I'm sure I've read an old Joel on Software post somewhere about how Adobe/Photoshop got big in the first place, but I can't seem to find it anymore.
The story as I remember it went like this: X had a practical monopoly on professional image editing and printing, everything else was for amateurs. (Was that Quark? not sure). Then X did something that pissed off a lot of their users, and within a few months everyone had pivoted to the newcomer, Adobe.
The moral here is that if you've got a monopoly or at least a comfortable majority in an area of software, you shouldn't just be worried about someone else making a better product - switching is effort and people don't like that - you should be very worried about doing something that annoys your existing customers enough that staying but adapting to the new UI / pricing model / etc. is perceived to be as much effort as switching.
(Whoever authorised the new UI for firefox on Android might want to think about this too.)
What I can find is Strategy Letter III, saying that in this situation the best thing for a challenger to do is make sure their product is "backwards" compatible: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-ii... Example: How Excel (that Joel was working on at the time) grabbed the market from Lotus 1-2-3.
When people like @prox below say things such as "I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change.", I'm starting to think that Adobe might be ready for its Lotus 1-2-3 moment. Not letting people install their old Adobe software they've paid for is the best incentive to try out something new that I could think of.
I don't mind the UI itself, per-se. However demoting bookmarks to such an inconventient level boggles my mind. Instead we have "collections" which are basically... bookmark folders? Except they don't sync to desktop like bookmarks. Just let me load up my bookmarks list on the start page like before and I have very few issues with the new Android FF.
The limited selection of addons is also frustrating.
This isn't going to piss off current customers though, it's going to piss off customers from fifteen years ago, who haven't upgraded, or maybe the freeloaders that used CS2 lately.
A lot of people were pissed off about Adobe stopping perpetual licenses, but that didn't hurt their bottom line. In fact, they increased revenue because a subscription is a low upfront cost.
Most of the people complaining about this are non-customers whose strong-held beliefs on how to license software have been offended. These people don't matter to Adobe's business.
Subscription revenue is also in and of itself valuable purely due to the fact that it's automatic. In fact, Adobe actually reduced the cost of their software significantly when they moved away from perpetual licensing. That's because it's far healthier for a business to get $50/mo out of you rather than thousands once in a blue moon.
The cost of CS6 Master Collection was around $2,500 or so; whereas a CC All Apps subscription is $53/mo. The thing is, though, that Adobe frequently updated their software to newer versions that had significant backwards compatibility problems. That $2,500 would only get you about a year or two of "the latest version", upon which you'd have to spend another $900 for an upgrade.
So Adobe went from a pricing model of effectively $2,500 + $450-900/yr, to one of $53/mo. Your first "year" of Adobe CSwhatever cost you $208/mo, followed by upgrades which were effectively $37-75/mo depending on how quickly Adobe released their software. Creative Cloud was and still is a bargain if you need Adobe's software.
Sure, you could have just stuck with CS2 or 3, and amortized your software cost over multiple years. However, by doing that, you wouldn't be able to practically collaborate with anyone else in the industry. The moment someone you work with updates from CS3 to CS4, all their files are going to start throwing weird errors and not working when you load them up in your older version. And remember: Adobe Creative Suite was THE standard in a lot of industries, it wasn't like you could just insist everyone remembered to click the save-as-old-version option (if that was even available). Not upgrading was a business disadvantage.
The story as I remember it went like this: X had a practical monopoly on professional image editing and printing, everything else was for amateurs. (Was that Quark? not sure). Then X did something that pissed off a lot of their users, and within a few months everyone had pivoted to the newcomer, Adobe.
The moral here is that if you've got a monopoly or at least a comfortable majority in an area of software, you shouldn't just be worried about someone else making a better product - switching is effort and people don't like that - you should be very worried about doing something that annoys your existing customers enough that staying but adapting to the new UI / pricing model / etc. is perceived to be as much effort as switching.
(Whoever authorised the new UI for firefox on Android might want to think about this too.)
What I can find is Strategy Letter III, saying that in this situation the best thing for a challenger to do is make sure their product is "backwards" compatible: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/03/strategy-letter-ii... Example: How Excel (that Joel was working on at the time) grabbed the market from Lotus 1-2-3.
When people like @prox below say things such as "I switched to Affinity completely, and I also slowly see some people in the industry change.", I'm starting to think that Adobe might be ready for its Lotus 1-2-3 moment. Not letting people install their old Adobe software they've paid for is the best incentive to try out something new that I could think of.