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Comment by pauldoerwald | Hacker News Reader

A subscription model isn't needed to kill software. I think Adobe just stopped caring about product quality. They stopped asking "why do people love Photoshop" and instead just chased quarterly numbers.

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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...)

If you were an honest company, you'd have the current version available for $subscription, and past versions available for some amount more - and use that to see how many people still subscribe but refuse to upgrade.

You also can't stick to the older version, so the choice is can you afford to do your job without any Photoshop or are you stuck.

That’s why I love the Nova.app model. You pay for a year of releases, but if you unsubscribe you keep the latest version when your subscription was active.

It’s the best/worst of both worlds!

Same with most (all?) JetBrains products, and for the first 3 years every year gets cheaper!

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.

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.

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.

It looks like they can take their customer base for granted:

https://news.adobe.com/news/2026/06/adobe-q2fy26-financial-r...

> 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.

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