Hacker News Reader

Comment by mangeletti | Hacker News Reader

    Customers just don’t like the idea of subscribing to software. We’ve seen
    that when Adobe discontinued Fireworks — that was one of our biggest sales
    days. Adobe’s pitch was basically that you can now switch to Photoshop. And
    many people said, I don’t really like Photoshop and I don’t want to pay for
    it monthly, so let me see what else is out there.

Here I witness a very serious ignoratio elenchi. The market's response to "Fireworks is gone. Use Photoshop" was an immediate exodus of many Adobe customers, myself included. He has confused this with an apprehension to subscriptions.

View on HN

He does address this later in the paragraph.

  In the beginning, Adobe introduced subscriptions as an alternative
  to the normal paid upgrades. Then a few years after that, they
  switched to subscriptions only–that was another one of our biggest
  sales days. We could clearly see people don’t like the idea of
  subscriptions if they don’t perceive a very obvious justification for it.

But, that's not what happened with Fireworks. Adobe stopped supporting Fireworks, period. Even when they introduced the Fireworks subscription, they said they wouldn't release updates to it.

IOW, Fireworks died and that is the reason everyone flocked to Sketch, et al.

Perhaps what he should have said was, that there is some apprehension to Adobe subscriptions. The price won't be "Price of Sketch"/"Date of next major version", that's for sure.

Well, besides that, the point I'm making is that, in the example given, there is no implied relationship between Adobe switching to a subscription model and users abandoning Adobe for Sketch. There is, however, a relationship between Adobe giving up on Fireworks and users abandoning Adobe for Sketch.

All I'm saying, really, is that if it comes down to giving my people a raise, or paying for Creative Cloud, the raise wins every time. Especially when the alternatives are better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com