imo, the subscription style is the evolution of “planned obsolescence”.
people are willing to give money if the goods have an expiration. so instead of the goods expiring, the concept of validity of the goods now expire. same money, but saves on making different goods altogether.
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.
As my boss said in one of those stupid floor meetings we always had to have, “if they have [the competitor’s] card in their wallet, and not ours, who do you think they’re going to?” God, I got sick of asking folks to sign up.
If you had to pick, would you rather get a large ammount of money semi regularly, or a smaller ammount of money on a consistant schedule, oh and there is no alternative for your customer than to keep paying for as long as they use your product.
Online subscriptions have actually been a thing for a long time. In some ways it’s even fallen out of favor, especially with the rise of the “freemium” model. MMOs are a great example of this as subscriptions used to be the price of entry with no other monetization, where as these days if an MMO uses subscriptions it’s a secondary “convenience” fee after entry that is almost always combined with MTX bullshit.
If you’re talking specifically about SaaS bullshit, it’s because it required a certain level of infrastructure before it became practical. We had to move away from cash and needed reliable internet connections first, amongst a host of other developments. Anything that couldn’t be a cash purchase in a physical store was losing significant market share. This didn’t stop time restricted licenses on software still being a thing, but it was generally pretty niche software.
Adobe did it because everybody and their grandmother just pirated Photoshop instead of paying that huge one time fee (licenses costed around $900 not counting inflation). It wasn’t until they went with the subscription model when people actually started to pay for Photoshop.
No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.
They priced it for businesses/students that would be using it constantly in a professional setting and did not have a reasonable personal use price for the general public who pirated it.
I am not an adobe user, but isn’t it possible to pirate its stuff? I’d do it only because I hate subscription models, and if they were the “pioneers” in this aspect I wouldn’t want to give them a dime.