I think it is an overall societal drain, and we're just in the early stages of it.

Photoshop is an interesting example to me, because I count Photoshop as another model that has had to change with the times: it used to be for pure professionals only, at a time when professionals often worked for companies that bought their licenses. Like the sports tickets of software. Crazy expensive, but if you did it as a full-time job, it was more than easily absorbed. After all, it required expensive (and technically challenging) hardware to run it on, so that barrier was already crossed by potential customers.

Today, everyone's a designer. Alright, that's not a fair assessment, but the number of people who have design skills–ranging from minor editing to some real mind-blowing stuff–but don't depend on them to feed their family, is astonishingly high compared to just a couple of decades ago. People who never consider themselves graphic artists find a lot of utility value in Photoshop, or one of its offshoots.

So its old price point, relative to everything else, just doesn't make sense if broad adoption is their goal, unless they're totally happy to capture just the pure pro crowd, who, for perspective, can run it quite handily on hardware that costs what a night or two in a mid-grade hotel in any big city does. The technical and cost barriers have fallen dramatically.

So that's changing.

Now, consider if Photoshop were ad-supported, and had been so for long enough to where designers grew up with that being the new normal.

Then, imagine someone comes out with an ad-free image-editing program, with no ads, that costs a reasonable amount. In some ways, better than Photoshop, in other ways, probably not as specialized, not as built-out, but pretty solid.

I think there's a market there for the taking.

Adobe's trying to strike that balance, and I'm not here to say whether or not they're doing a good job at it with their current approach (that's a much longer post and I doubt my ability to think about it as clearly as I believe I can other segments of the industry), but my point is that well-made products at a reasonable price is something I still want to believe there's a huge market for.

And we tend to underestimate it because of all the sub-par stuff, our conditioning to which we don't even realize.

I'd like to think that enough humanity still has the innate thoughtfulness to be slightly skeptical when being pitched to trade hours of their life (that is, the money they earned by working) for a given product, to provide a market for it.

And if we've all reached the point where we'll happily trade our time, attention spans, compromise our abilities to focus and concentrate, and reveal a wealth of personal data so as to pay a bit less, well, then we get what we deserve. But that's probably outside the scope of this particular comment.

Edit: Fixed a typo.