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Thanks for explaining this so well.
imo, the subscription style is the evolution of “planned obsolescence”.
people are willing to give money if the goods have an expiration. so instead of the goods expiring, the concept of validity of the goods now expire. same money, but saves on making different goods altogether.
Adobe opened the floodgates and it’s been downhill since
Adobe did it because everybody and their grandmother just pirated Photoshop instead of paying that huge one time fee (licenses costed around $900 not counting inflation). It wasn’t until they went with the subscription model when people actually started to pay for Photoshop.
No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.
Piracy is a service problem. In this case, Photoshop has never been worth $900.
Apparently it’s worth $20/month.
(Laughs in GIMP)
No one uses Gimp for professional use. Gimp is not a full replacement of what Photoshop does.
Less people were tech literate back then, and the ones who were would likely pirate things like music, than consider buying things out of convenience.
When everyone and their grandmas got online, convenience was something more people were willing to pay for.
That’s just my theory though.
Because companies make their best and most reliable income from subscriptions.
Also the reliable income makes them more credit worthy, allowing greater loans from banks and making it possible to grow more.
Tbh it only sucks for the customers
Tbh it only sucks for the customers
capitalist tradition
‘recurring revenue streams’. businesses can make more money selling products as services than actual things, and more reliably.
take adobe licensing as a perfect example of this enshitification.
