Heh, yeah. They have always been chasing quarterly numbers, they just stopped asking, "what do we have to do to sell the next version" and took their customer base for granted.

With subscriptions, you want to have ways to increase the subscription amount and retain people, which usually leads to adding features no one asks for and bloating the product, trying to upsell users.

Adobe and everyone else. Many of those complaints resonated with me outside of Photoshop

But as I've said in the past, I think there is a relationship between subscriptions and quality: with a subscription model, feedback signals become decoupled. In the past, if the new version isn't good enough, people won't buy it. Now the calculus is changed to whether the product has become bad enough to unsubscribe

Potentially related: trust thermocline (https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01ggz99w9kvpp6yq52abes00eq...)

> A subscription model isn't needed to kill software.

It's not needed, but it sure helps!

They stopped caring much about Creative Cloud. They were focusing on Experience Cloud which is their euphemism for their advertisement network (products like Adobe Tags).

True, but the subscription model is what allowed them to stop caring. Subscriptions will likely kill more software companies than AI in the long run.

The rot started with Flash in 2009. Then it hit Illustrator and Dreamweaver. By 2014 everything was an unstable mess. It coincided with their buyouts of a bunch of competitors including Day, Demdex, and Nitobi. They hit "big enough" size and stopped caring.