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Comment by lacker | Hacker News Reader

Adobe had an intense outcry when they moved to a subscription model, and it worked out great for them. You are basically changing your customer base. People who would happily spend $20/month for a good code editor will love the change to a subscription model in the long run, because it lets you invest more effort in making the product great. And I think there are a lot of those people - if you spend hours and hours every day programming, and you make good money at your job, aren't you willing to spend money to use the best tools? People who don't want to buy a subscription will be angry, but in a couple months they won't be your customer any more so it won't matter that they're angry.

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I'm probably missing it. I've used Photoshop since version 1 and owned a personal copy since version 3 (mid 90s). When new features were added i'd evaluate if I wanted them. I generally upgrade every 2 versions for $199 or which is ~$50 a year.

Subscriptions raised that to $240 a year, a 480% increase. Further, since subscriptions were added no features I want have been added. But, I can't just stop and use some version, stop paying and the software stops working.

I see no evidence that Adobe's subscription model has let them invest more effort in making the product great. In fact it's the exact opposite. Before they had to add some features to entice you to pay for the upgrade. now they can just do nothing because you're "renting" the software.

> I see no evidence that Adobe's subscription model has let them invest more effort in making the product great. In fact it's the exact opposite.

It's hard to define cause and effect, but Adobe's R&D spend is definitely increasing:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/794840/research-developm...

Because their competition is catching up.

Figma is crushing Adobe. Alternatives like Affinity are eating much of the casual user base.

Figma is crushing Adobe XD, not Adobe. But we will never know the exact reason for the increase in R&D spend - but without the increase in revenue they would not have been able to afford this investment in R&D (R&D is approx 60% of their revenue).

Again it's impossible to define cause and effect, but OP's claim that they are investing less in product after introducing subscriptions is spurious - R&D has dramatically increased almost exactly in line with revenue.

stop paying and the software stops working

This is the major problem. I do know indies who have used workarounds just so they aren't held hostage. I wouldn't use subscriptions for my own personal creative work. So, yes, the customer base is indeed changing- to those who mainly work for others.

Adobe's products are not trivial.

And yet they have ported them not only to iOS but also to M1.

Just because you don't see changes in the UI doesn't mean there hasn't been significant engineering effort spent.

Porting is a feature, and they already charged for it under the pre-subscription model.

> Adobe had an intense outcry when they moved to a subscription model, and it worked out great for them

That remains to be seen, actually. There used to be an "Adobe pipeline" where kids in high school and college would pirate Photoshop, become familiar with it, then be ready to use it when they got a real job. That pipeline shut down when Adobe moved to a subscription model: now all the kids use Figma instead. It'll take a little while to bubble up, but eventually all these design shops are going to find that their new hires know how to use Figma and not Photoshop, and start wondering whether Adobe software is worth the cost on top of retraining.

None of this shows up in quarterly reports but it's a real phenomenon and it will catch up to Adobe sooner or later.

>now all the kids use Figma instead.

This is only true if in your entire world bubble Photoshop only exists to design mobile UIs. Figma, like Sketch before it, is a simply a part of Photoshop's total market. There's no replacement for Photoshop yet for creative agencies, photographers, and content studios.

Give Affinity Photo / Designer a try. It's a fantastic photoshop replacement, many of the keyboard shortcuts are even the same.

Yeah I've seen designers switching to the whole suite.

nothing is stopping any of these kids from pirating photoshop in 2021

> People who would happily spend $20/month for a good code editor will love the change to a subscription model in the long run, because it lets you invest more effort in making the product great.

That’s almost double what I pay for Jetbrains’ stuff and I figured the forced subscription from Jetbrains was 3x what I had been paying by skipping 1-2 versions between updates.

You’re right about changing the customer base though. All the suckers that can’t figure out prices just when up 3-4x seem to love subscriptions and financially flippant people like that are probably the best customers to have.

And Jetbrains is the only subscription software I’ve used that doesn’t keep adding bloated trash features to justify their subscription.

For some crazy reason Photoshop users are so crazy loyal to that product they're willing to pay for it. I'm totally guilty of this, just yesterday I needed to scale and crop an image and I had to download the whole Creative Cloud installer to my new laptop and install Photoshop. I'm positive I could have done this in a number of different tools even built into the OS, but for whatever reason I'm just hooked on Photoshop.

FYI If you’re on a Mac you can do that right in Preview

Some people have been working with Photoshop for decades, it's integrated into industry wide workflows. For me some complex 4-key shortcuts (the legacy save for web claw) are second nature. It's the devil we know very very well.

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