Adobe is trying hard to become the next Oracle. Shit products combined with predatory license practices.
Are they selling the MBAs at Fortune 500s? And is that how IBM stays afloat as well?
There is also plenty of 3rd party LoB software that requires Oracle databases as well.
Also, yea, there is still plenty of companies onboarding Oracle Products, usually due to some new exec they hired who used it at last company and swears that it will revolutionize their business.
If you are working in a government or in a large company that can be the main factor for decision.
https://investopedia.com/terms/k/kickback.asp
The other one, is legacy systems.
If you are a big bank, migrating away is a big risk, and anyway you make so much profit that it’s better to leave an extra 10M USD license fees in costs untouched, rather than risk destroying the 300M USD in profit.
(Add that to the risk that your CTO may get mad because he won’t get his kickback)
And that's before we get into the fact that Oracle is not just a database company. They have a bunch of other products targeted at many different industries and applications, such as project management, ERP, procurement, etc.
Oracle wants to be the one-stop shop for technology needed by any of the many, many legacy industries that aren't tech, and in many industries they succeed at that.
take Opera. You buy it to run eg an amusement park or a casino or chain of hotels. That's a relatively complex thing to do, and not something that amusement parks or hotels are capable of building out a team of devs to build themselves.
The list of things that are table stakes would run $10-$20m of devtime for a decade to build out. Bookings (both individual, block for events, and syncs w/ expedia or others) / payments / loyalty + customer relationship management / etc.
When they talk to actual tech companies, they probably laugh when we can’t figure out what they actually do. We’re children playing with Postgres and node apps while they’re owning entire markets every quarter.
Took me a while to realize this, but the need they serve is just that people want their businesses to work, including complying with all laws, do payroll, keep customer lists updated, send documents to the CEO for approval, order supplies from China and produce financial reports. Every business with a decent size will need that, so Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft and friends, with help from McKinsey, Accenture & Co pick up the slack, with kickbacks all around.
Lightroom was the ultimate one-stop shop but I’ve now come to split my workflow up so much that the editing is now hot-swappable. C1 is looking vulnerable to RawTherapee, I gotta say. Lightroom is sadly a dot in the rear-view mirror.
$X per month when you make no money and just want to play around, have a fun hobby, or just try to learn so that maybe one day you too can have a job utilizing that software, then yeah, it can be expensive. I get it. Back in the days of installing Adobe software from floppies, I too was too broke to pay for it. Now, the use of Adobe software pays my bills. For people with hobbies, these other packages might be great alternatives. For working professionally, it's just easier to use the same tools as everyone else. It's just an expense of running a business.
My biggest gripe now is all of the generative AI bullshit, but I don't use it, and it's just one of those things. I also don't use their cloud offerings, so I'm not worried about my work used for training data.
However, back in the day, Photoshop was ~$1000 (using nice easy round number) for the full package. I think it was closer to $1500 for full, and $999 for upgrades, but that's too in the weeds. Updates were pretty much annually. So, you've got $1000/12 months = $83/month (but it was a lump sum payment only). Now, it's ~$60/month with much more frequent updates. If you paid the lump sum and then went on hiatus, you were still out that money.
People complain about forced to not be able to use their 10 year old version because that's all the features you need. Okay, sounds legit. However, good luck installing any 10 year old software on modern OSes. There are times were software has to be kept up to date with the OS. The 32bit to 64bit was a big one even if it was more than 10 years ago.
Again, I get trying to learn while not getting paid but needing to know it so you can have a chance to get paid. That's what I always told myself, that my using the pirated versions was for learning only. I never made any money from its use. Now, I get paid to use it, and I have a legit license. Pirating was much easier before the SaaS offerings, so I can appreciate that. For once, it pays to be old.
Apart from the network effects, are there many exclusive features that you use, or is it more that it's just not worth changing?
At this point in time, for me to switch to a different system would hinder my performance in an edit bay drastically while trying to learn something new. I'm old now, so the time that I used to spend doing all of that extra stuff is now spent on adulting. I used to try to learn every new thing, but I never left my computer. Now, I just want to get the work done as quickly as possible so that I can go back to my non-work activities.