FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations
ftc.gov
ftc.gov
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.
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.
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?
Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people
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.
Make a serious dent in their business and they will damn sure try. Typically with lawfare.
And the subscription turned out to be about the same cost as
upgrading every year.
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.
Adobe has provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.
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
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...
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop
ever again?" type of product.
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
2013 1.4 million
2017 12.0 million
2020 19.5 million
2021 22.0 million
2022 24.5 million
2024 29.5 million
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.
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).
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
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.
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:
- offer to keep at same price? No?
- offer to re-up at 50% more? No?
- offer to re-up at 100% more? No?
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.
I’ve never had to make the calls. It’s a bluff but the cost of legal compliance to answer AG calls always outweighs the cost of rightful resolution.
E.g. if Adobe or a contractor uses one service to process payments, if that API fails they use another service, if that API fails they use another service.
And it shows up as a slightly different name in each case, because it was a different person registering each service, and the names don't need to be consistent anyways.
I set up categorization rules in my personal finance app Monarch and have discovered that exact names of charges vary quite a bit. Always the same two or three variations for a given company, but it might be six months of one, then six months of another, then back to the first...
Basically my options if I don't want top pay a license fee for forever is to find alternatives, or pirate the software. I've opted for the former, but either leads to Adobe getting $0 from me, where they could have gotten >$0 if they had had a "pay outright" program.
I have generally found good enough alternatives with their competitors (Toonboom is generally good enough for basic animation, Krita is good enough for artsy stuff, Final Cut Pro is good enough for video editing).
For software I'd actually use though? Upper bound is probably $600 judging by what I paid for Toonboom Harmony. Honestly if I had known about Moho at the time I probably would have gotten that since it's considerably cheaper and on Humble Bundle fairly often.
I'm not in a creative industry so it's tough for me to know "fair" numbers, just "what can I justify as a toy" numbers. I like to occasionally whip out an animation tool and draw stuff with stick figures, and I like having that readily available, and I don't want my tool to change from under me so I don't want transparent updates. I just want to buy my software once.
I'm a programmer. I periodically need to make a tiny tweak in a file that's been created by a real artist, or I want to edit a photo I took, or whatever.
It's insane to spend $1500, or even $500 (the CorelDraw buy-it-outright price) for hobby and occasional-use software like that.
And yeah, I use other things like Affinity Photo, which is Good Enough for many of my purposes, but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists--unless they flatten the image before giving it to me, it's a crap-shoot whether I can import it in anything but the exact version of PhotoShop they were using.
It feels like extortion: I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file, or I have to pay Adobe an outrageous sum to do it myself. Lose-lose.
Photoshop was never $1500 either. CS6 was $700. The design standard CS6 suite was $1300.
Maybe hunt for artists that use the reasonably priced Clip Studio Paint instead? It's pretty popular among manga and the like artists anyways.
Hire the artist and ask them for the files exported into a format you can open. If they refuse, hire somebody else.
I do agree with the sibling that open standards should be set by state actors. But they should only make them available, not mandate them into private actors.
They already do that. That's not the problem.
If the original Photoshop file has 200 layers, and 60 of those layers have effects that use advanced Photoshop-only features, then no other art program can open the source material. Period.
At best you can get approximations of the original Photoshop render if you open the image in another program. But generally what you get is garbage if it's not a recent version of Photoshop.
The point of getting the Photoshop original with the layers is that I might be able to make a tweak to one of the layers and have it re-render a result that is better for what I need. Something that is difficult or impossible if I just have a JPEG.
And asking the artist to do the work in a program that doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they don't know). Yes, technically anything is possible in any environment, but it might take 10x as long and be 100x as painful--with a result that may not be as good due to the tools not being as good.
Artists are professionals with an acquired skill set. You can't ask them to work using unfamiliar tools and expect them to be happy or productive.
You mean the thing that every single company does for their work for hire?
When a developer doesn't know, they go after another developer. (And they should restrict the number of constraints to what is really important, but almost no company does that.)
And companies that want programmers who write, say, Delphi or Visual Basic, are going to be getting crap developers, and would be better off porting their software to something more modern. I did some work on a Delphi project to help out a friend, and no, I wouldn't go to work for a company to work on Delphi full-time. They couldn't possibly pay me enough.
But that's my point: Just like they would get crap developers, I would get crap artists. Or extremely expensive artists. Not interested. It would literally be cheaper to pay Adobe the extortion they ask than to try to work with non-Adobe artists.
- Paint is not only free but built-in
- Paint.net is free and covers most of what I'd need to do
- GIMP is free. Cumbersome, but if I need to do any batch operations that's when I bring out a full suite.
If I only need to do a quick edit for some hobby thing, I'm not frought for options.
>but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same software as my artists
So you are a professional? If you have artists at your beck and call and it's not a forboding deadline, I don't know why you wouldn't ask the artist to make the edit.
There's definitely a debate to be had about proprietary file formats (I work in games, so I completely understand that with its 3d equivalent that is the FBX format... thankfully there are very slow moves to cast that away), but I'm not sure I have a good solution. I don't necessarily think a company should be forced to open source/spec its own tooling.
Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce technically precise artwork?
The point would be that sometimes it takes 4-5 turnarounds with an artist to get something exactly right. Something that I, as a non-artist but skilled app user, can do in less time it takes to explain what I need to the artist a single time. So it's about saving my time and not having to pay for hours of artist time for something I can do in 10 minutes.
What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them. That's what it comes down to. I'm not saying they should be forced to do anything. Just that I don't like what they're doing, and therefore end up having to work around their software rather than using it.
I have a license for the last one they offered for a fixed cost; bought it for a steep discount when the new licenses were the Next Big Thing. But they won't get any more of my money until they offer the software at a reasonable price tier.
Yes. But I work in games, so maybe I was expecting professional artists working on complex assets and not a grab bag from fiverr for some UI art. Anything "simple" probably takes them 2-5 minutes and maybe a few turnarouns while I could maybe take an hour of edits for much worse quality.
>What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being greedy and I refuse to patronize them.
I agree completely. But I know there's no such thing as a smooth migration, especially when working as a team.
It's sad, but they have a lock on the market for a reason and that moral stance won't be without some growing pains or compromises. I'm sure we both know trying to get an artist to migrate tools is much harder than a programmer.
In fact, it's in games that the artists, especially when working with 3d, had the hardest time getting the precise kinds of changes that I would need.
But even in 2d, if they, say, created a sprite, but then left a few pixels non-100%-transparent in the corners of the image, I could ask them to go find those pixels and erase them...or I could do it myself.
And if they don't get them completely erased, then there will still be artifacts on the screen and the texture atlas packing will be screwed up.
Yeah. I've been doing this for a long time.
And no, I don't have much hope of getting artists to migrate. I'm just tilting at windmills.
Another one I don’t know: can you embed a gimp file into a layout editor? A common workflow is to embed a photoshop file into an indesign file; you can then edit your photoshop file and have your indesign file updating automatically. This is a common workflow in several adobe products, eg I believe after effects sequence embedded into a Premiere timeline is possible/common.
You sure can. I'm not even an artist and that's the one part of GIMP I can speak for. It has its own Python library, so almost anything you can do in editor you can do programmatically, but I made a few scripts for batch processing an entire album of images.
(documentation is about as awkard as the GUI, though. You will eventually find what you need after putting in 3-5x more effort than what should have been necessary, but it's somewhere in the docs)
What? This is the premier 2D animation package used by most of the top studios.
Toonboom is excellent if you're a professional. I'm very much not a professional, I barely know what I'm doing. I think Flash/Animate appealed to someone like me, because I found it easier to draw some goofy thing really quick and animate it.
I feel Toonboom has a much higher learning curve and isn't really for people like me. It's not insurmountably difficult or anything, just that I'm not really the target audience and as such I don't know that it's a good fit for "basic" stuff, if that makes any sense.
I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird, painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own servers.
Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5 minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.
They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia - we might still have it around if they invested in it properly and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount of old Flash content.
Creative Suite is fine and mostly functional from what I hear, but they didn't make that codebase either, and I've never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)
Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it). For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for subscriptions.
I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks, I've used it before and it seems fine.
I wish they'd release a Mac version, because that was actually my favorite video editor on Windows. It would be really great if they made a Linux version but I'm not holding my breath for that.
If it were opened up, it could have been integrated directly into browsers and maybe even the web standards. The Flash desktop program would still probably be the de facto means of creating Flash content but at that point it could have conceivably still been on iPhone, at least eventually.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
The death of Flash kind of makes me sad. A lot of HTML5 stuff feels like it's playing this huge game of catchup from what we had in Flash in 2004, and I still think that Flash was one of the most fun development platforms ever; the ease of quickly going from "drawing" to "animation" to "code" was so streamlined and as a teenager I had a lot of fun with it, and I haven't found a tool since then that I've had as much fun playing with.
It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
No doubt there was a never ending litany of security problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even led to a competitor targeting the same space with better characteristics.
I think it might have been able to live on in the form of Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR could have occupied the space that Electron does now.
Years of incremental improvements on this bustling platform could have made Flash into a performant beast.
Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash had been a mobile option on day one.
The runtime definitely needed to be improved, but I feel Flash gets a bit more hate than it deserves. By the tail end, there was even decent 3D graphics support, and CrossBridge was a pretty cool predecessor to Emscripten that allowed you to convert C++ programs into SWF stuff (IIRC an early version had the Doom engine ported over).
Having first MTASC and then the as3 compiler on the command line was another route into modern-day build pipelines. The 3D engines were great, Box2D port was great, and looking at it all now in 2024, the APIs still hold up and Adobe could restart an entire multimedia division with it.
Correct, and that might have been the single greatest gift Apple has bestowed upon the open Internet. Flash was the walled garden of the web — closed source, proprietary and a perennial security nightmare — and the community owes Apple a huge debt for gratitude for hastening its demise.
I know some people have fond memories of flash games, flash art and, in some instances, Flash websites. I do appreciate that it was a cultural moment. I do appreciate that it was accessible to novices and artists in a way that HTML5 is not. But the web is not, and should never have been, reliant on a closed source proprietary platform.
Sure Apple is to blame partially for Flash, but even now they rarely add new features to "Animate". There are other applications out there that are doing more interesting things.
Dreamweaver has been outdone by visual studio code and sublimetext, granted it was really only good for ColdFusion.
Fireworks was left to die, oddly enough it could of been the next Sketch, although Figma probably would of beaten it eventually anyway
Freehand was killed to let Illustrator be dominant
Safari barely ran on the first gen iPhone. If you scrolled too fast, it would display a checkerbox while the rendering caught up. It didn’t even have enough memory to have a background image on your Home Screen.
When Flash finally came to mobile in 2010 on Android, it required 1Gb RAM and 1Ghz processor and it barely ran. I had an HTC that met those specs. The first iPhone that met those specs didn’t come out until 2011.
Adobe was always over promising and under delivering on Flash for mobile to the point where the Motorola tablet that advertised flash support didn’t ship with it and embarrassingly enough, you couldn’t even view the Xoom’s home page on the web with the tablet because it required Flash.
Flash was a security nightmare
When did they do that? I guess I only really use Lightroom; but you've been able to buy each major release outright for ~1.5years of subscription (last I worked it out)
I even emailed Adobe sales representatives two years ago to see if I was missing something, and maybe there was a way to buy it that I wasn't seeing. They made it very clear that subscriptions are the only way now.
Yeah but they’re getting all the money from everyone else.
Adobe are not idiots, they ran the numbers and figured that subscriptions bring in more money. If that means tombert won’t give them money, good riddance.
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.
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.
Honestly there should be a law where if you haven't logged into your account in 3 months you should get a notification asking if you want to cancel. It's one thing if the company is storing your data (like google photos) as that has an associated cost, but inactive accounts just feels like corporate theft.
Meanwhile, an Eastern European grandma would show up at the branch office of the company with a pitchfork.
Yeah, pretty much. Especially when customer service is one of the most painful, drawling experinces imaginable for someone already working 60 hours a week and taking care of family. Or spending an hour+ on the line with excuciating elevator music hoping you don't disconnect and need to repeat that process. It's financially and mentally not worth the hassle unless it's over a certain delta. Maybe that's where some of this cultural difference lies.
But I think it's more an age thing than a country thing though. Look at who's in a phone store or grocery or any other establishment with a streamlined complaint pipeline on your next off day.
Oddly, poor people make similar choices for almost opposite reasons. They don’t want to check because it causes anxiety and they feel like they don’t have control anyway.
So wild, I guess I'm actually an outlier. I actually keep paper receipts and compare with what I was charged when it hits my balance. You'd be surprised how often restaurants, grocery stores, hotels and so on are off by a few cents or even a dollar or so. You'd think with everything computerized these errors wouldn't happen. I also never use autopay for bills.
I do glance at my statements every few months though
If this is on some normal $200 grocery receipt you probably won't be able to find the mistake in 3 minutes, let alone go back and take the time to flag a busy cashier, find a manager, and resolve the error. At best, it'd be a lesson learned to check at scan time extra hard.
To some extent I just I figure law of averages should even it all out. You see the reverse wtih ecommerce on Amazon et al. If you buy something and get the wrong thing, or it's partially broken, or just late, or even if you are just unhappy—you can click the refund button and like 33% of a time you just get your money back as part of a returnless refund and get to keep the item.
I have. It's not a hassle. Especially if I'm already there for some other reason. I clip coupons for the same reason. A $5 discount is a $5 discount.
I look at my bank transactions slightly less regularly, but at least every other month or so. I don't use a debit card so really the only things that directly hit my bank account are the credit card payments, a couple of auto-pay utilities, mortgage, and a few other things. It's not hard to spot something out of the ordinary.
That threshold must be VERY high!
Over half my income is disposable. My wife (who also works) and I end up eating out way too much and still manage to put 40% of my after-tax salary into savings each month.
I still log into my bank and credit card accounts every week to make sure nothing suspicious has appeared, and I manually pay off my credit card with every paycheck on the 1st and 15th of every month.
> Oddly, poor people make similar choices for almost opposite reasons. They don’t want to check because it causes anxiety and they feel like they don’t have control anyway.
An utterly dangerous action to take based on that mindset. I've been poor (though not really destitute, just could only budget ~$3 per meal), and I watched my finances like a HAWK. I even had a Post-It note stuck to the side of my monitor with the due dates of all my bills as well as the typical range (ie, Electric $30-100 depending on season), so I always knew what was coming.
I think many people start to internalize the cost of their time as their income rises. You don't think about it expliclity, but if you are making $100/hr, is spending 20+ minutes to save $20 really worth both the time AND hassle? I mean maybe. At $200/hr is it still worth it? Probably not.
I think this is only true if you'd otherwise be working and making that $200/hr. For most of us, the opportunity cost of our time is nowhere near our working wage. If I would otherwise be horsing around watching TV or playing video games, then the opportunity cost of my time is zero and it's worth it to spend time on these things.
If I can show that my credit card was charged $1.50 more than the check said (maybe they transposed some number on the tip or whatever), I lose nothing by bringing it up with the restaurant and getting it corrected. Especially if I was already planning on eating there again--just bring the previous bill along next time I go--I'm not even wasting gas because I'm already going there. I mean, sure, I could just ignore it but $1.50 is $1.50.
To be fair, itemized credit card charges are always formatted so badly and it usually just ends up stressing me out because I see some $83 charge on there for something in all-caps that doesn't look familiar, then I search my emails and figure out what it was and I don't know why they're named like that when the charge is put through.
But man, thank god for this thread because I thought to check just now and I realized my bank didn't email me when my last statement was ready, and I would have been late to pay if I didn't by tomorrow.
Nope. I can be guilty of it as well and I make a habit to cancel reoccurring subscriptions. But if it's not some hundred dollar charge, I don't look too closely in the "good times".
I even use budgeting software and I can fall for this on rare occasions. I have (had) maybe $100 reserved for reocurring subscriptions, so if I see that budget met and don't see any crazy $50/month charges, it just slips through. I overall just see a ballpark expected budget and my savings go up. Small fry slip through.
I can only imagine those unknowingly paying some small amount every month. It's a more realistic version of the whole "steal a penny from every citizen and become a millionaire!" scheme. But now times are harder and I'm calculating finances by the dollar.
I’ll do maybe a yearly audit but apart from that, if nothing seems out of the ordinary, I don’t check.
It's fortunately not a huge amount of money in this case (it was the cheapest plan), and they did refund me for this year's renewal, but I was annoyed that a service that I never log into would keep renewing with no notification. Digging through emails, I found two. One from a while back, talking about a change in my subscription, and another talking about changes to their terms of service, which I would expect to get even if I wasn't subscribed.
For as evil as Amazon is, at least you can easily cancel Prime after it auto-renews and get your money back.
> There are still 1.5 million people paying a monthly subscription service fee for AOL — but instead of dial-up access, these subscribers get technical support and identity theft software.
> The number of AOL dial-up subscribers is now “in the low thousands,” according to a source.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-people-s...
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.
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.
The Affinity suite of programs (Photo, Designer, and Publisher) have been the perfect alternative for someone like me who does casual work, isn't locked into the Adobe ecosystem, and doesn't want to spend $60+/month on a subscription.
Their programs are full-featured, blazing fast, integrate with one another, and are - most importantly - pay once per license. Funnily, they're doing a 50% sale right now, which brings the entire line of products to a one-time payment of $83. Likely to capitalize on the Adobe's bad press cycle.
The value of this package is undeniable. I'm a very happy user.
The only caveat is that they don't yet have all of the cutting-edge high-end features that Adobe offers (AI integration, etc). But the nuts and bolts functionality is rock solid and they are adding more and more features each day. I find the lack of bloat and a massive codebase really help to streamline the performance. It's been flawless for me.
https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=page... channels
https://affinity.help/photo2/en-US.lproj/index.html?page=pag... channels
Although not as feature rich as Photoshop, they are quickly catching up.
I've tried to quit Photoshop before with GIMP, Krita and even more obscure alternatives but gladly shelled out the cash for the Affinity Suite.
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?
Unfortunately too clunky for my use-case.
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.
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.
There is a massive opportunity in the market for Procreate to come out with a desktop version that expands on its functionality, but my theory is that it is probably the #1 iPad selling point for many people and Apple is paying them to keep it iPadOS / iOS only. Some big name Japanese anime studios are now working a big percentage of their workflow on iPads with Procreate.
1. Start the cancellation process for your current license
2. When offered a discount or to switch to another plan, choose the cheapest new plan
3. Once your membership is updated, start the cancellation process again immediately
4. The cancellation fee is now $0.
(Source: https://ui.dev/rwd/articles/cancel-adobe-without-paying-the-... )
I can vouch that this worked earlier this year.
Stand tall for your righteousness.
It's time to bring shame back to inherently-sociopathic corporate NPCs.
It was a crazy expensive licence ( I do not remember how much but it was more than I made a month at that time I remember ) but she is a woman of principals and refuses to run pirated software.
It took her weeks to get the licence as Adobe did not distribute to personal user licences in our area at the time. Only crazy enterprise fee.
She managed to get a personal license through US after weeks of emails and phone calls.
I however pirated until the subscription model came out, initially I thought the monthly fee was kinda brilliant as it allowed me to actually legally run photoshop for a price I could afford.
Just buy the occasional month when I actually need it and then cancel for all the 10 months a year that I don't use it. Seemed like a win/win to me.
Sadly someone at Adobe considers this a worse crime than pirating it seems and casual users are tricked into these insane contracts.
I sincerely hope this practice of a hidden cancellation fee is not only banned but heftily fined.
- Adobe released a stock image service, then bundled this deeply into their products. This could be considered anti-competitive bundling. There's also other examples of bundling which could be considered here as well.
- Adobe's file formats create not just lock-in for people willingly using their tools, but also require other agencies to use the adobe software to be able to work with the files. There is also limited backwards compatibility and limited ability to export to earlier versions while maintaining compatibility, this forces people into the subscription product. A similar issue was brought against Microsoft Office's formats.
- Adobe shutters apps/services on short notice while providing no migration off-ramp, or an off-ramp that requires the user to subscribe to a more expensive product. This is seen repeatedly with their own experiments, but also with acquisitions.
So many great businesses have been ruined by the need for endless growth leading to dark patterns.
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.
I would be fine paying for Adobe if their software would be the beat example of UX and performance. But sluggish brush stroke on M1 is just not acceptable.
I have spent the majority of my blue collar adult life earning <$50k/yr.
I had to reset my mac just to get rid of Adobe spywares.
Reminds me of typical gym memberships. It once took me months to cancel a Crunch subscription. My card expired and they had the audacity to send me a letter stating they will collect unless I enter a new card instead of just cancelling for me. They constantly gave me the runaround in person and over email; eventually I just sent an email to their legal/management team and threatened to escalate with the bank if there's another charge and it worked. Sadly, I was never refunded for the 3-4 months they charged me for during this period.
You'd think these sorts of subscription filibusters would be scrutinized more by the FTC to protect consumers. Glad to see it being looked at in this case, but seriously gym memberships need some attention too.
Luckily Open Source tools have been sufficient for my limited needs. Like Krita, Inkscape and Gimp.
Companies seem to respond very quickly when you forward legal code to them that they need to follow.
There are good reasons for subscription-based business models. But fear of rug pulls has personally damaged my trust in subscription software, and even "pay once" software.
See also "Killed by Google."
I'll never going to buy or support anyone in buying anything produced by Adobe. Not going to cry if they go down either.
After many sleepless nights fighting with Adobe's licensing servers, which had erroneously declared my installation no longer valid, I keep an extra desktop offline with my 2nd licensed install ready for their next round of shenanigans.
Operating System
Rocky Linux 9.3 Rocky Linux 8.7 Rocky Linux 8.5
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
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.
https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2024/Adobes-Stateme...
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).
For Acrobat, at least, a combination of tool sorta-kinda-mostly gets the job done; look at Xournal++, qpdf, and the various PDF printers (gradually being superseded by library-based PDF export filters).
For image processing, we have simple programs like Paint.Net or Krita, and we have GIMP - which is quite featureful but I don't know if it's a "match" for Photoshop.
I don't think companies should be allowed to charge for subscriptions that people aren't using personally.
edit: Also want to mention that I used a couple different subscription trackers like Trim, and they didn't identify the Adobe charges. Weird.
I don't want to elaborate unnecessarily, but I can confirm that these accusations are absolutely valid, and I even recently told my friends about how unfair Adobe's practices towards consumers are.
I also personally know someone who decided to block their payment card at the bank because it was the only way they knew to free themselves from Adobe's subscription.
This needs to be ended through legislation, but also needs to be retroactive, with fines and jail time for the senior most executives. Adobe is not the only problem company. Blizzard and Roku and TP Link and Sonos are all recent examples.
My only question is, what the heck took the FTC this long? Why didn't they do this years ago?
The problems with cancelling Adobe CC are well known:
- Consumers think they've subscribed to a monthly plan only to discover it's yearly
- If they cancel before the year is over they still have to pay 50% of the remaining time, while the software stops working immediately, and they had no idea
- But worst of all, if you want to set it to NOT autorenew at the end of the year, YOU CAN'T [1]. You can't cancel renewal but keep the existing subscription through the end of the year. Which is insane. You have to wait until some brief "cancellation window" period at the end of your year, and cancel it AFTER the window has opened up but BEFORE it actually renews. Again, this is INSANE
And all this is on top of the complaints that people try to cancel over the phone even within the cancellation window, and either can't do it, or think they've done it but it hasn't.
There's no way the FTC won't win here. And I hope the FTC levies a truly massive fine on Adobe, ON TOP OF refunds to consumers of all previous cancellation fees.
It's absolutely despicable behavior, and there's no way Adobe would be able to get away with it if they didn't have network lock-in effects from what have become the industry file formats of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, etc. If you collaborate in the graphics space you need to use their tools period, so you can edit files people send you and vice-versa. Conversion tools never work perfectly, or even well, when they even exist at all.
[1] https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/manage-auto-ren...
In general, the government and its agencies move very slowly. Compared to the FTC, Adobe's move over to subscription is quite recent. Adobe's only been doing subscriptions for what, maybe 10 years? And these problems are even more recent than that.
It also takes time to build up a case, even if they had looked into it immediately. Get a nice long paper trail, lots of documentation, consumer complaints, etc. That can take years.
As they get more familiar with the modern world of software, I think cases like this will take less and less time to deal with.
Instead of comments by users who have read the linked article, you have comments by people using the discussion as their personal diary.
But it does open up their product suite to people who would be hesitant to shell out a couple of hundred bucks upfront.
Adobe was a stagnant business until 2014. Revenue is up 500% since then: https://valustox.com/ADBE
Adobe and others use services that provide them with your new credit card expiry dates so they keep billing.
Adobe can be messaged on twitter to document them not fixing things. Companies can actually reverse 18-24 months of charges.
I use older versions of owned Adobe and Macromedia products still, I got them for almost nothing and best of all they work really well through Wine on Linux.
I can't really see any must have features in the newer releases. If anything some of their products deteriorated.
I kept hearing about them in discussions about the infamously impossible-to-unsub NYTimes subscriptions, then nothing happens.
For anyone facing this issue, an angry email to customer support citing the lawsuit is sufficient to obtain an immediate cost-free cancellation.
Dylan Field was initially very anti-Adobe, I don't know why he even agreed to sell to them.
Its completely okay to sell your company and cash out but I still don't understand, why Adobe?
You entered a contract where you promised to pay for a year, and they gave you a smaller fee. You cancel the contract, so they should cancel the discount.
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.
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).
I was so relieved when the Figma acquisition fell through — the only serious competitor to their ecosystem almost died in that deal.
Plus, Adobe never gets your credit card.
https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshitt...
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
While I don't use Photoshop I'd assume that logic holds even stronger - if you know how to use Photoshop you're going to ask for that rather than a tool you don't know how to use.
As a thought experiment: if Photoshop was means tested and free to anyone who couldn’t afford it, would that actually convert users when they had money?
Personally, I find the macOS behavior really irritating and unintuitive, but thankfully there are plenty of apps out there that solve this issue so it's not really a problem.
MacOS on the other hand not really. It is better/acceptable after I installed some Plugins. But I still wish Linux was fully supported (and my company would allow it). Even Windows would be an upgrade currently for me.
As a long time mac user I am probably unaware of neat stuff from windows.
The key to bring back the last window I looked at should not change depending on whether the app name happens to be different.
I bound it to Option + tab though, more intuitive to me.
Scenario: I'm in a terminal doing something, and I have a second window I'm switching back and forth between that contains the man page for a command. In isolation, I haven't given you enough information to tell whether I should be pressing opt-tab or cmd-tilde to swap windows: maybe the man page is in a browser, or maybe it's in a second terminal.
Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between an editor and some reference document in another window; you can't tell which key I should press to swap without knowing if I'm looking at the document in another editor instance or a browser window.
Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between a terminal and some reference document from a cloud provider. You can't determine which key to press to swap without knowing if I'm ssh'd in a terminal or using a web-based cloud terminal.
Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between an image editor and a client's low-resolution logo they emailed me. You can't determine which key to press to swap without knowing if I'm looking at the reference image in another image editor window or a browser.
I run into this constantly.
I didn’t reply to the wrong comment, I was just trying to be helpful.
This OS behavior has seemed second nature to me ever since browsers implemented tabs. Like in each of your described scenarios I usually forget which browser tab is in the foreground when I switch, I will have to Ctrl+tab until I find the relevant one. It will stay on top once I do though.
That is what MacOS does; the window of an app you had in focus last will stay on top of the stack. It makes intuitive sense to me personally but I agree it does make finding stuff a little onerous.
In your scenarios, you know which applications you have your relevant documents opened in so once you have them on top switching is easy. But again, I understand that a decade of muscle memory and using a different paradigm will make this behavior infuriating.
[0] https://superuser.com/questions/193922/is-there-any-program-...
I mean, I’d argue that the way Windows does it is illogical and confusing, and if I used Windows regularly I’d want a plugin to make window switching work the way it does on MacOS, which I find far more convenient. But that doesn’t make the way Windows does it objectively wrong, and it wouldn’t justify my irritation at the OS not working the way I would prefer it to.
All of the issues you’ve described are limited to your particular use case, and as has been pointed out by myself and others, are easily solvable with a relatively inexpensive program. So your entire argument really boils down to “I don’t like the way MacOS does something by default, but fortunately it’s an easy and cheap fix so it’s not really a huge deal”.
…yes, and?
Somebody was asking for an example of the sort of plugin someone might want to install, I provided an example. There was no argument being had, no claims that OSX is objectively wrong for doing things that way, just a pile-on of people not reading the context.
You could have just said, “I don’t like the way MacOS does X, and here’s the plugin to use to change it so it does Y.” Instead, you went on a long-winded screed about why your view was obviously the correct one, while providing no solution to the problem (and implying that there was no obvious solution, because you “run into this problem constantly”) and strongly implicating that anyone who dared to suggest otherwise was clearly wrong.
And then you wonder why people thought you were being argumentative.
This is a great formulation of an annoyance that I've had for 10 years but hadn't put into words.
If you happen to use virtual desktops / "spaces" or whatever macos calls them these days, it's annoying that the default cmd-tab switcher will switch to apps that have no windows on the current workspace. I know, that's part of Mac's app model and it is self-consistent (especially since even if you don't use virtual desktops, you can still have an app running with no open windows, switch to it and usually cmd-N to get a new window) and that it's at odds with Windows's model (where usually closing the last window of a program closes the program).
A sibling comment suggested Witch to get app-agnostic window-switching, I haven't tried Witch but you can do almost all things with Hammerspoon, including window-switching. I cribbed from a bunch of other peoples' configs and made a simple switcher: https://gist.github.com/philsnow/ef8532c3fa3304336ffb0198163... . I think it's worth investing in learning Hammerspoon because of the sheer amount of things that you can integrate.
# AltTab brings back the ability to switch to specific windows. MacOS is still annoying here because it brings -all- instances of the program in foreground (overlapping a Firefox instance in wanted to look something up for example). Feels like MacOS is designed mainly for one screen. I have about 4x that size on my ultrawide. Still this Plugin helps a lot.
# Commander one is a better file manager for me
# Shottr makes taking screenshots easy and actually works with ultra widescreens
# UnnaturalScrollWheels makes the scroll function of my mouse nice again. Personal preference oc but MacOS has no option to invert the scroll behavior.
In general I encountered quite some bugs in MacOS. I was disappointed tbh because I came back after many years of Windows and Linux. Macs and MacOS are build in the same house and should "fit together".
A selection: - System settings search broken. Does not navigate to item - Finder sometimes does not find programs (which are found 2 min later without a problem) - Crash of MacOS after sleep. The automatic recovery is good however. - Selecting to only share a window (in Teams for example) shares sometimes more than that window. This can reveal sensitive information
My current laptop was about 750$ , has a 8845HS and I added a 4TB SSD for 200$.
If I wanted to do the same thing with a Mac I'd be spending over 3k.
I actually have a M1 Air, but Apple decided soldering SSDs would be a good idea.
Dualboot Linux and Windows for the best experience...
Right, "when a consumer can afford to."
So instead of being able to upgrade to a 8TB in a few years when the prices come down, I can just throw out my 3K Mac and buy a new one. Only 5k for the 8TB Mac.
I make music and I'm getting into photography and film making. I prefer more space over being having to carry around an external SSD with me
I also enjoy gaming, which is still much better on Windows. If I want to play some COD or Tony Hawk HD, that's very well supported.
Not really going to work on a Mac.
Macs do have a much more premium feel to them, but I've had great experiences with cheap laptops. Even if I drop it, shucks, I'm out 750$, not 3k.
Mac buyers fall into two groups: those who don't need that upgrade (most consumers) and those who can afford to spec it up at the beginning, cost be damned. That's what OP meant by "when the consumer can afford to."
> also enjoy gaming, which is still much better on Windows
100%. I don't think Apple has meaningfully contested this space.
I'd just prefer to save my money and get significantly more storage.
I will miss Logic though...
Or something cloudy, though not necessarily iCloud Drive.
Not to mention that feeling premium doesn't mean that it is more durable. I used to joke that those cheap plastic bodies found on cheap products did a much better job of protecting a device from the shock of a fall than the glass and metal bodies of premium feeling products.
And while my experience with Macs is dated, I had an optical drive in one that refused to accept disks because there was a minor bend in the case. That machine never suffered from a fall, though it was likely a result of how I stuffed the machine into my book bag.
The rest of your points are all valid, but for photography storage purposes you can just use SD cards. They take up virtually no space, and MBPs (since at least M1 gen) have an SD card slot built-in.
If I had to use a Mac, I guess I'd change my workflow a bit.
Sure. But most high-income consumers value many of the perks that Apple products provide.
I can actually use a MacBook Air on my lap without endangering my ability to have little scarface_74’s
Also a “laptop” computer that doesn’t fry your reproductive organs when working on your lap is an obvious metric.
I'm still trying to figure out the reproductive organ bit. It sounds like an issue for people who use their computer in awfully unergonomic postures, particularly since most computers radiate heat towards the back rather than the front.
Seriously honest question as someone not too deep in the x86 ecosystem anymore. Which of these that are listed as having the best battery life would be comparable in performance to the latest MacBook Airs?
https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-battery-life-laptops
The tradeoff use to be performance or battery life.
Compatibility for many programs people care about is a lot better on Windows than on Mac (or Linux). That has improved a lot in recent years, of course. Especially for games.
Linux has great compatibility for lots of hardware, but Windows is still better supported. Mac has almost non-existent compatibility for hardware: you need to buy an Apple branded device to run Apple's operating system. For peripherals Windows has probably the best compatibility list, but Linux can often be better for very old stuff. Mac's record is spotty at best.
Not only an Apple device but a recent Apple device. I have a 2014 RMBP that works flawlessly. I haven’t been able to install MacOS on it for a couple of years now.
They learned from XP/7 that they'll never recoup it though licenses so now its ads and subscription upsells for everybody.
Knock yourself out!
I like to procrastinate just as much as the next guy, but procrastinating over trying out a different search engine is a bit too much even for me.
Are they legit legit? Or is this just because it's trivially easy to get a "legit" OEM license for free via Microsoft Activation Scripts?
i am unfamiliar with windows activation, does it activate once only, meaning that if you tried to reinstall on the same machine, you can't reuse the same license?
Netflix also famously went this route, allowing rampant password sharing and then deciding "Hey, we want to get paid!" On one hand I don't have a problem with companies wanting to get paid for what they produce, but on the other, given that allowing the piracy is a deliberate decision they made from the get-go, I don't have a problem telling them to get bent once they decide "Time for profits! Enshittification it is..."
(Lest you think I am joking, have a look at the 'MoviePass economy.')
That said, this strategy is surefire when it comes to consumer products like Windows. Consumers will stick with what thye are comfortable with. The Network Effect. It's a huge gamble for professional tools like Adobe, and they are somewhat lucky there wasn't a timeline where GIMP un-GIMPED itself, nor where Krita and other modern competitors didn't get adopted faster. There's money at stake, so professionals can and will learn new tools if the tools bite them.
It’s like when someone offers to sell you a product weighed in grams, you can’t just say ‘ah yes, the drug dealer measurement system’ and dismiss their business out of hand.
Because I don’t think the moral issue people have with drug dealers is that they take a deliberately easy going attitude to theft of their merchandise and allow others to profit from selling it to a territory, only to later on increase their prices.
See also how 'picking the low hanging fruit first' would get you fired from any picking gig: the fruit higher up the plant tends to ripen first. So that's what you pick first.
There's lots of other funny (business) metaphors going wrong.
See also how a 'quantum leap' is the smallest possible change possible, not something big and amazing.
However, I think it is a pretty common occurrence that first timers often get their first hit from friends or even co-workers.
(there's nothing wrong with it other than it being a bit of a generic tangent, but I'm trying to prune the top-heavy subthreads)
How to inform your professional audience that their Figma, Miro, Adobe files are used for training, a result which will remove them from the work market and give their knowledge to the unprofessional masses.
As a professional designer with more of 20 years experience, moving through graphic, web, UX, PM I have a strong disdain with all Adobe connected software.
In the past, when Macromedia started eating their market by introducing more affordable and capable software, I jumped on a bandwagon and supported Freehand, Firefox, Flash and Director. Only to be again in Adobe hell.
When moved from Sketch to Figma, the news of possible acquisition made me mad.
The Adobe products are total bloatware, and nothing of substance or innovation in their base offering has never materialized. They are the epitome of corporate greed, dark patterns and monopolistic hell.
But now we have a lot of monsters around. Microsoft. Apple. Google. Meta. And the new kid under the block: Closed AI. The same type of illness but in a new form. They appointed NSA head for security and announced that will pursue profit first. Surpassing in speed, Googles transition from "Don't be evil" to "Be evil at any cost".
The software industry is eating the world, killing careers, stealing copyrighted data, centralizing and integrating in a monster of deals to deliver nothing of substance. Just food for shareholders who have no ability of systemic thinking and did not see the elephant in the room: Communistic Tech driven Dystopia.
Propaganda of empty promises and no government control. Future for the people who trust the machine more than a professionals and experts.
What bright future for humanity will deliver AI art? The delimiting factor when removing technical skill set will be taste. So how the next generations will form this taste without a curriculum and practice?
They will prompt the taste? Good luck with this.
Here is a list of alternatives for the Adobe crapware.
Vector illustration:
Learn Inkscape, aside of instability under macOS, the software is capable and has fine tools which will deliver everything you need as a designer.
Affinity will become a subscription based software eaten by Canva and AI "art".
For digital painting: Apple Pencil removed 60 percent of my Wacom workflow, and Procreate is a monster of an app. For the desktop stuff, I use Krita.
3d: Blender for polygonal modelling, animation, rendering, sculpting (Plasticity if you are into mixed workflow), Rhino 3d for surfacing and generative modelling (The price is high only at a first glance).
Photography: I learned that all the one app solutions are not future-proof. Moved my workflow into a system of folders and markdown notes. The capability of Raw Therapy combined with Krita are more than enough.
Video editing, compositing and Mogrpaph There is a champion: Blackmagic Design with DaVinci Resolve and Fusion.
You can use Unreal Engine and Blender for Mograph to escape After Effects black hole.
Rive is a mix between After and Flash which is gaining popularity (sadly subscription based).
For UX/UI design, we have a real contender to Sketch and Figma in the face of Penpot. Free. Open source. Possible enterprise goals with option of self-host installation. Baked in interface for token centric design process, real grid and flex box implementation (not the fake auto-layout) and developer friendly without Figma upselling strategies or mac only dungeon of Sketch.