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Comment by troyvit | Hacker News Reader

Man I want to believe it's short sighted, but Adobe's stock price in 2012 was $30.95. It's at $518 today[1], outperforming SPY. What drives me crazy is that there are plenty of Adobe alternatives that are pretty good, but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base.

[1] https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY

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The stock price growth looks wonderful until the day it doesn't.

The point of this discussion is that Adobe is essentially stealing from its future self by making short-sighted decisions. To a significant extent, they're cashing out their customer loyalty, and that loss of loyalty makes them much more vulnerable to attrition. Gradual attrition will slow their growth; a major attrition event, which they're now making possible, could rapidly reverse it.

But if it has looked wonderful -- like really wonderful -- for the last twelve years that also says something. I would've argued that Adobe was stealing from its future ten years ago when they started started using this model and I would clearly have been wrong. I don't see what's different for them over the next 10 years either because I've apparently underestimated peoples' complacency with being fleeced.

Stock price in the modern market is not a measurement of company health and long term well being - it's a measurement of speculators' willingness to bet on short term performance.

Fwiy it takes a while for these things to have impact, look at Boeing.

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

Well said. Back when people pirated Photoshop, there wasn't much competition. Here's a newspaper quote from 1999: "GIMP, an Image editing program like the $899 PhotoShop, is free. I must be fair here and say that PhotoShop is in many way a superior program to GIMP. Still, there's that free thing to think about."

Compare that to the Affinity suite, which is an amazing collection of programs, especially for the price. They're currently running a sale where you can get everything for $83. If my daughter becomes interested in digital design, I'd be happy to spent that kind of money to encourage her. I'd be very hesitant to subscribe to the Adobe suite, even though that's what I use at work.

> but they still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's contempt for their customer base.

Hello, Autodesk

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