Subscriptions are good for utility type services which are stable, has continuous consumption, has very low margins of profit and has much less competition.
Adobe's subscription model is dumb. They are purely thriving on consumer mindshare but these prices are going to start hurting. Adobe's core business is ripe for breaking in.
I gladly pay them $10 a month for Photoshop and Lightroom and photography for me is just a hobby, not my job. There are free and paid but lower-cost sorta-work-alikes to both of those apps (and I even use them sometimes -- RawTherapee in particularly has some nice features), but nothing I've tried free or otherwise comes close to the overall feature set in those two packages.
Considering no 'upfront' cost that isn't really too bad for me, and I have no problems paying for tools I actually use to get work done.
If people want to edit Office documents using non-Office software there are plenty of free alternatives.
The fact that Microsoft is the only company able to do this without formatting errors is value that I think is worth the fee.