HUGE ethics policies :)
Ethics and Integrity
At Adobe, good business begins with our commitment to the highest ethical standards.
We adhere to the following core principles:
Integrity, by conducting business according to high ethical standards
Respect for our employees, customers, vendors, partners, stockholders and the communities in which we work and live
Honesty in our internal and external communications and all business transactions
Quality in our products and services, striving to deliver the highest value to our customers and partners
Responsibility for our words and actions, confirming our commitment to do what we say
Fairness through adherence to applicable laws, regulations, policies and a high standard of behavior
We encourage you to read our policies to learn more about the legal and ethical standards we embrace.
AI ethics at Adobe
Australia Modern Slavery Act Statement
California Transparency in Supply Chains Act Statement
Adobe says "Make amazing transformations in seconds with tools powered by Firefly generative AI! Create images with just a few words, unlock endless color combinations, and make eye-popping text effects! You have to try it to believe it! See what generative AI can do for your business!"
i tried activating my old Lightroom software (purchased in 2015 or 2016) and they wouldn't let me activate it. Adobe customer service said their activation servers are taken offline for my Lightoom version.
Why does the version of the complaint embedded in the article have so many redactions? Any idea what kind of information those would contain and why they would be redacted?
Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off.
Though, obviously as per the article, this is a pain to do.
It’s really a shame there’s nothing comparable to Adobe’s products on the really pro-artist end of things.
Companies like Serif have tried with Affinity but it’s lackluster when you really need to do some high end work. OSS stuff like Krita, Inkscape and Gimp have improved a lot but there’s still a huge gulf.
Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace, but the rest of the suite like Illustrator really has no competition when it comes to functionality.
Affinity Designer lacks so many of the gradient tools, shape repetition, and even certain alignment tools.
InDesign similarly has many QoL features that Affinity Publisher lack.
After Effects has some competition but nowhere near the ecosystem it provides.
I guess premiere and animate (previously flash) have a lot of competition but that’s about it?
For reference of where I’m coming from , I own licenses to the full Adobe suite and the full affinity suite. I have professionally done art and programmed for features in multiple domains for a decade and my work has shipped with major products from FAANG-like companies.
I totally think the alternatives can replace Adobe products at some level, but the level of tooling I need and that Adobe has provided, is currently unmatched.
It would be great to see better alternatives someday.
This is true of literally everything in the new economy.
Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Any subscription service is like this. I sometimes grab a Blue Apron when it's 65+% off which is anytime I want. My ex used to do this with clothing subscriptions, up to 80% off.
There are laws against things being "always on sale". But now they're just being used to punish lazy customers who don't keep up on their promos. Only lazy or ignorant people pay the "real" price.
Oh hey would you look at that, another billion dollar IPO with no plan for profitability went bankrupt. Weird.
I had T-Mobile starting in ~2003 and it included unlimited tethering.
After they introduced the Netflix included offer I inquired and they offered an "upgrade" that they swore up and down would not change my current service.
After agreeing, I was traveling and tried to tether and boom nothing. Their upgrade that would change nothing got me out of this grandfathered situation. Over time the cost of Netflix resulted in a higher fee for Netflix and ultimately I pay more for less.
Can't trust any company not to do anything in their power to squeeze another dime out of you.
Why accept oral promises when a contract with the term is definitely available? I guess you didn't record the conversation so why not giving the papers a look?
"Your call may be recorded for quality assurance," is ubiquitous when calling the official sales/support number for any US company.
However, every single one of those call centers _also_ instructs their employees to hang up immediately if they are told (or have good reason to suspect) that the _customer_ is recording the conversation. It sounds hypocritical (and it is), but this rule comes from the company's legal department, whose sole job is to shield the company from legal liability.
When I’m recording (usually using the Rev app on iPhone if its not particularly sensitive or legally confidential information) I always start the human conversation with something like “hey so this call is recorded right? Thats what the message told me when I picked up. Just double-checking that we should consider this call to be recorded?”
I figure that it is completely legally unnecessary but it guarantees there’s an understanding between all human participants to expect a recording, which brings it in line with my own personality morality when conversing with an “innocent / relatively powerless human” (my morality exceeds the ethical and legal framework we operate in).
I can't find an app that lets me record both sides of the conversation on Android. Only my side. When I looked into, it seems that Google has disabled that part of the API that apps cannot record both sides of a conversation.
Does anyone know of a reliable way to record conversations?
I got around this by paying for a VoIP line and running 3cx to utilize it, 3cx can record calls. I've never actually done it - not even to test - because right around the time i got it set up covid hit and the people i used to spend 1-2 hours a day talking to on the phone about tech and other interesting things stopped having to drive to work so my phone usage is now down to maybe 4 hours a month on private calls that no one else would be interested in.
Technically i've been paying for a voip line for 20 years, and shoehorning it into 3cx was mostly to allow my young kid to be able to call his aunt or someone who isn't on our PBX (grandma and grandpa and his siblings are, already).
believe me i was really annoyed when android stopped being able to reliably record calls. Another alternative that i did actually use is a 3 channel breakout connector on my cellphone, a DAC/ADC, PC microphone and headphones. You could tell the OS to "monitor" the microphone, and record mix (remember those days?). Or now-a-days you'd have to use VAC(virtual audio cable) or something to manage the routing. Speaker out goes to mic in on phone, and vice versa, hit record on your PC, and both the remote side and your side will be recorded. I never got too deep into this because it's a huge hassle unless you have a phone just for this; but multi-channel recordings would let you have synchronous audio, for, say, correct transcriptions.
Many states in the US do not allow calls to be recorded unless all parties on the call consent to being recorded. There is no distinction (that I am aware of) between companies and natural persons in those laws. In those states, you can _technically_ record a call without consent, but my guess is that if you try to use it as evidence, you open yourself up to being prosecuted for wire fraud or somesuch.
> You don't have to tell them. You're dealing with the company, not the individual employee. If the company is recording the call, so can you.
The whole point of "this call may be recorded" is to establish consent between both parties. In two-party consent states (caller or recipient), you still have to establish consent to record.
If you're calling from a 1-party consent state to a 1-party consent state, you don't have to tell them, although I don't know how that works legally with call center routing.
If they’ve already told you that they’re recording, hasn’t consent already been established? You don’t need to ask again. It’s not like they’ve gotten consent for themselves to record, but not you.
My understanding is that intent needs to be established for any recording. If you establish consent and the second party records without consent I'm not sure where that stands but the spirit of the law seems to suggest every party must consent to every recording.
> They don't specify that it may not be you that records it. They are consenting.
My - not a lawyer - understanding of consent laws is they're tied somewhat to privacy expectation laws.
If I tell you I am recording you, your expectation of privacy is lessened. But mine isn't, necessarily, because I control the recording and its potential dissemination.
Right but that's less important than telling the other party that anyone might be recorded. Because, again, spirit of the law, it loosens expectations of privacy.
Given there are only two parties on the call, only one needs their consent solicited anyway.
I’ve worked for those call centres and they don’t tell employees to hang up if it’s being recorded by the customer, because the company is already recording everything and trains their staff to operate as such.
“Cool you are recording too, IT will be happy we have an offsite backup”
That’s been recorded!
For anyone who might not be aware, this is true for most companies. Any changes to your plan will usually require the removal of any grandfathered features, regardless of what the tier 1 CSR tells you.
> Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Careful though. Companies are catching on to the "threaten to cancel" trick. Last time I tried this with Comcast, the support rep put me on hold, and then instead of sending me over to the "retention" specialist, just canceled my service and asked if I needed anything else. Oops..
There's no need to be worried about it. Don't just threaten, actually switch when a competitor is having a promo and stop worrying about it. I switched internet service between a few providers almost every year for quite a while. It saved a lot of money.
Hasn't ever been an issue. I live in Canada, though, so our competition sucks and all our providers are in collusion with the regulator (CRTC) to fuck over canadians.
up until 2022 i had 2 options, dialup, or 5mbit DSL. I don't consider hughesnet workable for anything other than email (seriously, 1500ms latency on a good day?)
As siblings comment, this only works if you're not a captive audience.
Lenovo is great at this. Their absurd $3,000+ laptops are conveniently priced near market value after their perpetual 50% off LENOVOJUNE, LENOVOJULY, etc. coupons are applied. You don't even have to do work to use them, they're usually automatically applied at check out.
Talk about cheapening your brand and pandering to people who only buy things "on sale" out of principal. It almost feels insulting to the customer.
This is one thing Apple does right - there are no sales or discounts, it costs what it costs regardless of which US holiday is approaching.
Apple devices go on sale on other platforms (I only look at Amazon, but it must be the same for any other retailer), that's how they differentiate.
As device registration and customer support still goes through Apple, it makes absolutely no difference wherever you buy it, and anyone looking for a lower price will wait for Prime day or any other bigger sales in the year.
Exactly. When I bought a pair of USB-C AirPods Pro recently they were 70 dollars cheaper from Best Buy vs Apple's website and I was able to add AppleCare with no issue.
They appear to currently be 60 dollars cheaper and have been in a sort of perma sale of varying degrees for the last 6 months (not unlike the Lenovo example).
It’s a marketing tactic way broader than the “new economy”
You know coupons in the newspaper? They serve exactly the same purpose.
Some people take time and effort to cut them out every week. Others don’t and pay full price.
It’s a way to make customers who are willing to pay more pay more
Edit: referring to the “always on sale”, not to the cancellation promotions
Have you disputed the charge? If the bank is refusing to honor your request, that’s both reason to switch banks and to try small claims court to get your money back.
There are two different kinds of Revolut throwaway cards: One that works just one time, and one that works indefinitely, and you need to cancel it manually. The one that you cancel manually works more often, for example in scenarios where they will first make a "test" deduction of $0.00, and then the real deduction.
I can only go by the information you provide, and my own experience that banks are responsive if you want to switch out your credit or debit card because it's being abused by someone.
Is that a pro-tip? I mean, I wouldn't give them a penny more for having this attitude towards customers in first place. The real pro-tip at least for me would be to pay once for a product that I can use without being enslaved to a for-life subscription. It really really pisses me off how most commercial software is offered today. F** all that.
I get the impression from my friends in the animation industry that Toon Boom’s animation suite pretty much dominates the industry. Flash hung on a while but TB has so many features designed for the particular craft of assembling a small army of people who collaborate on making a moving and talking drawing.
I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by limiting the effects, and “constantly pushing the limits of Illustrator’s effect system” is one of the reasons I want to move on from it.
Toon Boom’s domination really is very regional. But that’s one reason I list flash as having competitors.
In Canada, you’ll find a lot of the larger shops use toon boom and the smaller shops use Flash/Animate.
When you move out to Asia, the balance changes quite a bit the other way but you also see a lot more players in the form of OpenToonz etc entering. Especially on the anime front.
god it's like there's actual multiple viable options, is that even legal any more. My animation friends are all in the LA scene; they all started out in Flash cartoons in the 00s and some of 'em kept on using it for a pretty long time but it seems to have pretty much vanished.
I really gotta make some time to grind on tutorials for Toon Boom or this copy of Moho 14 I have on my computer and see if I actually want to animate again once I get over the hump of "how does this giant toolkit even work".
> Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off
I have found the same to be true with SiriusXM radio as well. You can ask the chat bot to cancel your account when a promo runs out and it will take you back down from $19/mo to like $6/mo. I setup a calendar item so I know when the promo is going to expire and do this. It's a PITA but it only takes 5 minutes.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I'm called them at.)
I don't think there's such a huge gulf between Krita and Photoshop for digital artists. I do work with it professionally all the time, mostly dealing with texture work for CG.
For Photoshop specifically (and perhaps other CC programs, but I'm less familiar with them) another problem compared to alternatives is that a great wealth of instructional material (tutorials, paid video courses, etc) are built around Photoshop.
While there are ways to make alternatives more Photoshop-like, there's always going to be unreconcilable differences which bring unwelcome friction when the goal is to learn whatever the material is teaching rather than screw around with keybinds and UI configuration.
More projects that aim to adjust existing FOSS alternatives to more closely clone Photoshop would be of great help here. There used to be GIMPShop[0] that did this for GIMP but it's unfortunately been defunct for a long time now.
Krita is geared towards illustrative work versus photo vs editing/product design. While it can do both, it misses or is behind in several areas
1. Photoshop has a much better template and smart referencing system
2. Photoshop has better photo retouching tools in the form of healing or switching working spaces to tune filters.
3. Photoshop has better image manipulation tools like warping and perspective correction
I do really like Krita, and I’ve replaced Photoshop use for illustrative use cases for several studios and individuals with it. So it really depends what you do, but Photoshop just has a lot of little and big things that add up which prevents me switching myself.
Yes. Photoshop, which is photo and image editing software for photographers, has more features for photographers than Krita, a painting program for artists.
That’s a pretty curt dismissal given that tons of artists paint in photoshop and have for decades.
Photoshop is a great painting app that rivals krita for painting. That it does other things well or originated for just photo editing doesn’t take away from that.
Davinci Resolve is miles better than Premiere. I don't do a lot of compositing, but I know more and more people are starting to use it over After Effects as well.
Resolve is better than Premiere on its own (hence why I list premiere as having competition) but the Fusion compositing is not a comparison for After Effects, but rather for something like Nuke.
While After Effects does some compositing (and it’s decent at it but poor in comparison to Nuke/Fusion), its’ stronghold is motion graphics. There’s very little other than Cavalry to compete with it.
And with that comes the benefit of Premiere: live updates to my edit when using After Effects.
> Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your sub and they’ll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to 60% off.
The issue though is this often only works for many subscribers for a small window each year, when the *annual* "renewal" occurs.
The problem with much of the Creative Suite subs, and what the FTC are also suing over, is that it looks and smells like a monthly sub you can cancel at any time, but you often can't - its “annual paid monthly” as the linked article describes.
The big problem is their ridiculous “annual paid monthly” plan - you often can't cancel, or it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to escape “annual paid monthly”. I know plenty of people who needed Creative Suite for one month who fell into the “annual paid monthly” trap assuming it was a typical subscription service.
> "Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year."
If you are stuck in this situation open a chat with support and ask to cancel with the reason "My new employer is paying for my Adobe subscription" to get the cancellation fee waived.
I can't guarantee it still works but it worked for me and at least 3 others I know of
Adobe deserves to get slapped down for this practice and I hope they are forced to change it, but something to try in the meantime
You can also sometimes get it very cheap via random country specific deals. They had one last year for Latvian students. Excecpt it had zero checks in place to ensure you actually were a student. I think I paid something like $4 for a year of Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premier, Adobe Stock, etc.
Of course it goes without saying, if you do this use a burner card. They dont ask for/check for a valid address or anything like that so when it comes to the stupidly complex to cancel renewal process you just walk away and let their threats go to an empty inbox.
I've got zero issue with anyone pirating their software at this point, Adobe deserves it for the crap they've pulled over the last few years.
You are spot on about Adobe's products not having adequate alternatives. I see a lot of new artists online saying to use Affinity or Gimp, but they do not compare. Even Blender lovers, myself included, who have embraced the open source alternative would be shocked to see what features they are missing compared to the top tier tools like Maya.
I'm curious why certain categories of software receive little to no competition, while others see a lot. I feel that Silicon Valley's focus on social media oriented smartphone apps has drained a lot of the talent and capital that could have been working on alternatives to Microsoft Office, Adobe's suite, Maya's 3D, etc.
Procreate is an excellent example of a young team coming in and dominating the tablet art tool market. For a measly $12 you own procreate forever, and it is easily the most functional art tool on the iPad. I don't know why we haven't seen similar attempts at Adobe's dominance anywhere else.
"FTC charges Adobe their annual Business Practices fee"
Not to be a pessimist, but what's the chance this is just another suit that's a rounding error compared to the revenue Adobe gains from these unethical business practices in the first place?
The FTC has been more aggressive and actually doing their job under this administration. Idk if this particular case will have a satisfying conclusion, but I'd say the chances are as good as they've ever been.
I wonder how far the chain one can go to punish individuals for something like this .. can a dev or qa tester get fined for this? Should they get fined?
Or any gym I've tried. Washington sports club kept charging me after email/verbal confirmations that the account was closed. Trying to do it in the app resulted in a "server error" lmao.
Had to pester them so many times, and of course they never refunded me for the months where they lied to me and I thought the account was canceled
My local-to-Chatt gym (unfranchised) allows no-hassle cancelation, pro-rated.
I now only attend the county's free gym, which is actually decent (and true athletes, not just social meetups); or buy a daypass to local college facility ($5).
Agencies have the powers specifically delegated to them by Congress. That’s different in every case because there are different politicians in power when various laws are passed and the political factors vary. In cases like this, you really want to contact your congressional representatives because they will hear a lot from the companies who see enough revenue to make it a lobbying point and might figure that the general public doesn’t really see it as a priority.
As an outsider, I'm just surprised to find out another weirdness of the US system :) I have no congresscritter to contact.
Around here if an agency is regulating something it also has the power to impose changes and/or fine. Those can be contested in court but involving the legal system for years isn't the first step.
They often do here as well. It’s just very situational whether they have the ability to levy a fine directly, force action (e.g. the FAA can decide that an airplane is unsafe and they’re immediately grounded), or sue. Consistency would be nice, but every time someone proposes changes they’re going to hit industry opposition unless there was just a big failure, at which point they’ll probably try to let it go forward enough for the initial news to fade and then water it down.
Cancelled my lightroom cloud account last night and was very surprised at the "early cancellation fee". Only made me upset and more determined to move off to something else! Very happy to see this post this morning.
Darkroom [1], my scenario is I am editing my photos on my iPad and it can do all the same basic edits and modifications with it and I can use my photo library to organize things rather than have them in Adobe's cloud
Gave it a try. Seems to be very lacking for any type of bulk operations, and little things like saving your edits requires too many steps. For instance, I wanted to modify the coloration of a set of photos that I'd shot in one session. Yes, I can apply the adjustments, then copy and paste those to another photo, but I can't do that in-bulk, so you need to apply it to each individual photo. Then the save workflow requires that you popup the save modal, then choose what type of save you wish to perform.
I'm currently on the free trial of Capture One Pro. It's a $300 license for the current version, which gets updates for a year. It's super pricey but it's the only program I've found that plays well on Mac, has the features I want and is intuitive to use.
When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop ever again?" type of product.
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.
> When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop ever again?" type of product.
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.
agree but I would reverse the cause and effect.. launch great experience on the web+cloud to gain traction.. then Because it is so Easy to Do It, change the terms of service, the benefits, the longevity, the billing practices, the prices.. etc
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" )
If I am reading the post you're replying to correctly they're saying that maybe it's not that they launched with a good value prop with a plan to screw you later, but rather that because the initial launch went so well and everyone says what a good value it is that maybe the SaaS vendor says to themselves, 'screw it, we're delivering so much value, let's raise prices'. But I agree that there's little difference between the two ultimately.
Adobe did not "capture" the old single license sales customers, they are just walking away from them.. any way they can, into the cloud.. the results look similar but thinking about the power dynamics that drive them, here...
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
Or you do what everyone else does, which is force everyone to adopt the SaaS model by revoking their licenses or otherwise bricking the software.
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.
100% agree. I would also add an explicit exception to the DMCA. Cracking copy protection on software you bought legally because the copy protection has failed in a way that prevents the software from working should be legal.
That's sadly why I stick with Windows. I am perfectly comfortable in Linux, but I know my next place of work will inevitably throw Windows hardware at me. And some vital professional tools only have Linux support in the most superficial stance.
But yeah, trying to make sure anything else I have control over.
You can "own" a copy of Adobe's software (like earlier Creative Suite DVD versions) but then Adobe essentially bricked them by killing the activation server.
I recall they used to have a free Photoshop CS2 download on their site with the activation removed. Strictly for existing license owners of course, but anyone could download it ;-)
Interesting. I just installed a copy of CS4 Design Premium and InDesign CS5.5 without issue. Looks like CS5+ still has live activation servers, and CS4 didn't seem to care that its were gone.
"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. "
I know, I read that too. And I also have an official boxed copy of CS4 Design Premium that I installed from the DVDs, which loads and works without issue. Weird!
I don't think I tried with anything older than CS5 stuff, but blocking the program in the firewall and putting in any valid CD key (people posted them online) worked flawlessly.
I assume it worked this way so people with airgapped machines could still be sold the software.
An activation-free version of CS3 was available for about a year after the activation shutdown. You had to create an Adobe account, provide your original serial number, and get a new offline installer and new offline serial number to use with it.
Source: have Offline CS3 Master Collection and use PS CS3 daily to clean up my flatbed scans https://i.imgur.com/8tS8ced.png
This is honestly why I advocate for pirating software.
I purchased it once. So long as I don't make copies and send it to people I should be allowed to use it no matter what.
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.
Every corporate leader has the opportunity to "bring value" to the company by upping the subscription fee a few dollars. Profits increase, shareholders are happy. Better than trying to solve twenty year old bugs or worse, refactor legacy code.
And we keep falling for it, too. Folks on HN and elsewhere are fawning over Fusion360, despite Autodesk having a long history of being worse than Adobe and pulling the rug on individual features more than once.
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 up Creative Suite, Office365, Xbox Game Pass, Spotify, Netflix, Squarespace, and whatnot, it's all of sudden a big chunk of your disposable income.
For the longest while, Adobe charged Canadians in USD despite having an entirely Canadian version of the site etc. It meant that the price of the software varied each month!
I've been on the $29.99 full Creative Cloud plan for over 2 years. I got it as a Thanksgiving offer in 2021. Just last month they told me the deal was over and I needed to pay full price. I went to faux-cancel and they gave me 2 free months, but I still need to find a way to get a reduced price again.
They should release a home-user version with some restrictions unpalatable for commercial use - eg. "Can only edit 5 files per month" or "All edited images get non-commercial use licenses attached".
Or even "May only be used during evenings and weekends".
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.
I think there's multiple downsides, but the biggest one is that it makes it a massive pain in the ass for any price-conscious users to decide whether it's worth paying for.
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.
> it makes it a massive pain in the ass for any price-conscious users to decide whether it's worth paying for.
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.
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
> Somebody please show me a downside to this model?
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.
> 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.
I had forgotten that they offer the 'Elements' range where you can buy Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements. These are stripped down versions of the full software, but they are not subscription. You pay once, you own it.
Not for students.
CS6 single product was up to $250, CS6 DS $350, CS6 MC $800 compared to CC 1st year $240 increasing to $360.
If you only needed a single product you were off worse after one year. Even doing a bachelors which required all products would have been less expensive with the one time fee if you had the money.
Back in the day (a decade ago) you would go to the lab which had Autodesk/Solidworks/Matlab/Adobe/$expensive-software installed instead of buying it for your personal (and probably underpowered) device. It was one of the few things that your tuition actually paid for.
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.
Our lab used to let you remote desktop in for that stuff, but it was unreliable at best (especially during project crunch times) because anyone physically at the lab could kick you off your computer by unplugging it. Was still really nice to have if you were letting a rendering run overnight.
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.
It is 100% enshittification. The definition is even in the linked article:
> 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.
Enshittification usually refers to companies that run two-sided markets ("platforms"), like rideshare and delivery apps. Adobe raising prices on everyone isn't really the same thing. Enshittification works by first subsidizing everything for everyone, then alternately squeezing the sellers and buyers on the platform by increasing their cut and raising prices. It's about playing a game where you alternately squeeze one side or another of a marketplace that you control.
Adobe doesn't really run a platform, they're selling a product and finding ways to raise the price.
I don't think any of that stuff really follows the definition as quoted though. That definition is all about a middleman squeezing buyers and sellers. That people use it to mean "any scummy business practice that uses lock-in or corner-cutting to squeeze customers" doesn't make those uses fit that definition.
That stuff is not new, enshittification was coined to refer to the relatively new ways that platforms started to squeeze people.
The original word is really just descriptive of the unpleasant side of optimization you see in commerce.
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.
> Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
I am not saying he is using it to say ‘things are getting worse’ but rather ‘things are being optimized in ways we don’t like by large companies’ which is meaningfully different.
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.
They subsidized things for everyone by turning a blind eye to personal piracy for so many years. They got entrenched as a defacto standard, and then they started tightening the vice.
It's enshittification. Why defend a multibillion dollar corporation who doesn't care about you one bit?
I'm not defending them, I'm saying that their behavior is probably a different sort of bad. There are lots of ways for companies to extort consumers, they can't all be "enshittification".
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.
The point I mentioned isn't enshittification by itself so much, but combined with the predatory dark patterns, I personally consider it enshittification as a whole.
Are you sure you read the article? The very first sentence of the article is, "Enshittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products[.]" (Emphasis added.) If the quality remains the same, or improves, it's by definition not decreasing, and therefore not enshitification. Furthermore, as other people pointed out, this is a reference to two sided marketplaces.
Just because there's a new buzzword, doesn't mean it applies. In fact, it usually doesn't.
For people who hate or simply can't justify the subscriptions, big shout out to Affinity suite v2. Currently 50% off at $83, permanent universal license for Mac/Windows/iPad
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.
Another caveat is that if your workflow requires dealing with complex text layout on a regular basis (e.g., Asian languages), Affinity suite support for it is pretty much non-existent. For example, lack of a working right-to-left support, no vertical text support for CJK, broken tone markers handling in Thai layout, lack of complex word-break for any languages that is not space-based, etc.
Sadly, Adobe is still the only option in the market for this.
It's really striking to see two things in this thread: (1) complaints about price, and (2) repeated (cjk, lightroom library management, a half dozen other things) that Adobe offers features that have no competition. Feels like Adobe is charging for being the sole provider for various features that people need.
Photoshop has been around for 34 years, even if they jacked the price up to $500/month nobody would be able to show up with feature parity to compete for 100% of their customers right away. It's a heck of a moat.
Sure, but the thread is also full of people claiming Adobe is rent seeking. Charging a high price for differentiated, unique features that competitors haven't replicated is not rent seeking. That's just capitalism.
But you can keep using your previous version after you stop getting updates. With Adobe you have to keep paying, even if you don't care about updates anymore.
Exactly! I will say that Adobe still does add features to the CC subscription[1], but the things I spend 90% of my time using in CC haven't changed all that much in the past decade. I'd be OK with continuing to use an older version. I only have a CC subscription because it's what my employer uses. If we all used Affinity instead, I'd be perfectly OK with that and we'd have more money in the bank.
[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.
I expect the previous versions to stop getting compatibility updates which is a bigger problem on macOS than Windows, but that's the deal with buying a license vs monthly 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.
I was one of those who wasn't supportive back then, because it was pretty clear where things would go from there. They wouldn't switch for a subscription model to earn less money, that was sure.
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.
And that cost per month is for a 12 month contract that if you try to cancel early will require you to pay 1/2 of the remaining contract to get out of it. You cancel on day 32... that'll be 5.5 x your monthly payment to cancel.
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.
It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop
ever again?" type of product.
Nah. Lightroom is/was the primary Adobe product I used. Pretty much the only new features they've ever introduced that meant anything to me revolved around supporting new cameras. At $80 for a perpetual license it was great because I rarely upgrade my camera bodies. Aside from supporting new cameras the only other worthwhile to me feature Adobe's introduced was a 64-bit installer. Yeah, LR 4.4 was a 64-bit app, but the installer remained 32-bit because Adobe is that lazy or greedy.
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.
> 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.
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
honestly, i found a solution for this. it is a little unethical, but is as unethical as them forcing me to never be able to unsubscribe (there's only a short time where you can unsubscribe once per year). i have a card that i use only for recurring subscriptions, when one of the recurring subscriptions gets problematic, i first block the card (this is important!) and then delete it and create a new one. this way they can not continue to charge me.
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.
I don't want to pay for a subscription for software I use thrice a year. I was looking forward to having Affinity's suite be the replacement, where I could buy it, and use it.
However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription. Since they've been bought by canva, it's just a matter of time.
I even went so far as to get Affinity Photo being able to start on Wine. But lost interest since their acquisition.
(I'm sure people will question why I don't just use inkscape, krita, or gimp. And its because all of them have a subpar vector experience IMO)
Corel's (or whatever they call themselves now) stuff is generally pretty ok, and most of their stuff still lets you buy it outright.
I don't know much about Affinity Photo but Paint Shop Pro and Aftershot have been "good enough" for the limited uses I have for photo editing (though I'm definitely far from a professional). CorelDraw is, I think, a very decent vector drawing program if nothing else.
CorelDraw is great, but for years they were also subscription-only. In the last six months or so they finally started offering a single-price license again--at a prohibitive level.
I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.
Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.
All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.
But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).
I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.
Fair enough. I've never paid full price for any Corel product. They're frequently on Humble Bundle where you get a bunch of them on the order of like $30 total. It looks like right now there's even a sale going on: https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-cre...
My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date, but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials package.
I'm stuck with CorelDraw X8 which dates to 2016. If they were selling a buy-it-once license in 2020, I wasn't aware of it. I swear they had switched to subscription-only by then? But maybe it happened that year and I missed the last opportunity to buy a permanent license.
Last time I looked at Essentials, it looked to me like they had hamstrung it too much. I don't remember the specific restrictions they put on it, but I didn't want what they were selling. Might be worth another look with the Humble Bundle though.
I ended up grabbing the Affinity bundle since it's half off despite concerns about Canva. I'd expect even if they end up moving to a subscription I'd at least have the versions I bought for an extended amount of time. I still have a working copy of Photoshop CS 5 as well. Hopefully we see Affinity remain committed to affordable non subscription plans but if they don't I think the one time purchase will last me a long time. If they put out a version 3 without subscription and it's compelling i'll upgrade, if not i'll continue to use 2 for I'm sure years to come.
Completely agree! I also refuse to put gas in my car because I know that prices will go up later...
Or on a more serious note: I use Affinity professionally (previously PhotoShop). Why would I care the slightest about what they might or might not do with their pricing model in the future? I need software that delivers right now.
If you don't want to pay for the car, why are you complaining about car dealerships? I don't think anyone here is opposed to the concept of paying for professional tooling in any way, shape, nor form.
For the same reason that you would care with Photoshop or Premier or Lightroom; you're investing money in learning and building your workflow around a tool that is guaranteed to go down the subscription and enshittification path.
Your computer will not explode if or when Affinity changes to a subscription model. You'll still have the software and can use it until the next ice age if you please.
Well, until there's an OS update. Most of us have gone down this road before - the old software works until it doesn't, it runs on the old hardware until that doesn't, it's usable until it's not. The actuarial table for any given software release is north of 5 years and south of 10.
We're talking about professional software. If you're a professional you have a machine dedicated to that work. If a software update will break software you've paid for and need to use, you don't update that machine. Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run time for paid pro software. You can also keep the old machine around for the software and have a new machine for other needs.
If I was successful with my career, I hope I would have saved up 50 dollars in 10 years so I could buy the new version of the software or buy an old used computer to run my old version on.
> If you're a professional you have a machine dedicated to that work. If a software update will break software you've paid for and need to use, you don't update that machine.
Yes, that's exactly the right thing to do. Only then the security folks will start whining about factories and shipping terminals being controlled by ancient PCs with WinXP (not to mention power plants with hardware and software older than most of us on this site). In fact, the security folks and the business folks align enough on it that professional software is force-feeding you updates too, and you can't do anything about it unless you're a multinational megacorp and can afford to make bespoke deals with OS vendors.
> Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run time for paid pro software.
5 is the minimum. Legal minimum for some documents, in some cases.
Still, the problem usually isn't upgrades per se, it's that universally these days, newer versions of products are almost always inferior in terms of functionality, performance and ergonomics. So, I might be easily able to afford refreshing my software tools after 5 ways of using them to earn a living, but then I discover they all went to shit and new versions are worse than the versions I have (and even worse, half of the software is now subscription-only).
> So, I might be easily able to afford refreshing my software tools after 5 ways of using them to earn a living,
That's just how all of tech works. Some pockets of software may be able to be fundamentally unchanged over decades, but the fact is that the software I used 5 years ago is not the same as the software I used now. Your choices are the same as ever:
- Don't upgrade for as long as possible
- Upgrade and eat the inefficiency cost for a while until replacements are found/made
- go the FOSS route and either do it yourself or rely on the goodwill of the community until its inevitable next schism.
There is no perfect solution unless you're willing to become a domain expert in that specific kind of tech and roll your own.
The only silver lining is that most of the fundamentals remain the same so you're not starting from square one. Whatever new web stack is being used today is still probably based upon React, which is based on JQuery, which is based Javascript. ES6 isn't a complete recvolution from ES3 (even if there are new major concepts to learn over those 15 years). So you have some knowledge transfer of seeing where and how things.
This is true on Mac but Windows is remarkably good at allowing most old software to still run. I still run games and professional applications from the 90s on Win11 and only occasionally need to set "compatibility mode" or change resolution. I haven't even had to resort to running a VM with an old version of Windows yet (although that's always an option).
And that's exactly what subscription model kills. Stuff only works for as long as you pony up - and it's only the newest, stuff. When the new version turns to be less useful and more bloated than previous versions, you're out of luck, because eventually the old version won't authenticate against license servers.
Not to mention, the push to run everything in the cloud, via the browser, means that for a lot of software, you literally have zero flexibility and control.
>The actuarial table for any given software release is north of 5 years and south of 10.
even at full price, $200 for 5 years of usage from a professional tool seems pretty good for me. That's $3.33/month if you want to convert to the subscription model way or thinking.
No way any potential subscription model would be cheaper here if you are in it for the long haul.
I just don't understand why you're using your own time to defend predatory business models that inevitably screw over the user. You can't just sit on an old piece of software and expect it to work forever because the companies do not want that. I know you're not being malicious but we have so many receipts of this happening. People have plenty of reasons to not want to support companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in this direction.
10 years down the line their DRM stops working because you're on locked down, ancient hardware and they don't want to support your OS anymore. Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Maybe you need to replace your motherboard and it counts as a "new" computer, and it no longer runs on. Maybe they take away your ability to reinstall it on another device because offline authorization no longer is enabled, and their online services don't support your old license. Both of these were done by reason studio. I hope you didn't buy a $400 perpetual license and expect it to work until the ice age.
Maybe they change the ToS like blizzard, and you now have to agree to the new ToS to continue using the software you bought and paid for?
Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to, like the whole unity fiasco?
I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user. Every single company screws us over and I hate to see people defend it because they think you can just opt out of it.
And I don't understand why you would write such a long rant about something that hasn't happened and "get sick of people". Learn to love yourself and you can love others.
I'm happy to pay for quality software, both professional and consumer. With Affinity it took exactly one project to recoup much more than the cost ($50) of the software, and I expect that to be true for 99% of graphics professionals.
> Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to
Yeah, and then I'll laugh my ass off at them. It's like me writing that anybody who reads this comment owes me a hundred dollars. Now you read it, now you pay. Or not.
Part of growing up is to understand that other people are unique and can't be blamed for what somebody else has done. A child will not understand this, because to him it is only "me and other people" that exists. Every company has to be blamed for the wrongs that some companies did, even the competitors. Every woman has to be blamed for the wrongs that some woman did in the past. Every person who disagrees with me on the internet is exactly the same person who has mistreated me in the past, they make me sick. And so on.
It's the easiest thing in the world to be distrustful. You're never going to be wrong, because you'll never take that risk and you'll effectively repel all people who don't like to be treated as if they were dishonest or be insulted at random. But what kind of people will you be left with?
>You can't just sit on an old piece of software and expect it to work forever because the companies do not want that.
also because users don't want that. I don't think any of us would necessarily be satisfied playing Doom 1993 on Windows 95 because 256KB of RAM is all we'll ever need.
I'm not even saying it's a bad way to live, to be honest; that's just not how user demand works. They'll inevitably want Doom 2/3/4/etc. until the franchise jumps the shark or stagnates into nothingness.
> People have plenty of reasons to not want to support companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in this direction.
Well we're both probably cynically minded here on this topic. It's equally unlikely, but I've taken the path of walking away wherever I can for companies that keep pulling off these stunts. I've more or less de-googled myself over the last year outside of mail and Youtube, for instance. At some point, consumers need to put their foot down, but they won't. How many times does it need to happen before we evaluate who's really the fool?
>Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Yes, that's why I don't even trust the benevolent actors for stuff I really care about. If I can find it on GOG, it's likely DRM free and I have no worries about what Steam's runtime looks like 20 years from now. The internet may flame me for that mentality, but I remember when Google was in similar acclaim, down to their long buried "Do No Evil" motto.
Again, not perfect, but the worst thing to do is dump all your eggs in one basket. Always be on the lookout for your own interests and be ready to jump.
>I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user.
I agree with you the same way I agree that locks in an ideal world should not be required. They shouldn't be; I should have a reasonable sense of privacy, respect and security among my fellow man. an unexpected knock on the door shouldn't give me anxiety over it possibbly being an irrelevant sellsman, a crazy relative, or simply a package I forgot about.
But I'll keep my keys ready in the meantime until that ideal time comes. I can only look out for myself until then.
I bought the Affinity suite and have gotten good value out of it. If at some point in the future new versions go to a subscription model, I just won't buy them.
Is that the exact situation that subscription pricing (in principle) solves? If you only use it thrice a year then you can pay for it as you go instead of needing pay for the thing outright.
none of these companies offer monthly subscriptions - they offer a 12-month subscription billed monthly or annually (with a slight discount), your choice.
This is adobe's whole schtick with the cancellation fees for example. You pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance as a termination fee. So if you subscribe 3 times a year for a month and then immediately cancel you are paying more than a yearly subscription.
Even a 1 month subscription for 2 hours of need is too much though. Thrice a year, for a few hours each... But have to pay 3 full months usage is nuts. 12+ months is even crazier.
Bill per hour would be OK.
Or buy once, give me 1 year of free updates but I can use it as-is forever (like intellij) is also fair.
But some of these subscriptions, including the one I think this thread is about, will obligate you for a period of time. This happened to me, signed up to a trial of Adobe to test a graphic designers pc, once it ticked over to paid, I was told that I had a 12 month sub, just billed monthly. (I screeched and pulled my hair out and went all karen and they ended it, but they wouldnt do it twice)
The "Apps on Tap" enthusiasts got absolutely mogged by Adobes commercial reality.
Yep. You’re usually signed up for an “annual plan, paid monthly”. I apparently am and wasn’t even aware of it until I tried to cancel it one time.
To cancel, you need to immediately pay out 50% of the rest of the year. And you’ll lose access to the products at the end of the month.
So unless you’re not even getting 50% of the subscription cost worth of value out of it, it pretty much makes more sense to continue it and cancel just before renewal.
As soon as you run over that 7 day trial, you’ve got a 30 day window a year from now where you can cancel without penalty. Miss it or forget? Set a better reminder for next year…
I use Lightroom and Photoshop very irregularly. I now can't access Photoshop 5 that was installed on my Macbook because it doesn't work with the current MacOS. So now not only can I not deauthorize the license to free it up for my Windows machine, I can't actually use it either.
I keep older hardware running older OS's for just this reason.
There was one version of Apple's Photos for MacOS that has not been topped in terms of its retouch tool (actually got much, much worse). Since I restore a lot of old scanned-in family photos I keep this aging iMac just for photo editing.
It might be a bit esoteric ... but the Photos that shipped after macOS Sierra introduced a clever new editing view built upon, I think, CoreImage so that it could do all the processing of levels, temperature, etc. extraordinarily fast — leveraging the hardware — for real-time changes as you dragged the sliders.
Unfortunately the retouch tool in Photos for cloning, fixing scratches, etc. took a huge step backward in performance. Like it became unusable.
So simply for dealing with old scanned family photos that have lots of scratches, tears, etc., I have stuck with Sierra Photos on my one machine.
>However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription
why not buy Affinity now and use it until you need to upgrade? unless there's some horrible TOS, I'm sure that tool as is will last you 5+ years before some new hit feature drops in.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 378 ms ] threadI was canceling a several years old standalone radio subscription, and not trying to cancel at the end of a car's free trial, and I wonder if that's why I had such difference experience.
A couple months ago when the trial ran out on a different car it was like you said, over and done with in 5 minutes.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I called them at.)
Afterward I asked him about it. He laughed. Tom was Dad’s favorite cousin’s ex-husband. Whenever something like this came up, Dad would give them Tom’s info. He’d been doing this for years, and occasionally updated the address as needed.
Dad’s no longer with us but I still Tom up for things to this day. Should I ever start getting SiriusXM spam, so will Tom.
Gym memberships and newspaper subscriptions is what needs to get targeted next. They are aggressive and lots of gyms will only cancel in-person, even if you move away.
That's still 2 minutes and one phone call too much.
Phone call anxiety is a real thing. No idea why I have it, but I do
There is no legitimate reason to limit the options for canceling a subscription or adding barriers to the process. It's always an anti-consumer move. If you don't want your customers to cancel, then don't give them a reason to.
Surprisingly, they actually did stop calling.
SiriusXM never called me, but I got mail from them every damn week. I had even tried telling them to stop sending me mail, but still got it until I just changed my address to some bullshit fake address that didn't exist.
They have good products and I gladly pay for software I use. But the whole cloud service experience has not been good for me. Cory Doctorow coined a word for this that I am too polite to use.
Planet Fitness requires in-person or a mailed note for cancellation (unless you “move” to California which legally requires companies to provide online cancellation if you can sign up online)
Good to know that's not a thing anymore, i don't know how that was ever legal to allow someone to subscribe through one medium, and not allow them to unsubscribe through the same medium.
I find it strange because the rest of Amazon seems pretty good in this regard.
This seems like a case where Adobe is behaving unethically.
I wonder if long-term Adobe employees have the sense about their ethics being more flexible now, versus when they started at Adobe?
The others are kind of complicated to me. They're so large that the sins kinda get diluted. How many products does Microsoft have? How many dark patterns do they need to make use of among those products before you can no longer justify working for the corporation as a whole? Can you work on Microsoft Research because the XBox Game Pass subscription cancellation is problematic? I think I could justify that to myself just fine, but I imagine that's a personal call.
A novel idea let down by a poor example.
To answer your question practically: No, it's just a job, gotta pay the mortgage. And you know companies have a legal duty to be amoral in the quest for profit, right?
We live in a time where so many people work at and/or want to work at ethically dubious large tech companies, we experience overwhelming social pressure to see them as more morally-neutral than they are.
We don't want the cogitative dissonance of hanging out with friends and spending the whole time thinking about what it means to have someone in my life that enables $foo for a living. Are you financially and emotionally ready to quit your job as soon as your employer crosses your line? You did spend time developing and reflecting on your own personal line in the sand, right? And are you're comfortable unabashedly sharing that standard over dinner to your 5 closest friends? What if one works at the place you find most-evil?
No, they don't.
It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma purchase failed.
For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's that people think you don't need to pay a license for generated images, even when they were clearly and provably stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered. If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock people think that's legal now.
So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro. But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and content is made by people from developing economies on Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.
And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.
Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the maximally enshittified manner.
Adobe wasn’t going to risk bad publicity going after some freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than switching at the threat of a lawsuit.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/10/fortune_200_oracle_ja...
As covered here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40639943
So this is not just a thing of the past, sadly.
The primary bit of evidence to the BSA was/is from disgruntled employees "ratting" on their employer. Is that sufficient evidence of a crime to justify a warrant for any TLA to do an investigation? If not, that's the only way you're looking at my computers.
Again, laughing in their face would be my response.
It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).
A perpetual license is not meaningfully distinct from ownership in the context of software - you don't "own" open source software either, just license it for the low, low cost of free.
Your house/car get re-possessed if you stop making their loan payments since they are listed as collateral for the loan, that's different then you not owning them in the first place.
I don't need my builder's permission to add a sofa, paint the walls, or change the locks. But god help you if Adobe finds out that you've changed the DRM locks on the version of Photoshop that you "own".
> you don't "own" open source software either, just license it for the low, low cost of free.
Depends on the license, ones like Unlicense or 0BSD try to opt out of the default copyrighted licensed state of released code.
That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not paying for cloud crap.
SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative to more of Adobe's CS software.
Subscriptions for software that you run on your own machine is a little much tho.
The problem is that there are fewer and fewer pieces of software that aren't hosted somewhere.
If indies need it, then sure, it can be necessary to sustain smaller shops that have to support backend/cloud features and multiple OSes that churn APIs faster than a newspaper.
Haven't found any significant deficiencies, nice tool overall.
I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac. What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free stuff?
In addition to signing documents with Preview, MacOS/Linux/Windows can all print to pdf / pdf/a, and the Notes app on iOS includes a camera-based document scanner that exports to OCR’ed PDF.
I’ve been making PDFs with LaTeX, for decades, but those other tools are more mainstream, and work fine. I can’t imagine why anyone would pay for acrobat these days.
I'd be curious to hear what Preview messed up?
For my work, it was the highly detailed low level stuff. Pre-flight checks/profiles, content tree (object level, including text fragment) browsing, flattening, converting, transforming versions, and so on. It was indispensable for some of those operations, working in a printing business where clients would sometimes send in their own problematic PDFs which we'd need to adjust or inspect to find the error.
(Favourite one: a font was embedded in a PDF that mapped a character using // in its name, which was "fine" on PDF, but on the printer's RIP was converted to postscript for one step, and // in postscript precedes an immediately evaluated name so it stopped parsing and tried to look for it and bombed out)
I also wish Microsoft would pull its head out of its rear and make a preview clone for windows because that app basically supplants acrobat for basic use.
That's also why so many companies practically give their software away through educational licenses.
Lightroom is starting to get some HDR processing capabilities that are interesting to me, but that one feature by itself isn't currently worth paying Adobe's crazy subscription prices just to use a program that I otherwise don't enjoy.
[1] I'm a hobbyist photographer, but not a pro.
If you're using a Mac, the new Nitro from gentlemancoders seems quite good. I haven't made the leap yet though because it's missing file/library management and layers.
When you have complete market dominance, you have little opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming up using your tool.
That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
Ah yes, the google style of offerings.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
LoopStart: Expand into so many markets to then be unmaintainable, then randomly decide to focus on your main stream of revenue again and kill off the side offerings GOTO LoopStart.
I dont know about that, Ive made many songs in Adobe Flash in my time! /s
But what Adobe has done is a series of aggressive egg laying hormonal supplements and force feeding. Yes, it might get them even more eggs for a bit, but it's also a big risk for killing the goose for not a whole lot more eggs, with the side effect of definitely making everyone angry with you.
But I think Adobe, and most companies, would inevitably make this decision. If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most corporations would push that button at least once every few years.
That pretty much sums up all of what business and investment is. Play with money to get more money to play with.
If the shareholders, who management has a fiduciary duty to, are well-diversified, this might even be the right decision.
Basically, if it's mostly index funds and mutual funds holding your stock, you probably should push that button every so often.
The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
I was answering the hypothetical example of one company having this magic button. With the rest of the world operating as normal.
If you want to figure out the optimal approach to many companies having such magic buttons, that's a slightly different question.
You are right that creating companies isn't easy nor trivial. That's why the market so richly rewards creating successful companies from scratch. But that's nothing that a well-diversified investor needs to worry about for this particular decision. You just look at market prices.
> The thing is, the people who own these companies also happen to live in a word powered by the products they produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker accounts, but it’ll be because everything we all use has become scarcer and more expensive.
> Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of abundance?
You seem to assume zero competition? And also that the stock market is really bad at evaluating business decisions (at least worse than you)? If the latter is the case, you should become an investor and make a killing!
Especially if you are living in a world where everyone else is stupidly slaughtering their golden geese, you should be able to pick up some disgruntled ex-employees for cheap and just run a steady ship!
Another important consideration: at some level of abstraction a company is just a legal shell. 'Killing' a company might just mean that the old equity (another legal abstraction) is deleted, and the former creditors turn into equity holders. The operations don't even need to be affected by this at all. Of course, you can also 'kill' a company by shutting it down. But again, that doesn't necessarily remove any of the demand for its (type of) products, nor does it remove the experience of the people working there, nor does it break any of the machinery and hardware.
So if Adobe goes belly up, there are already plenty of other companies willing to fill their former niche.
I can tell you that many people would choose the first.
Yet, that time is frequently cited as the golden age that people harken back to.
You don't need a layoff to migrate a product into minimum maintenance.
There's another way I like to think about what you said: cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did it previously (or the person before you) the less you have available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend of enshitification we see.
> "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not get you a promotion.
It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation. Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should change when your environment does. I just wonder what these people are doing with this money and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
Money is relative. I bet there are things $1bn can buy that we aren't even aware of because we were never exposed to it. Some of those things are probably non-tangible, like the ability to influence politics and change the world.
Of course this doesn't mean everyone is aware of these things but they're still publicly known.
After all, money is nothing else but a token of work. The more money you have, the more work you can make other people do.
I think you're reaching. The things you're talking about have physical impacts. You can't run computers without building chips, developing power systems, and so on. Yes, things of value need not be inherently physical but there are no things that are not connected to the physical world in some form or another.
It's a me problem alright, but I'm in no way unique in refusing to put up with the mountain of grief that the Gimp UX is.
> I've been using it productively for photo editing and web design for two decades+.
I know Gimp must have its share of long term users but they're a miracle to me and I don't know what to say to that. I suppose it's good people reading these threads who are open to giving Gimp a go see there are users for whom it's working out.
I personally learned Paint Shop Pro first, after baby steps of Mac/MS Paint. Later on didn't find Photoshop particularly intuitive... although liked 3.0 on the Mac. It's even worse now according to professional friends.
I've used many others over the years and never had a problem with basic to medium features. They all work roughly the same—WIMP. Point, click.
Gimp works similarly to every other graphics program, so using it for common tasks is not hard. It's not "full of grief." If you can't do it, you either never learned how to use a GUI program properly[1], proceed by rote, or refuse to consult the manual for more specific tasks.
For one thing, it's a helluva lot easier to learn than Blender, which has no chronic troll posts that I've seen.
[1] Not uncommon in web times. The original Apple HIGs might help.
Blender being harder to learn has pretty much zero to do with how great or poor the experience of using it is. On top of missing the point, you're also missing the connection between the lack "troll posts" and what the user experience is like.
But since you're muttering to yourself about troll posts and how it's really just a skills issue, I might as well go and mutter to myself about how great Gimp could be if it had users who had standards instead of being chronic enablers who just cheerfully whistle through the wart fair it is.
I've had my yearly share of discussing Gimp I think. I'll just keep to my routine: see an update, install it in hopes of finding it has changed, and quit it ten minutes later kicking myself for being dumb enough to allow myself to hope.
I think the dark patterns here are garbage, but Adobe has provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.
Is it common for people to upgrade LR or similar software every year?
The Lightroom CC is the mobile/desktop product. That is and always has been a separate "more accessible" product. Moving Lightroom "Classic" (the desktop only product) to a rental only model simply makes profits more accessible to Adobe.
Of course it's the market now, there's no other option from Adobe.Make a serious dent in their business and they will damn sure try. Typically with lawfare.
Lightroom upgrades cost about $80. According to the wiki page Adobe rents Lightroom for $10/mo. That upgrade would only get me eight months of access.
Sure, they've provided a ton of shareholder value for those subscriptions. Customer value? Not so much.And yeah I paid for two upgrades before Adobe moved Lightroom to rental only. The pricing was quite steady. Keep in mind Lightroom had no DRM baked in. No licensing checks, perpetual three seat cross-platform license, etc., etc. That $10/mo is for one seat only.
If the cost to the consumer were close Adobe wouldn't have spent the engineering effort to integrate Lightroom with all of their licensing software and incur the cost of having to keep the rental servers running. You can't predict the future but based on the steady pricing (both rental and perpetual licensed) the rental software is unambiguously more expensive for the consumer.
Maybe Adobe's worried about AI making Photoshop irrelevant. Here's the cautionary note from its latest quarterly report: "While we have released new generative artificial intelligence products, such as Adobe Firefly, and are focused on enhancing the artificial intelligence (“AI”) capabilities of such products and incorporating AI into existing products, services and solutions, there can be no assurance that our products will be successful or that we will innovate effectively to keep pace with the rapid evolution of AI across our Creative Cloud, Document Cloud and Experience Cloud. If we do not successfully innovate, adapt to rapid technological changes and meet customer needs, our business and our financial results may be harmed."
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.
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.
It doesn't really apply to any SaaS.
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
Google has never charged for search, nor has Facebook charged for their social network.
They arguably have bigger reach and market dominance than Adobe has.
There are good reasons Google and Facebook behave in different ways, of course. They aren't stupid, nor do they lack greed.
I am here just arguing that your comical assertion of mono-causality.
'If other companies don't do it yet', perhaps they have good reasons?
However, I understand your point, it's the truth of many businesses that if you're not paying, you're the product not the customer.
No, that wasn't my point. My point was that the mono-causal point
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
is wrong.
> If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
was wrong. Clearly, there's more than one reason that determines how companies behave.
So yeah, they behave exactly the same - towards their actual customers, which are advertisers, not you.
How did we end up in situation were anyone would be paying in this case? Seems like just pure exploitation of their position having combination of add network and popular search engine...
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/services-reven...
And they will need access to all of your data to provide those services.
Which doesn’t require any of your data.
There is nothing I am aware of that Apple has done indicating this and plenty to show they are not (e2e cloud backups, on device llm) they continually find ways to provide services without needing access to your data or keeping your data on device
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/
If you want to make any meaningful statement at all, I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock compared to eg the S&P500 index. (Oh, and be sure to look at the total performance, ie with dividends re-invested. Don't look just at the share-price.)
So why not just comment with exactly this?
Here is a comparison of ADBE and SPY, which ADBE correlates very strongly to SPY, and also in this analysis is AAPL which severly outperformed the SP500:
2003 -> 2013 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&s...
2013 -> 2023 https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-portfolio?s=y&s...
See the difference?
Guess I’m a Toyota subscriber as in 10 years I’ll be buying a new Tacoma
For me I got a 14 for upgraded GPS and satellite, no plans for a 15. My dad is on a 12 and my mom a 10 and totally content. I think my brother has an 11. Most people I know don’t obsessively buy upgrades and those I know who do are actually split between Apple and android- and do it with other things too ie it’s the personality behind it not the company “tricking” them. Some ppl even do it with cars wanting the latest
Thanks for providing the data. Sorry, I was on mobile, so had a harder time finding the numbers in a way that I can share.
> See the difference?
For anyone following at home, here's the important bit for the earlier period:
> The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe], measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.57. Whereas the Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.57.
And for the later period:
> The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe], measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.93. Whereas the Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.69.
Thanks!
Thank you Harvard Business School.
For better or worse, I agree. If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on the table, but if you go too far and piss them off they're going to take away all the money on the table with them.
You're leaving money in their pocket that you might get later
How do you quantify loyalty? Because it seems to me that it's very easy for individuals to prioritise short term gains at the cost of medium and long term losses due to trust erosion
I wonder how much client satisfaction and trust would be worth on the quarterly report, if it could be calculated. I think it would be immense for most companies
The most effective business is getting all the money on the table and making your client happy. Thusly the art of business, ripping off your client without pissing them off.
Absolutely nobody gets ahead in business by selling wares cheaper than what they could have gone for, unless you are deliberately underselling the market to gain share by sheer force of will. Likewise by selling wares higher than what they could have gone for, clients will just look elsewhere because you're just another one of many merchants.
Explain Costco then.
I've seen the same numbers in multiple articles state that 72% of Costco's profits came from the membership fee in a year that they saw record sales.
1. https://teknikveckan.se/det-krisar-hos-viaplay-over-25-proce...
2. See comments - https://twitter.com/ViaplaySportSE/status/180153322166384670...
3. https://omni.se/sparkade-vdn-jobbade-fem-manader-far-18-milj...
https://web.archive.org/web/20240118204920/https://www.fastc...
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog under the Experiments header.
Fortunately they fell into financial troubles before the deal became active.
They massively overpaid for showing all of the matches, to force everyone interested in football to get a subscription. But probably most people just watch it on tv, because "hey, why not, national team of x country (or our own team, for whom winning a match is a miracle) is playing, lets watch it". Not "I will happily pay tens of € each month to some company to watch stuff".
Reminds me of the "men only want one thing and it's disgusting" meme but with executives.
If Photoshop would cost 5€ a month, then everyone would buy it because it is the best.
If Photoshop costs 50€ a month, they make more money, but they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5€ a month product.
I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem. There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top, but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo -- none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo.
Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there are now.
Most (all?) arguments that depend on competition depend on a fair market.
However, no industry or government lives in a vacuum.
Firm X develops enough market dominance to constantly collect vast sums of money to build their war chest.
This war chest is used to buy out competitors, and kill off competing ideas.
Firm X creates clones of lower priced alternatives, then outcompetes the smaller firm.
Firm X uses war chest to fob off or weaken regulators (if any exist), extending the time they can extract rents.
——
Little guys have to survive by getting enough money fast enough to beat the Big guy. Why bother? Get moderately sized, get bought out, and live with your wealth.
PS: I have butchered economics somewhere, forgive me.
Best of all, if the competitor becomes a threat, the company with 50€ a month product can just buy them out.
There are inexpensive stocks yielding close to 10% from dividends, but you are told not to expect an increase in share price. Instead, people go after stocks that yield far less (0-3% dividend with a much higher stock price) but which may experience a growth in share price.
If microchip producers had done what Adobe has done, computers would be developed by adding a few vacuum tubes each year and bumping the cost by 5%.
[1] https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY
The point of this discussion is that Adobe is essentially stealing from its future self by making short-sighted decisions. To a significant extent, they're cashing out their customer loyalty, and that loss of loyalty makes them much more vulnerable to attrition. Gradual attrition will slow their growth; a major attrition event, which they're now making possible, could rapidly reverse it.
Hello, Autodesk
I just purchased affinity suite this year because I’m done with adobe for good now. I don’t see them doing anything to ever win me back as a customer
Compare that to the Affinity suite, which is an amazing collection of programs, especially for the price. They're currently running a sale where you can get everything for $83. If my daughter becomes interested in digital design, I'd be happy to spent that kind of money to encourage her. I'd be very hesitant to subscribe to the Adobe suite, even though that's what I use at work.
[I think you didn't mean 'except']
I haven't had an installed copy of Adobe Reader on any computer I've used in the last 15 years.
Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience (cost, bugs, support, tactics).
I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running releases from 10 years ago.
I'm pretty sure Adobe went for subscription model as one of the earliest big companies and then the trend bloomed all around us - especially on mobile devices.
Few years ago my friend had issues with her computer after being forced to upgrade from Win7 to 10 - it was something drivers related. She reinstalled 7 but couldn't activate her CS anymore because servers for that particular version were no more active. She could use crack and activate the software but she didn't want to risk issues if she'd face the visit from Polish tax office (which is permitted to check legality of software in business). Purchasing new license was out of the question because Adobe already introduced subscription at that point and she, as a single-person company couldn't afford it in expenses. A colleague suggested her Affinity and she gladly switched.
Ugh, what an egregious misuse of public funds. Maybe they should also check the labels on the employees' clothes, in case of illegal knock-offs.
I'm not dissing Affinity Photo. It seems great. And like I said, I use Affinity Designer (never owned Illustrator). all I'm saying is $120 isn't that much money if you actually need the software for work.
If you just need something for a hobby than there's Affinity Photo ($50) as well as gIMP and Krita. There's also Photopea which I find is meeting most of my short term Photoshop needs so I might switch and give them my $$$ instead of Adobe. Though I suspect if I ever have to do 200+ images again I'll find Photopea's workflow to be missing the things that made me pony up last time.
Woman whom I met while being at uni one day calls me and asks for help with installing Photoshop - I ask her why she's doing that. She never was into graphics software and in fact, constantly needed my help with the true computer basics. She said she went to this photography course and the instructor guy ordered everyone to get Photoshop to fine-tune their work. I told her she should be careful because it's likely she'll be maneuvered into a subscription for a piece of software she doesn't need. I also mention Gimp but she refused as they were working with Adobe software only. Fast-forward to a year later: she unsurprisingly cancelled Photoshop sub. Prob with a help of her daughter boyfriend who become the personal tech support guy for the whole family.
There was also a case of finding her a replacement for trial Office she got with her machine with - she was familiar with Word for years. So I suggested OpenOffice and it worked pretty well up until some document formatting issues happen, which were resolved already in LibreOffice. I installed LO but she found its UI hard to use somehow, and in few weeks she opted to redo her papers with some cracked version of Office.
On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if that photography course would be all about getting people trapped within Adobe software and the instructor would be paid for each head he managed to catch.
Then there's my closest friend: for years she was working with pirated Photoshop 7 up until it refused to work on her Win11 machine recently and she had to swap to a yet another pirated CS version. Same goes for managing photos and her drawings pieces - it's always ACDSee 2.xx with the commonly-known-serial-number. I suggested her Affinity giving the example of the woman from my original comment, but she said Photoshop was and is always enough for her and she wouldn't want to learn everything all over again in another UI. Tho, she's enjoying darktable and rawtherapee along with Stellarium for her sky-watching which I suggested her.
---
While two examples may be that much, I do believe being committed to familiarizing itself with software in early stages makes the switch harder later.
I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments... That'd be really interesting stuff to read.
I learned 3d modeling in 3ds Max as a kid, but many years and a CS degree later, I ended up switching to Blender because the license cost of 3ds Max was absolutely mental for a hobbyist ($3,000ish?). This was after the Blender renaissance where they overhauled their UI and stuff. But it wasn't my first time trying to switch to Blender from 3ds Max. In terms of features and workflow, both are very similar (and I actually like some things in Blender more), but it's the little differences that end up bugging you in my experience. Like some alt-mode of a feature being missing. Or the camera handling differently from how you're used to.
I'm currently going through this again now, switching from Unity to Stride game engine. At a quick glance, they're extremely similar, but that's almost worse. It's like coming home to your house and finding that it was replaced with an identical house.
Changing the activation flow in non-obvious ways, dark patterns on the website leading you in circles when trying to download the installers, support chat telling you to just get CC...
Probably not unintentional.
This isn't unique to Adobe—most software companies have followed suit because it just makes sense. What is unique about Adobe is they're doing some really shady things with subscriptions that are abusive to customers, which this suit hopefully ends and serves as a warning for other abusive SaaS corps.
SaaS changed that -- you can now get Photoshop for a month (no annual contract) for $10 [2, 3].
Which is truly just an amazing deal -- that $700 in 2010 would be $1015 today, so the subscription will be cheaper until you use it for eight and a half years, plus you get upgrades. It's a lot fairer for everyone. Except when Adobe pulls sh*t like the FTC is suing them over.
But yes -- SaaS absolutely ended the idea of companies wanting home users to pirate their stuff so companies would buy it.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/12/photoshop.first.look.wir...
[2] https://petapixel.com/how-much-is-photoshop/
[3] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html
I.e. $400-$1200 for a home user is a hard sell for someone that only needs it for a bit, so they accepted the benefit piracy gained them since the sales lost was minimal. Once they could feasibly expect someone to pay $30 for a short term access to some tools (whether true or not, it's the perception of that which matters), I think there's little incentive for them to still allow that piracy.
I'm not sure if this was very forward thinking of them or they just got lucky by allowing the piracy instead of allowing cheap/free home users, but I suspect they would have had a much harder time trying to charge for home users if they had previously offered home user free use licenses to legalize the benefit that piracy was providing. Raising prices is harder than enforcing pricing that was unenforced, and charging something for what was previously free is very hard to get away with without a huge reputation impact.[1]
1: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
I wonder what he thinks about all that in hindsight, putting the many millions he made aside.
First, free samples, then you must pay, once addicted you pay more and more, no money ? go sell these drugs and be an evangelist for us, now your work is our profit.
[1] On a side note, I lament how this phrasing became over-used by adult content creators, thereby making its connotation strongly affiliated with that industry.
if these individual users are deriving commercial revenue from the software, i dont see it as wrong to pursue revenue from them.
Same. But also because Lightroom hands-down beat out everything else in existence at the time (and possibly still does?) for it's fantastic digital-darkroom workflow.
It also wasn't horribly expensive - I think it was around AUD$300 for the full version, and maybe $99 for an upgrade.
(And no, the open source alternatives do not work for my workflow, and they REALLY didn't back then. I might be able to squeak by with inkscape's current tools for typesetting, but having to work between that and gimp to modify type in an interactive layout would be idiotic in a professional workflow. It would be even clunkier than having to quickly develop a native GUI app a la winforms or in X-code but only being able to edit code in a word processor, and then pasting it into the IDE for syntax checking and compilation.)
Changing card is a bit to blunt.
It's slowly getting to the point where a low credit score will bar you from participating in major areas of the economy.
1: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/what-is-credit-c...
You mean this case? Why should that get it dismissed?
This is about abusive (and unlawful) business practices, not a lack of knowledge on the consumer's end. If the customer had full knowledge of the terms before agreeing it would still be unlawful, the law generally doesn't care that the two parties consented to an abusive business relationship.
But ye it is not optimal. You'd probably want to have some record of trying to cancel.
The simplest, safe route is to not give companies the newly updated number. If my Netflix lapses because I forgot to update the number after a card change (whatever the reason), they can email me, and then I will log in to my account and update the card on file.
You dispute the charge, just like any other unauthorized transaction. That's quite different than changing your card number under their feet, and will be received as such by Netflix.
Also, because my account was "closed," I didn't receive any statements notifying me that I was being charged. I only discovered this issue when my credit score dropped by 100 points.
Another thing for the FTC to investigate/stop.
https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau
https://rr.judge.sh/IMG_1150.PNG
Also good when forced to do archaic practices like writing credit card numbers on a form or saying them over the phone.
Allows you to create unique CC#'s for every single company, and you can ship to any address (because the "address verification" will always respond <OKAY>).
This is not uncommon for businesses that use annual subscriptions. Certain gyms are particularly known for this. And with Adobe being so sneaky and aggressive about subscriptions, it wouldn't even surprise me.
Damages are generally limited to the extent to which a contract is performed or not performed, and the non-breaching party generally has a duty to mitigate damages.
So, in other words, you can't continue to perform once the other side has stopped performing and then later claim damages for non-performance you were aware of.
It's possible the contract itself specifies otherwise for this situation, but courts are generally not sympathetic to this sort of end-run around common law contract law.
I'm not saying companies have not tried to collect on this basis. I'm saying that if they were taken to court over the practice that they might lose. If Adobe really does this, it might strengthen the case against them.
While GPDR and others vary, at least with CCPA two data points are enough to get a release of data.
What's done is if general info on you has leaked (say email address / date of birth / social etc) then someone can use that to go to Apple and now request a full dump of everything they have on you.
So you can leverage one dump / leak, and now go after lots of players that have to comply with a data export request to get everything you want to know about someone.
Google / Microsoft / Apple / etc can have a surprising amount of sensitive data (every photo you have taken or that's been shared with you) and even though you've been hit by one data leak, you may not want those folks to be able to leverage that for more leaks.
https://dataprivacy.foxrothschild.com/2019/02/articles/europ...
The liability is usually very high if the companies DON'T release data - so the bias moves to releasing data (there are folks who go around putting requests in and complaining if the data dump is not easy to get).
Ethics and Integrity At Adobe, good business begins with our commitment to the highest ethical standards.
We adhere to the following core principles:
Integrity, by conducting business according to high ethical standards Respect for our employees, customers, vendors, partners, stockholders and the communities in which we work and live Honesty in our internal and external communications and all business transactions Quality in our products and services, striving to deliver the highest value to our customers and partners Responsibility for our words and actions, confirming our commitment to do what we say Fairness through adherence to applicable laws, regulations, policies and a high standard of behavior
We encourage you to read our policies to learn more about the legal and ethical standards we embrace.
AI ethics at Adobe
Australia Modern Slavery Act Statement
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Code of Business Conduct
Code of Ethics
Conflicts of Interest
Global Anti-Corruption Policy
Partner Code of Conduct
Public Policy and Government Relations Policy
UK Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement
Adobe Whistleblowing Privacy Notice
Tell me what you brag about and I'll tell you what you lack.
Though, obviously as per the article, this is a pain to do.
It’s really a shame there’s nothing comparable to Adobe’s products on the really pro-artist end of things.
Companies like Serif have tried with Affinity but it’s lackluster when you really need to do some high end work. OSS stuff like Krita, Inkscape and Gimp have improved a lot but there’s still a huge gulf.
Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace, but the rest of the suite like Illustrator really has no competition when it comes to functionality.
Affinity Designer lacks so many of the gradient tools, shape repetition, and even certain alignment tools.
InDesign similarly has many QoL features that Affinity Publisher lack.
After Effects has some competition but nowhere near the ecosystem it provides.
I guess premiere and animate (previously flash) have a lot of competition but that’s about it?
For reference of where I’m coming from , I own licenses to the full Adobe suite and the full affinity suite. I have professionally done art and programmed for features in multiple domains for a decade and my work has shipped with major products from FAANG-like companies.
I totally think the alternatives can replace Adobe products at some level, but the level of tooling I need and that Adobe has provided, is currently unmatched.
It would be great to see better alternatives someday.
Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
Any subscription service is like this. I sometimes grab a Blue Apron when it's 65+% off which is anytime I want. My ex used to do this with clothing subscriptions, up to 80% off.
There are laws against things being "always on sale". But now they're just being used to punish lazy customers who don't keep up on their promos. Only lazy or ignorant people pay the "real" price.
Oh hey would you look at that, another billion dollar IPO with no plan for profitability went bankrupt. Weird.
After they introduced the Netflix included offer I inquired and they offered an "upgrade" that they swore up and down would not change my current service.
After agreeing, I was traveling and tried to tether and boom nothing. Their upgrade that would change nothing got me out of this grandfathered situation. Over time the cost of Netflix resulted in a higher fee for Netflix and ultimately I pay more for less.
Can't trust any company not to do anything in their power to squeeze another dime out of you.
Recording calls is always tricky because of party consent rules, although telling people you're recording probably puts some guardrails on behavior.
However, every single one of those call centers _also_ instructs their employees to hang up immediately if they are told (or have good reason to suspect) that the _customer_ is recording the conversation. It sounds hypocritical (and it is), but this rule comes from the company's legal department, whose sole job is to shield the company from legal liability.
I figure that it is completely legally unnecessary but it guarantees there’s an understanding between all human participants to expect a recording, which brings it in line with my own personality morality when conversing with an “innocent / relatively powerless human” (my morality exceeds the ethical and legal framework we operate in).
Does anyone know of a reliable way to record conversations?
Technically i've been paying for a voip line for 20 years, and shoehorning it into 3cx was mostly to allow my young kid to be able to call his aunt or someone who isn't on our PBX (grandma and grandpa and his siblings are, already).
believe me i was really annoyed when android stopped being able to reliably record calls. Another alternative that i did actually use is a 3 channel breakout connector on my cellphone, a DAC/ADC, PC microphone and headphones. You could tell the OS to "monitor" the microphone, and record mix (remember those days?). Or now-a-days you'd have to use VAC(virtual audio cable) or something to manage the routing. Speaker out goes to mic in on phone, and vice versa, hit record on your PC, and both the remote side and your side will be recorded. I never got too deep into this because it's a huge hassle unless you have a phone just for this; but multi-channel recordings would let you have synchronous audio, for, say, correct transcriptions.
I am in NY, a one-party state, so I record most important calls for use later.
The whole point of "this call may be recorded" is to establish consent between both parties. In two-party consent states (caller or recipient), you still have to establish consent to record.
If you're calling from a 1-party consent state to a 1-party consent state, you don't have to tell them, although I don't know how that works legally with call center routing.
They don't specify that it may not be you that records it. They are consenting.
My - not a lawyer - understanding of consent laws is they're tied somewhat to privacy expectation laws.
If I tell you I am recording you, your expectation of privacy is lessened. But mine isn't, necessarily, because I control the recording and its potential dissemination.
The former can be interpreted as explicit consent to record the call, after all they provided the consent, but you actually haven't.
Right but that's less important than telling the other party that anyone might be recorded. Because, again, spirit of the law, it loosens expectations of privacy.
Given there are only two parties on the call, only one needs their consent solicited anyway.
“Cool you are recording too, IT will be happy we have an offsite backup” That’s been recorded!
Careful though. Companies are catching on to the "threaten to cancel" trick. Last time I tried this with Comcast, the support rep put me on hold, and then instead of sending me over to the "retention" specialist, just canceled my service and asked if I needed anything else. Oops..
As siblings comment, this only works if you're not a captive audience.
Lenovo is great at this. Their absurd $3,000+ laptops are conveniently priced near market value after their perpetual 50% off LENOVOJUNE, LENOVOJULY, etc. coupons are applied. You don't even have to do work to use them, they're usually automatically applied at check out.
Talk about cheapening your brand and pandering to people who only buy things "on sale" out of principal. It almost feels insulting to the customer.
This is one thing Apple does right - there are no sales or discounts, it costs what it costs regardless of which US holiday is approaching.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th...
As device registration and customer support still goes through Apple, it makes absolutely no difference wherever you buy it, and anyone looking for a lower price will wait for Prime day or any other bigger sales in the year.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/17/24104233/the-m1-macbook-a...
They appear to currently be 60 dollars cheaper and have been in a sort of perma sale of varying degrees for the last 6 months (not unlike the Lenovo example).
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sku/6447382.p?skuId=6447382
You know coupons in the newspaper? They serve exactly the same purpose. Some people take time and effort to cut them out every week. Others don’t and pay full price.
It’s a way to make customers who are willing to pay more pay more
Edit: referring to the “always on sale”, not to the cancellation promotions
https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by limiting the effects, and “constantly pushing the limits of Illustrator’s effect system” is one of the reasons I want to move on from it.
In Canada, you’ll find a lot of the larger shops use toon boom and the smaller shops use Flash/Animate.
When you move out to Asia, the balance changes quite a bit the other way but you also see a lot more players in the form of OpenToonz etc entering. Especially on the anime front.
I really gotta make some time to grind on tutorials for Toon Boom or this copy of Moho 14 I have on my computer and see if I actually want to animate again once I get over the hump of "how does this giant toolkit even work".
I have found the same to be true with SiriusXM radio as well. You can ask the chat bot to cancel your account when a promo runs out and it will take you back down from $19/mo to like $6/mo. I setup a calendar item so I know when the promo is going to expire and do this. It's a PITA but it only takes 5 minutes.
I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
But this time... I just created an account on their website and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I care!
(I've done this with other businesses that don't respect their potential customers with great success! Often the people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give them their company's address or the 800-number that I'm called them at.)
But if we’re limiting it to stuff like illustrations and texturing, it’s very capable. I’ve introduced it in several areas specifically for that.
however for other things like photo retouching and product design, Photoshop has a pretty wide moat at the moment
I wish
While there are ways to make alternatives more Photoshop-like, there's always going to be unreconcilable differences which bring unwelcome friction when the goal is to learn whatever the material is teaching rather than screw around with keybinds and UI configuration.
More projects that aim to adjust existing FOSS alternatives to more closely clone Photoshop would be of great help here. There used to be GIMPShop[0] that did this for GIMP but it's unfortunately been defunct for a long time now.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
1. Photoshop has a much better template and smart referencing system
2. Photoshop has better photo retouching tools in the form of healing or switching working spaces to tune filters.
3. Photoshop has better image manipulation tools like warping and perspective correction
I do really like Krita, and I’ve replaced Photoshop use for illustrative use cases for several studios and individuals with it. So it really depends what you do, but Photoshop just has a lot of little and big things that add up which prevents me switching myself.
Photoshop is a great painting app that rivals krita for painting. That it does other things well or originated for just photo editing doesn’t take away from that.
While After Effects does some compositing (and it’s decent at it but poor in comparison to Nuke/Fusion), its’ stronghold is motion graphics. There’s very little other than Cavalry to compete with it.
And with that comes the benefit of Premiere: live updates to my edit when using After Effects.
The issue though is this often only works for many subscribers for a small window each year, when the *annual* "renewal" occurs.
The problem with much of the Creative Suite subs, and what the FTC are also suing over, is that it looks and smells like a monthly sub you can cancel at any time, but you often can't - its “annual paid monthly” as the linked article describes.
The big problem is their ridiculous “annual paid monthly” plan - you often can't cancel, or it takes a ridiculous amount of effort to escape “annual paid monthly”. I know plenty of people who needed Creative Suite for one month who fell into the “annual paid monthly” trap assuming it was a typical subscription service.
> "Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year."
I can't guarantee it still works but it worked for me and at least 3 others I know of
Adobe deserves to get slapped down for this practice and I hope they are forced to change it, but something to try in the meantime
That used to be true at NYTimes and WaPo. But new WaPo management does the reverse:
With the election coming up, they're determined to raise prices, and they know all they need to about you.1. Get 50% off for 3 months
2. Get access to only Photoshop for the same price
Of course it goes without saying, if you do this use a burner card. They dont ask for/check for a valid address or anything like that so when it comes to the stupidly complex to cancel renewal process you just walk away and let their threats go to an empty inbox.
I've got zero issue with anyone pirating their software at this point, Adobe deserves it for the crap they've pulled over the last few years.
I'm curious why certain categories of software receive little to no competition, while others see a lot. I feel that Silicon Valley's focus on social media oriented smartphone apps has drained a lot of the talent and capital that could have been working on alternatives to Microsoft Office, Adobe's suite, Maya's 3D, etc.
Procreate is an excellent example of a young team coming in and dominating the tablet art tool market. For a measly $12 you own procreate forever, and it is easily the most functional art tool on the iPad. I don't know why we haven't seen similar attempts at Adobe's dominance anywhere else.
Not to be a pessimist, but what's the chance this is just another suit that's a rounding error compared to the revenue Adobe gains from these unethical business practices in the first place?
I wonder how far the chain one can go to punish individuals for something like this .. can a dev or qa tester get fined for this? Should they get fined?
Had to pester them so many times, and of course they never refunded me for the months where they lied to me and I thought the account was canceled
I now only attend the county's free gym, which is actually decent (and true athletes, not just social meetups); or buy a daypass to local college facility ($5).
I kept hearing about them in discussions about the infamously impossible-to-unsub NYTimes subscriptions, then nothing happens.
How about the other US government agencies regulating ... something? Is the FDA as toothless as the FTC?
Around here if an agency is regulating something it also has the power to impose changes and/or fine. Those can be contested in court but involving the legal system for years isn't the first step.
[1] https://darkroom.co/
Unfortunately too clunky for my use-case.
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.
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.
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'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.
But yeah, trying to make sure anything else I have control over.
"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.
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 up Creative Suite, Office365, Xbox Game Pass, Spotify, Netflix, Squarespace, and whatnot, it's all of sudden a big chunk of your disposable income.
Your wording reminds me of this infamous video where Adobe's CEO refuses to answer a question about them overcharging customers in Australia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnrMhbWG0Pc
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.
Or even "May only be used during evenings and weekends".
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.
https://www.autodesk.com/buying/flex?term=500&tab=flex
You can actually buy the software, not just rent it.
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-press-...
https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/affinity-and...
I use Affinity Photo the least though — for pixel-based drawing I prefer Pixelmator Pro.
https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop-elements.html
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.
> 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.
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.)
https://affinity.serif.com/
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 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.
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
https://photutorial.com/adobe-statistics/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.
However I don't want to support another company that is inevitably going to go subscription. Since they've been bought by canva, it's just a matter of time.
I even went so far as to get Affinity Photo being able to start on Wine. But lost interest since their acquisition.
(I'm sure people will question why I don't just use inkscape, krita, or gimp. And its because all of them have a subpar vector experience IMO)
I don't know much about Affinity Photo but Paint Shop Pro and Aftershot have been "good enough" for the limited uses I have for photo editing (though I'm definitely far from a professional). CorelDraw is, I think, a very decent vector drawing program if nothing else.
I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite as a more professional replacement.
Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at my limited usage level.
All of these subscription services should get over themselves and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed the product.
But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices like Adobe above).
I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine, but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost rather use Gimp.
My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date, but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials package.
Last time I looked at Essentials, it looked to me like they had hamstrung it too much. I don't remember the specific restrictions they put on it, but I didn't want what they were selling. Might be worth another look with the Humble Bundle though.
Or on a more serious note: I use Affinity professionally (previously PhotoShop). Why would I care the slightest about what they might or might not do with their pricing model in the future? I need software that delivers right now.
Not really a reasonable run time for a career, though. What do you do after that?
Yes, that's exactly the right thing to do. Only then the security folks will start whining about factories and shipping terminals being controlled by ancient PCs with WinXP (not to mention power plants with hardware and software older than most of us on this site). In fact, the security folks and the business folks align enough on it that professional software is force-feeding you updates too, and you can't do anything about it unless you're a multinational megacorp and can afford to make bespoke deals with OS vendors.
> Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run time for paid pro software.
5 is the minimum. Legal minimum for some documents, in some cases.
Still, the problem usually isn't upgrades per se, it's that universally these days, newer versions of products are almost always inferior in terms of functionality, performance and ergonomics. So, I might be easily able to afford refreshing my software tools after 5 ways of using them to earn a living, but then I discover they all went to shit and new versions are worse than the versions I have (and even worse, half of the software is now subscription-only).
That's just how all of tech works. Some pockets of software may be able to be fundamentally unchanged over decades, but the fact is that the software I used 5 years ago is not the same as the software I used now. Your choices are the same as ever:
- Don't upgrade for as long as possible
- Upgrade and eat the inefficiency cost for a while until replacements are found/made
- go the FOSS route and either do it yourself or rely on the goodwill of the community until its inevitable next schism.
There is no perfect solution unless you're willing to become a domain expert in that specific kind of tech and roll your own.
The only silver lining is that most of the fundamentals remain the same so you're not starting from square one. Whatever new web stack is being used today is still probably based upon React, which is based on JQuery, which is based Javascript. ES6 isn't a complete recvolution from ES3 (even if there are new major concepts to learn over those 15 years). So you have some knowledge transfer of seeing where and how things.
Not to mention, the push to run everything in the cloud, via the browser, means that for a lot of software, you literally have zero flexibility and control.
even at full price, $200 for 5 years of usage from a professional tool seems pretty good for me. That's $3.33/month if you want to convert to the subscription model way or thinking.
No way any potential subscription model would be cheaper here if you are in it for the long haul.
10 years down the line their DRM stops working because you're on locked down, ancient hardware and they don't want to support your OS anymore. Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Maybe you need to replace your motherboard and it counts as a "new" computer, and it no longer runs on. Maybe they take away your ability to reinstall it on another device because offline authorization no longer is enabled, and their online services don't support your old license. Both of these were done by reason studio. I hope you didn't buy a $400 perpetual license and expect it to work until the ice age.
Maybe they change the ToS like blizzard, and you now have to agree to the new ToS to continue using the software you bought and paid for?
Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to, like the whole unity fiasco?
I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user. Every single company screws us over and I hate to see people defend it because they think you can just opt out of it.
I'm happy to pay for quality software, both professional and consumer. With Affinity it took exactly one project to recoup much more than the cost ($50) of the software, and I expect that to be true for 99% of graphics professionals.
> Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate amount of money that you never agreed to
Yeah, and then I'll laugh my ass off at them. It's like me writing that anybody who reads this comment owes me a hundred dollars. Now you read it, now you pay. Or not.
It's the easiest thing in the world to be distrustful. You're never going to be wrong, because you'll never take that risk and you'll effectively repel all people who don't like to be treated as if they were dishonest or be insulted at random. But what kind of people will you be left with?
also because users don't want that. I don't think any of us would necessarily be satisfied playing Doom 1993 on Windows 95 because 256KB of RAM is all we'll ever need.
I'm not even saying it's a bad way to live, to be honest; that's just not how user demand works. They'll inevitably want Doom 2/3/4/etc. until the franchise jumps the shark or stagnates into nothingness.
> People have plenty of reasons to not want to support companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in this direction.
Well we're both probably cynically minded here on this topic. It's equally unlikely, but I've taken the path of walking away wherever I can for companies that keep pulling off these stunts. I've more or less de-googled myself over the last year outside of mail and Youtube, for instance. At some point, consumers need to put their foot down, but they won't. How many times does it need to happen before we evaluate who's really the fool?
>Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid for that require a version of windows that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a subscription?
Yes, that's why I don't even trust the benevolent actors for stuff I really care about. If I can find it on GOG, it's likely DRM free and I have no worries about what Steam's runtime looks like 20 years from now. The internet may flame me for that mentality, but I remember when Google was in similar acclaim, down to their long buried "Do No Evil" motto.
Again, not perfect, but the worst thing to do is dump all your eggs in one basket. Always be on the lookout for your own interests and be ready to jump.
>I am so sick of people pretending the free market of software isn't rigged against the user.
I agree with you the same way I agree that locks in an ideal world should not be required. They shouldn't be; I should have a reasonable sense of privacy, respect and security among my fellow man. an unexpected knock on the door shouldn't give me anxiety over it possibbly being an irrelevant sellsman, a crazy relative, or simply a package I forgot about.
But I'll keep my keys ready in the meantime until that ideal time comes. I can only look out for myself until then.
This is adobe's whole schtick with the cancellation fees for example. You pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance as a termination fee. So if you subscribe 3 times a year for a month and then immediately cancel you are paying more than a yearly subscription.
Bill per hour would be OK.
Or buy once, give me 1 year of free updates but I can use it as-is forever (like intellij) is also fair.
Adobe does offer monthly subcriptions, but for individuals only.
But some of these subscriptions, including the one I think this thread is about, will obligate you for a period of time. This happened to me, signed up to a trial of Adobe to test a graphic designers pc, once it ticked over to paid, I was told that I had a 12 month sub, just billed monthly. (I screeched and pulled my hair out and went all karen and they ended it, but they wouldnt do it twice)
The "Apps on Tap" enthusiasts got absolutely mogged by Adobes commercial reality.
To cancel, you need to immediately pay out 50% of the rest of the year. And you’ll lose access to the products at the end of the month.
So unless you’re not even getting 50% of the subscription cost worth of value out of it, it pretty much makes more sense to continue it and cancel just before renewal.
As soon as you run over that 7 day trial, you’ve got a 30 day window a year from now where you can cancel without penalty. Miss it or forget? Set a better reminder for next year…
There was one version of Apple's Photos for MacOS that has not been topped in terms of its retouch tool (actually got much, much worse). Since I restore a lot of old scanned-in family photos I keep this aging iMac just for photo editing.
When? Do you have any articles/videos showing the difference? I can’t find any.
The only major loss I’m aware of is when they left iPhotos and Aperture in the dust.
Unfortunately the retouch tool in Photos for cloning, fixing scratches, etc. took a huge step backward in performance. Like it became unusable.
So simply for dealing with old scanned family photos that have lots of scratches, tears, etc., I have stuck with Sierra Photos on my one machine.
why not buy Affinity now and use it until you need to upgrade? unless there's some horrible TOS, I'm sure that tool as is will last you 5+ years before some new hit feature drops in.