[HN Gopher] FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancel...
___________________________________________________________________
FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 2458 points
Date : 2024-06-17 16:29 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ftc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ftc.gov)
| extr wrote:
| Good IMO. Adobe is a uniquely bad actor here, I can't think of
| many other services that operate in a similar way.
| dboreham wrote:
| Try canceling SirriusXM.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Let's sue them too.
| davisr wrote:
| Way ahead of you.
| https://lite.cnn.com/2023/12/20/media/siriusxm-
| cancellation-...
| terinjokes wrote:
| I did so at the beginning of last year. I was on and off the
| phone within 5 minutes and they refunded the last month.
|
| I was canceling a several years old standalone radio
| subscription, and not trying to cancel at the end of a car's
| free trial, and I wonder if that's why I had such difference
| experience.
| PNewling wrote:
| I feel like something must have changed, because when we
| went to cancel ours on a previous car ~3 years ago it was a
| long-ish process, but only because they kept offering more
| and more discounts until it was essentially free.
|
| A couple months ago when the trial ran out on a different
| car it was like you said, over and done with in 5 minutes.
| judge2020 wrote:
| If you call to cancel every time, you'll probably end up with
| a subscription equal to $10/yr every year.
| heywire wrote:
| It's not hard at all. In fact, I use an iPhone, and they have
| an iMessage "service" or whatever it is called where I just
| text them for account related things. Every year I text them
| for a discounted renewal on my wife's car. Last year I
| cancelled service on my car because I just wasn't using it
| often enough. Of course they started offering a discounted
| price, but when I countered that I'm just not using it, they
| completed the cancellation without issue. Guess I've been
| lucky.
| meowster wrote:
| I never paid them, but used to receive their mailers.
|
| I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said
| they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
|
| I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to
| SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
|
| But this time... I just created an account on their website
| and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number
| to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I
| care!
|
| (I've done this with other businesses that don't respect
| their potential customers with great success! Often the
| people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give
| them their company's address or the 800-number that I called
| them at.)
| kstrauser wrote:
| One time I was at a mall with my dad. There was a nice new
| car on display and he wanted to go look at it. The salesman
| said if Dad filled out a postcard to register to win, we
| could sit in the car and check it out. Dad took the card
| and filled it out as "Tom" something-or-another. I watched
| this and kept my mouth shut.
|
| Afterward I asked him about it. He laughed. Tom was Dad's
| favorite cousin's ex-husband. Whenever something like this
| came up, Dad would give them Tom's info. He'd been doing
| this for years, and occasionally updated the address as
| needed.
|
| Dad's no longer with us but I still Tom up for things to
| this day. Should I ever start getting SiriusXM spam, so
| will Tom.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| Sirius is easy these days, it's a 2 minute phone call.
| They'll offer a discount rate, decline it, canceled and
| refunded.
|
| Gym memberships and newspaper subscriptions is what needs to
| get targeted next. They are aggressive and lots of gyms will
| only cancel in-person, even if you move away.
| bogwog wrote:
| > Sirius is easy these days, it's a 2 minute phone call.
|
| That's still 2 minutes and one phone call too much.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I don't know, 2 minutes is about the time to cancel an
| online subscription.
| broodbucket wrote:
| A lot of people, including myself, consider a phone call
| an extremely unwanted barrier. If you can sign up without
| speaking to a person then you should be able to cancel
| without speaking to a person, no matter what.
|
| Phone call anxiety is a real thing. No idea why I have
| it, but I do
| bogwog wrote:
| Not at all. You can go to a website and click a button in
| less than a minute, and you don't have to do it during
| business hours, sit on hold, or deal with a pushy sales
| rep trying to convince you not to cancel (well, unless
| they do what Adobe is getting sued for).
|
| There is no legitimate reason to limit the options for
| canceling a subscription or adding barriers to the
| process. It's always an anti-consumer move. If you don't
| want your customers to cancel, then don't give them a
| reason to.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I successfully canceled a newspaper subscription in like
| 2005, but for a few months, they'd call. The first couple
| times, I said I wasn't interested and hung up. Then I just
| stopped answering, but they still called. Then I finally
| answered once and said "Stop calling me" and they tried to
| say "If you want to be removed from our call list, you'll
| need to call our customer service line" and I said "No,
| that's not how this works. I asked you to stop calling me,
| so stop calling me." and hung up.
|
| Surprisingly, they actually did stop calling.
|
| SiriusXM never called me, but I got mail from them every
| damn week. I had even tried telling them to stop sending me
| mail, but still got it until I just changed my address to
| some bullshit fake address that didn't exist.
| rockinghigh wrote:
| Canceling SiriusXM is pretty easy via phone. Adobe makes the
| process confusing to make you believe you canceled even you
| haven't yet. It also charges high cancellation fees and has
| threatening wording.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I was just having a terrible experience trying to uninstall the
| "Adobe Creative Cloud". I have used it and paid for it. It's
| full of anti-patterns to make it difficult to uninstall, and
| now that I don't pay for it any more it just exists on my
| computer to nag me to renew my subscriptions.
|
| They have good products and I gladly pay for software I use.
| But the whole cloud service experience has not been good for
| me. Cory Doctorow coined a word for this that I am too polite
| to use.
| beretguy wrote:
| Reinstall OS.
| spike021 wrote:
| New York Times. Last year I wanted to cancel my Athletic
| subscription and not only do they use the positively colored
| buttons to cancel the cancellation flow rather than continue
| with cancelling, once you get to what seems like a final
| confirmation, it doesn't show anything to confirm it actually
| was cancelled. I ended up needing to wait until the next bill
| date to make sure I wasn't charged again. Their support was
| useless too.
| gabinator wrote:
| Several years ago, the only way to cancel was over the phone.
| Hallmark of scumbag business.
|
| Planet Fitness requires in-person or a mailed note for
| cancellation (unless you "move" to California which legally
| requires companies to provide online cancellation if you can
| sign up online)
| lelandfe wrote:
| My local gym ducked my calls, ignored my emails, and then
| after finally canceling, actually restarted my membership
| two months later. Gyms thrive on those bad with finances,
| people who don't know what services they subscribe to.
| ehsankia wrote:
| Ugh that pissed me off so much! Thankfully I used paypal to
| subscribe, and Paypal allows me to just not pay anymore for
| a subscription, so I just did that.
|
| Good to know that's not a thing anymore, i don't know how
| that was ever legal to allow someone to subscribe through
| one medium, and not allow them to unsubscribe through the
| same medium.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| If you pay via Apple Pay, they can't do that
| spike021 wrote:
| It was a standard subscription from their website -- I had
| been a subscriber there since The Athletic first started
| (before NYT bought them and long before they had an iOS
| app).
| justusthane wrote:
| I saw a joke once that "New York Times customer support is
| not the New York Times of customer support."
| cflewis wrote:
| Can confirm NYT is appalling, and they should really be
| ashamed of themselves.
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| Audible is similarly bad. The only notification of my 12mth
| subscription renewal was after it had occurred. If I cancel, I
| lose any unused credits plus access the the included-in-
| subscription content immediately. There's no way to cancel
| auto-renewal - you're either subscribed or you're not. I have a
| reminder set to cancel close to the renewal date.
|
| I find it strange because the rest of Amazon seems pretty good
| in this regard.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Amazon accounts are really hard to delete too. You have to talk
| to a retention person and jump through says of hoops
| baal80spam wrote:
| Good.
| martinky24 wrote:
| Would love to get the money I wasted on this problem back. Who
| knows if that's on the table... Class action lawsuits can result
| in payouts though.
| strictnein wrote:
| $17 coupon for future Adobe services coming your way!
| gyudin wrote:
| From personal experience they refused to cancel subscription or
| close account as they failed to charge my card after a trial
| period. So I just blocked their emails for good :D
| ncr100 wrote:
| Does working at Adobe impact the individual 's ethics?
|
| This seems like a case where Adobe is behaving unethically.
|
| I wonder if long-term Adobe employees have the sense about their
| ethics being more flexible now, versus when they started at
| Adobe?
| dylan604 wrote:
| Does working at Facebook, Twitt...er,X, TikTok, or any of the
| other soulless companies?
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It's easy for things like Adobe or Facebook or Twitter
| because they're mostly one thing.
|
| The others are kind of complicated to me. They're so large
| that the sins kinda get diluted. How many products does
| Microsoft have? How many dark patterns do they need to make
| use of among those products before you can no longer justify
| working for the corporation as a whole? Can you work on
| Microsoft Research because the XBox Game Pass subscription
| cancellation is problematic? I think I could justify that to
| myself just fine, but I imagine that's a personal call.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I get the gist of your comment, but your specifically
| chosen example of Microsoft is a bad one. It's not just
| MS's XBox subscription is bad by itself. The recent news
| about the forced inclusion of Recall. The forced inclusion
| of ads into the OS. The horrendous data collection by MS.
| The list goes on and on that would put Microsoft on a
| egregiously morally bankrupt company on all levels.
|
| A novel idea let down by a poor example.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| I worked for Adobe and it was very much _not_ "one thing".
| My work there involved literally tens of thousands of
| software services across three major segments and hundreds
| of products.
| dogleash wrote:
| To answer your question for real: Yes, obviously.
|
| To answer your question practically: No, it's just a job, gotta
| pay the mortgage. And you know companies have a legal duty to
| be amoral in the quest for profit, right?
|
| We live in a time where so many people work at and/or want to
| work at ethically dubious large tech companies, we experience
| overwhelming social pressure to see them as more morally-
| neutral than they are.
|
| We don't want the cogitative dissonance of hanging out with
| friends and spending the whole time thinking about what it
| means to have someone in my life that enables $foo for a
| living. Are you financially and emotionally ready to quit your
| job as soon as your employer crosses your line? You did spend
| time developing and reflecting on your own personal line in the
| sand, right? And are you're comfortable unabashedly sharing
| that standard over dinner to your 5 closest friends? What if
| one works at the place you find most-evil?
| quonn wrote:
| > companies have a legal duty to be amoral in the quest for
| profit, right?
|
| No, they don't.
| altacc wrote:
| About 25 years ago, working at one of those dot com bubble
| internet consultancy firms, I was told by an Adobe rep that they
| knew everyone at home had a pirated copy of their software but
| the company view was that they thought that was a good thing. It
| meant people learnt their software at home and then insisted on
| using it at work, where it would be a paid for license.
|
| It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their
| almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards
| their users in the pursuit of profits. The last Adobe software I
| really used was Lightroom as that was one of the last pay-once
| software titles. Now the only Adobe product most of us at work
| have is except Acrobat Reader. We were quite glad when the Figma
| purchase failed.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The number of graphic artists working from home well before
| COVID definitely put a kibosh to that theory.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Were they not working for a company?
| nickff wrote:
| Many graphic artists operate as independent
| contractors/consultants.
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| Presumably they mean gig economy aka artists are vastly
| undervalued.
|
| For instance. It's not that AI is replacing artists. It's
| that people think you don't need to pay a license for
| generated images, even when they were clearly and provably
| stolen from copyright material. The bar was just lowered.
| If "AI" is used to remove the watermark from Shutterstock
| people think that's legal now.
|
| So WHEN gig economy workers get picked up by a company. Yes
| they pay for a software license as a "tax" on going pro.
| But from personal experience. A vast amount of art and
| content is made by people from developing economies on
| Fiver or whatever. Many of those licenses are stolen.
|
| And now everyone thinks you don't need to pay artists
| anymore. So nobody will generate licenses.
|
| Adobe was basically right. They're just going at it in the
| maximally enshittified manner.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, this is not what I meant at all. I meant the
| independent artists that work without being attached to a
| firm or anything. The number of small owner/operator type
| places in the graphics/marketing type of world is
| apparently a much more common thing than the readers of
| this forum are familiar.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Is this still the case with Creative Cloud? I'm surprised
| that that would be so expensive for people whose job it
| is to use it.
| acdha wrote:
| An independent contractor using Adobe is still helping cement
| Adobe's perception as a must-have for business. If you worked
| in that space at all, it was super common to have things like
| Illustrator or Photoshop specified in contracts for designers
| and print shops, and pretty much everyone needed Acrobat Pro
| for sone proprietary feature which didn't exist in the
| alternatives.
|
| Adobe wasn't going to risk bad publicity going after some
| freelancer for $800, but they could count on everyone in that
| world needing to use Adobe products for compatibility reasons
| to provide the inertia which meant that the businesses who
| hired those freelancers kept paying Adobe rather than
| switching at the threat of a lawsuit.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Anybody remember the Business Software Alliance[0] from
| years ago threatening to audit your company for using
| unlicensed software? I cannot believe any business would be
| dumb enough to allow them on their premises to even conduct
| an audit. Anyone with two brain cells would just laugh in
| their face.
|
| [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_Alliance
| stevekemp wrote:
| And yet it was only last week we started hearing of
| Oracle sending nastygrams to Java users:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/10/fortune_200_oracle
| _ja...
|
| As covered here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40639943
|
| So this is not just a thing of the past, sadly.
| crote wrote:
| How exactly are you supposed to do that, when your
| license includes their right to audit your business? If
| you refuse them they're going to sue you, and they have
| _far_ more money to spend on lawyers than your business.
| dylan604 wrote:
| You need to have proof that the software is being used.
| You also have to provide notice and cannot expect to just
| walk up and demand inspections. Also, this is a private
| company so they have no authority to do this.
|
| The primary bit of evidence to the BSA was/is from
| disgruntled employees "ratting" on their employer. Is
| that sufficient evidence of a crime to justify a warrant
| for any TLA to do an investigation? If not, that's the
| only way you're looking at my computers.
|
| Again, laughing in their face would be my response.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| new executives coming in, while the well connected ones leave
| completely to chase unicorns? maryhodderetc
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to
| their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive
| towards their users in the pursuit of profits
|
| It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed
| them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it
| at different prices to different customers (price
| discrimination).
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| Not so minor nitpick, but afaik you never got to purchase and
| own the software, you only purchased a license to it.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| That license used to be perpetual, and only enforced
| locally (i.e. without connecting to the internet). That's
| about as close to "owning" as anyone gets in software.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| If you need to put "owning" in quotation marks it isn't
| owning.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| If we go down this particular philosophical rabbit hole,
| you don't "own" anything. Stop making payments into the
| capitalist system we live under, and the bailiffs come
| and take away your car/house/possessions...
|
| A perpetual license is not meaningfully distinct from
| ownership in the context of software - you don't "own"
| open source software either, just license it for the low,
| low cost of free.
| _aavaa_ wrote:
| > Stop making payments into the capitalist system we live
| under, and the bailiffs come and take away your
| car/house/possessions
|
| Your house/car get re-possessed if you stop making their
| loan payments since they are listed as collateral for the
| loan, that's different then you not owning them in the
| first place.
|
| I don't need my builder's permission to add a sofa, paint
| the walls, or change the locks. But god help you if Adobe
| finds out that you've changed the DRM locks on the
| version of Photoshop that you "own".
|
| > you don't "own" open source software either, just
| license it for the low, low cost of free.
|
| Depends on the license, ones like Unlicense or 0BSD try
| to opt out of the default copyrighted licensed state of
| released code.
| zztop44 wrote:
| This isn't really saying much. In many places you need
| permission to paint the outside of your house (and cannot
| choose whichever color you want). And almost everywhere
| you need permission to build a house on land you own.
| WheatMillington wrote:
| Your semantic argument isn't useful to this discussion.
| vsuperpower2020 wrote:
| It seems like almost half the discussion on this
| godforsaken website is midwits picking specific words to
| argue over for no apparent reason. My favorite activation
| phrases is "AIs can hallucinate and make mistakes."
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| I have a full paid license of acrobat pro. I want to pay for
| the 2020 version as that's the last one before it became rental
| software crap. I refuse to pay monthly for this software.
|
| That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not
| paying for cloud crap.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| <sarcasm>Dear lord, did you stop to think of the shareholders
| before you wrote that screed?!</sarcasm>
|
| SaaS is a virus that has drastically reduced the power of the
| individual creator for the benefit of people who really don't
| need more money. I wish there were a viable FLOSS alternative
| to more of Adobe's CS software.
| dartos wrote:
| SaaS itself is fine. A lot of software has recurring costs
| for the saas company (think clarifai, chatgpt, or circleci)
|
| Subscriptions for software that you run on your own machine
| is a little much tho.
| lenerdenator wrote:
| The word for the activity occurring in your second
| sentence used to just be called "hosting".
|
| The problem is that there are fewer and fewer pieces of
| software that aren't hosted somewhere.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Gotcha capitalism with a side of rent-seeking.
|
| If indies need it, then sure, it can be necessary to
| sustain smaller shops that have to support backend/cloud
| features and multiple OSes that churn APIs faster than a
| newspaper.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Isn't the shareholder us?
| asnyder wrote:
| I recommend a one-time Fox-it PDF pro purchase. While they
| too are getting into subscriptions they still make a one-time
| purchase available.
|
| Haven't found any significant deficiencies, nice tool
| overall.
| tombert wrote:
| Genuine question; what does Acrobat Pro buy you over the free
| versions and/or OSS competitors?
|
| I uses Apple Preview a lot because it lets me edit and sign
| documents pretty easily, and that came bundled with my Mac.
| What does the Acrobat Pro include that isn't in the free
| stuff?
| hedora wrote:
| I've been wondering about this too.
|
| In addition to signing documents with Preview,
| MacOS/Linux/Windows can all print to pdf / pdf/a, and the
| Notes app on iOS includes a camera-based document scanner
| that exports to OCR'ed PDF.
|
| I've been making PDFs with LaTeX, for decades, but those
| other tools are more mainstream, and work fine. I can't
| imagine why anyone would pay for acrobat these days.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| One huge flaw of Apple Preview is that it doesn't handle
| PDF forms well, as I discovered when trying to print tax
| returns.
| tombert wrote:
| Really? Me and my wife did her immigration paperwork a
| few years ago with Apple Preview (I think?) to edit the
| forms.
|
| I'd be curious to hear what Preview messed up?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| It looked fine on screen, but only printed the first 4-5
| pages properly, then lots of stuff was missing on
| subsequent pages. After that I couldn't print at all and
| ended up having to remove/reinstall the printer in OS
| preferences. This was just a few months ago, OS up to
| date, unremarkable Canon printer.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| None of the free apps I tried can fill out certain forms.
| The one built into Firefox is pretty good but still a
| little janky with some fields.
| hnick wrote:
| I think the modern ones are all fine for the basic stuff
| like that.
|
| For my work, it was the highly detailed low level stuff.
| Pre-flight checks/profiles, content tree (object level,
| including text fragment) browsing, flattening, converting,
| transforming versions, and so on. It was indispensable for
| some of those operations, working in a printing business
| where clients would sometimes send in their own problematic
| PDFs which we'd need to adjust or inspect to find the
| error.
|
| (Favourite one: a font was embedded in a PDF that mapped a
| character using // in its name, which was "fine" on PDF,
| but on the printer's RIP was converted to postscript for
| one step, and // in postscript precedes an immediately
| evaluated name so it stopped parsing and tried to look for
| it and bombed out)
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| There's advanced features that FOSS equivalents dont do
| quite as well.
|
| I also wish Microsoft would pull its head out of its rear
| and make a preview clone for windows because that app
| basically supplants acrobat for basic use.
| downrightmike wrote:
| The only problem is that ADobe is making the adobe engine
| incompatible with older versions. I've had PDFs that were
| made less than 10 years ago indesign etc that refused to load
| in Edge, which is where we work.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > It meant people learnt their software at home and then
| insisted on using it at work, where it would be a paid for
| license.
|
| That's also why so many companies practically give their
| software away through educational licenses.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| VMware and Citrix had a gentleman's agreement: they pirated
| each-other's stuff, and agreed not to break users' stuff in
| production and keep licensing issues to warnings.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| They drove me off Lightroom, I was just a causal user. The
| upsell spam and ads in Adobe Reader has also driven me away
| from that too. I would have considered buying an upgrade for
| both, but the price was never right for casual home use. Now I
| don't use any Adobe products at all.
| ein0p wrote:
| As someone looking to drop Lightroom, what did you move to?
| Last I checked everything else sucked pretty bad.
| grumpyprole wrote:
| I switched to Capture One. Not as easy to use as Lightroom,
| but the RAW processing is actually superior. It's a one
| time purchase. The professionals can choose to upgrade
| every year, the casual users can upgrade less frequently.
| buildbot wrote:
| Capture One is just ~5 years behind Adobe pushing people
| to subscriptions - in fact they are actually quite bit
| more expensive for what you get now. Perpetual licenses
| are going away
| coder543 wrote:
| I also use Capture One, and I actually liked it
| _significantly better_ than Lightroom when I did a side by
| side comparison of them a couple of years ago.
|
| Lightroom is starting to get some HDR processing
| capabilities that are interesting to me, but that one
| feature by itself isn't currently worth paying Adobe's
| crazy subscription prices just to use a program that I
| otherwise don't enjoy.
| matwood wrote:
| And they all still only deal with a part of what LR
| provides. You're going to be upset. LR as a complete
| package (editing, DAM, apps on all devices, etc...) is hard
| to beat. I'm about to turn LR back on b/c I find myself
| taking fewer pictures as to not deal with my non-LR
| workflow.
| sib wrote:
| I strongly dislike paying for subscription software that I
| don't use very frequently[1], but I do pay for the Photoshop
| & Lightroom bundle. At ~$10 / month, it ends up being a lot
| less than I paid for updating "perpetual" licenses to those
| products frequently enough (every two years?) to get the new
| features.
|
| [1] I'm a hobbyist photographer, but not a pro.
| hahajk wrote:
| What have you replaced lightroom with? That's the one thing
| Adobe makes that I haven't found a good replacement for.
| tombert wrote:
| I've not really done enough with "real" photography to have
| strong opinions on this, but Aftershot (which was included in
| a Humble Bundle a few years ago) has been ok for the stuff I
| used it for.
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| I've been using Exposure for many years, but it seems like it
| might be dying/dead - they haven't released an update in a
| long time, YT and social media accounts are quiet etc.
|
| If you're using a Mac, the new Nitro from gentlemancoders
| seems quite good. I haven't made the leap yet though because
| it's missing file/library management and layers.
| noyesno wrote:
| I've been quite happy with my switch to Capture One. They
| offer subscription and one-off purchases. I haven't seen the
| need to upgrade since my initial purchase. The Capture ONE
| RAW engine also seems to produce better results for my Fuji
| than Lightroom.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It's weird to watch Adobe make these fundamentally short
| sighted decisions. I can only assume the ultimate cause is the
| individual motivations of executives and managers. "Oooo, if we
| raise subscriptions $10/mo, we'll make lots of money, and it'll
| look really good on my annual review." "Oooo, this cancellation
| fee will really help our retention, which will look really good
| on my annual review." "Making Photoshop subscription only will
| do amazing things for our revenue."
|
| When you have complete market dominance, you have little
| opportunity for growth. If your employees and investors have an
| insatiable need for growth, you have to try anyway, and that's
| where things fall apart. The #1 threat to your magical money
| faucet is something replacing your product as the photo editor
| of choice, and you should be 100% focused on making sure that
| doesn't happen. To do that, you need to be focused on keeping
| up quality, periodically adding the latest features, and making
| absolutely sure that the next generation of artists is coming
| up using your tool.
|
| That Adobe rep 25 years ago was 100% correct, but "I keep the
| money pipe flowing and did not actively make it worse" does not
| get you a promotion.
| alt227 wrote:
| When you make the industries best software and pretty much
| have a monopoly on the market, the only place left to go is
| adding markup to your product.
| callalex wrote:
| That's not true, you can also expand to new markets. For
| example Adobe doesn't really have many offerings for
| musicians.
| gabeio wrote:
| > That's not true, you can also expand to new markets.
| For example Adobe doesn't really have many offerings for
| musicians.
|
| Ah yes, the google style of offerings.
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| LoopStart: Expand into so many markets to then be
| unmaintainable, then randomly decide to focus on your
| main stream of revenue again and kill off the side
| offerings GOTO LoopStart.
| alt227 wrote:
| > Adobe doesn't really have many offerings for musicians.
|
| I dont know about that, Ive made many songs in Adobe
| Flash in my time! /s
| chaosite wrote:
| It's more for sound engineers than musicians, but Adobe
| Audition exists.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Having a monopoly like this is like having a goose that
| that lays golden eggs. The right thing to do is nothing
| except to guard the goose and keep it happy and well fed.
|
| But what Adobe has done is a series of aggressive egg
| laying hormonal supplements and force feeding. Yes, it
| might get them even more eggs for a bit, but it's also a
| big risk for killing the goose for not a whole lot more
| eggs, with the side effect of definitely making everyone
| angry with you.
|
| But I think Adobe, and most companies, would inevitably
| make this decision. If you give a medium-sized public
| corporation a faucet that spews money at a constant rate
| forever and a button that has a 60% chance to double the
| money and a 40% chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect
| that most corporations would push that button at least once
| every few years.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet
| that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button
| that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40%
| chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most
| corporations would push that button at least once every
| few years._
|
| That pretty much sums up all of what business and
| investment is. Play with money to get more money to play
| with.
| eru wrote:
| > If you give a medium-sized public corporation a faucet
| that spews money at a constant rate forever and a button
| that has a 60% chance to double the money and a 40%
| chance to destroy the faucet, I suspect that most
| corporations would push that button at least once every
| few years.
|
| If the shareholders, who management has a fiduciary duty
| to, are well-diversified, this might even be the right
| decision.
|
| Basically, if it's mostly index funds and mutual funds
| holding your stock, you probably should push that button
| every so often.
| jamesknelson wrote:
| That assumes that once a golden goose dies, there's an
| infinite supply of replacements. There's a reason we're
| comparing these companies to a mythical creature after
| all: if sustainable businesses producing valuable things
| were easy to create, this website wouldn't exist.
|
| The thing is, the people who own these companies also
| happen to live in a word powered by the products they
| produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit
| of profits, they _will_ see bigger numbers in their
| broker accounts, but it'll be because everything we all
| use has become scarcer and more expensive.
|
| Sure, the owners will _look_ richer - at least in
| comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich
| in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of
| abundance?
| eru wrote:
| You seem to be making a bunch of somewhat odd
| assumptions? Eg that investors are idiots, and that it's
| easy to beat the market?
|
| I was answering the hypothetical example of one company
| having this magic button. With the rest of the world
| operating as normal.
|
| If you want to figure out the optimal approach to many
| companies having such magic buttons, that's a slightly
| different question.
|
| You are right that creating companies isn't easy nor
| trivial. That's why the market so richly rewards creating
| successful companies from scratch. But that's nothing
| that a well-diversified investor needs to worry about for
| this particular decision. You just look at market prices.
|
| > The thing is, the people who own these companies also
| happen to live in a word powered by the products they
| produce. If you kill a bunch of golden geese in pursuit
| of profits, they will see bigger numbers in their broker
| accounts, but it'll be because everything we all use has
| become scarcer and more expensive.
|
| > Sure, the owners will look richer - at least in
| comparison to everyone else. But would you rather be rich
| in a world of scarcity? Or middle class in a world of
| abundance?
|
| You seem to assume zero competition? And also that the
| stock market is really bad at evaluating business
| decisions (at least worse than you)? If the latter is the
| case, you should become an investor and make a killing!
|
| Especially if you are living in a world where everyone
| else is stupidly slaughtering their golden geese, you
| should be able to pick up some disgruntled ex-employees
| for cheap and just run a steady ship!
|
| Another important consideration: at some level of
| abstraction a company is just a legal shell. 'Killing' a
| company might just mean that the old equity (another
| legal abstraction) is deleted, and the former creditors
| turn into equity holders. The operations don't even need
| to be affected by this at all. Of course, you can also
| 'kill' a company by shutting it down. But again, that
| doesn't necessarily remove any of the demand for its
| (type of) products, nor does it remove the experience of
| the people working there, nor does it break any of the
| machinery and hardware.
|
| So if Adobe goes belly up, there are already plenty of
| other companies willing to fill their former niche.
| kaibee wrote:
| > But would you rather be rich in a world of scarcity? Or
| middle class in a world of abundance?
|
| I can tell you that many people would choose the first.
| lenkite wrote:
| Its more like a 90% chance to double the money and a 60%
| chance to utterly destroy the faucet. Definite short term
| gain at only a moderate chance of future failure.
| interludead wrote:
| And it is hard to balance profitability with ethical
| practices
| lmm wrote:
| You could cut costs and let the money roll in. But
| unfortunately even if that's the smart move for the
| company, it's unlikely to be the smart move for the
| individual decisionmakers.
| eru wrote:
| Empire building is fun! And the press you get for hiring
| more people is infinitely nicer than when you announce
| layoffs and other cost cutting measures.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It looks like the US software companies replace all of
| their employees every 6 years without any action, whether
| they want it or not.
|
| You don't need a layoff to migrate a product into minimum
| maintenance.
| godelski wrote:
| It's always easier to play these types of games than it is to
| actually perform innovation. So while competition is not
| necessary for growth, it clearly often helps.
|
| There's another way I like to think about what you said:
| cutting fat. If cutting fat is the easiest way to get stock
| price up (on a quarterly evaluation) then that's probably
| what most people will do. But how frequently can you cut fat
| before you start cutting limbs? The more effectively you did
| it previously (or the person before you) the less you have
| available to you. Not to mention that some fat is necessary
| for big businesses. I suspect this is connected to the trend
| of enshitification we see.
|
| > "I keep the money pipe flowing and did not actively make it
| worse" does not get you a promotion.
|
| It's actually quite sad that it doesn't. Or that the money
| pipe flowing is by far the main metric used for evaluation.
| Especially when the market is cornered. Your strategy should
| change when your environment does. I just wonder what these
| people are doing with this money and why they want it so
| much. $1bn is essentially unspendable. But we see 200 people
| with 10x that and 15 people with 100x that. I just don't get
| why they care anymore. But I guess people really care about
| points?
| bheadmaster wrote:
| > I just wonder what these people are doing with this money
| and why they want it so much. $1bn is essentially
| unspendable. But we see 200 people with 10x that and 15
| people with 100x that. I just don't get why they care
| anymore. But I guess people really care about points?
|
| Money is relative. I bet there are things $1bn can buy that
| we aren't even aware of because we were never exposed to
| it. Some of those things are probably non-tangible, like
| the ability to influence politics and change the world.
| treflop wrote:
| I've been using Photoshop for 20 years and they absolutely
| still add features all the time. For example, they just added
| a ton of AI content fill features and you could make a debate
| about how AI is ruining artists, but you can't say that Adobe
| is doing nothing.
| adzm wrote:
| Pretty much everyone who talks about Adobe stagnating
| doesn't actually use the suite to it's full extent in the
| first place, I'm pretty sure. It's glaringly obvious when
| people talk about competitors; there is nothing near
| Photoshop. DaVinci Resolve is a good one for video though.
| victor106 wrote:
| Agree 100%. Photoshop is a great product. That doesn't
| mean that Adobe can follow dark practices to cancel
| subscriptions.
| queuebert wrote:
| What's missing in Gimp? How far away is it from being a
| viable competitor?
| Athari wrote:
| Gimp is still far behind. Non-destructive editing, AI
| selection/filters/fills, CMYK, animation/video, macro
| recording...
| matwood wrote:
| Yeah, LR is also a great product. And the subscription
| turned out to be about the same cost as upgrading every
| year. There are other tools out there, but nothing comes
| close with image editing and DAM. The subscription also
| gets you LR on every device.
|
| I think the dark patterns here are garbage, but Adobe has
| provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _And the subscription turned out to be about the same
| cost as upgrading every year._
|
| Is it common for people to upgrade LR or similar software
| every year?
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| No. Were it common you wouldn't see such a large
| difference in profit between the rental and perpetually
| licensed versions of Lightroom. Aside from support for
| newer cameras new versions have few, if any, compelling
| features. Performance improvements (LR is slooooooow),
| improved noise reduction, improved handling of video or
| non-Bayer sensors... all of that mostly fell to the
| wayside in favor of things like that AI garbage, improved
| mobile integration, enhanced geolocation support.
| matwood wrote:
| Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people. It
| also included storage space and made it easy to take and
| edit images on any device. That may not matter to you,
| but that is the market now.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| Or the subscription made LR more accessible to people
|
| lol, no.
|
| The Lightroom CC is the mobile/desktop product. That is
| and always has been a separate "more accessible" product.
| Moving Lightroom "Classic" (the desktop only product) to
| a rental only model simply makes profits more accessible
| to Adobe. That may not matter to you, but
| that is the market now.
|
| Of course it's the market now, there's no other option
| from Adobe.
| matwood wrote:
| As a frequent user, I certainly did.
| nsokolsky wrote:
| Also... no one's forcing people to use their products.
| Photoshop doesn't have a patent on editing images.
| Lightroom doesn't have a patent on sorting through photo
| collections. Plenty of paid and free alternatives exist,
| they're just not as good. But it's a completely free
| market out there and Adobe can't stop you from building a
| better version of Photoshop tomorrow to make billions.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| > Adobe can't stop you from building a better version of
| Photoshop tomorrow to make billions.
|
| Make a serious dent in their business and they will damn
| sure try. Typically with lawfare.
| nsokolsky wrote:
| When's the last time this happened?
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| And the subscription turned out to be about the same cost
| as upgrading every year.
|
| lol, no.
|
| Lightroom upgrades cost about $80. According to the wiki
| page Adobe rents Lightroom for $10/mo. That upgrade would
| only get me eight months of access. Adobe
| has provided a ton of value for those subscriptions.
|
| Sure, they've provided a ton of _shareholder_ value for
| those subscriptions. Customer value? Not so much.
| matwood wrote:
| You're assuming they would have never raised the upgrade
| pricing, which seems unlikely.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| You're assuming they will never raise the rental pricing,
| which seems unlikely.
|
| And yeah I paid for two upgrades before Adobe moved
| Lightroom to rental only. The pricing was quite steady.
| Keep in mind Lightroom had no DRM baked in. No licensing
| checks, perpetual three seat cross-platform license,
| etc., etc. That $10/mo is for one seat only.
|
| If the cost to the consumer were close Adobe wouldn't
| have spent the engineering effort to integrate Lightroom
| with all of their licensing software and incur the cost
| of having to keep the rental servers running. You can't
| predict the future but based on the steady pricing (both
| rental and perpetual licensed) the rental software is
| unambiguously more expensive for the consumer.
| toyg wrote:
| You underestimate the power of SaaS. Companies do SaaS
| precisely because it allows for this sort of capricious rent-
| seeking at wildly-unregulated levels of greed. That's just
| the name of the game. If other companies don't do it yet it's
| just because they don't have the level of market dominance
| that Adobe has - once they reach it, they all behave in the
| same way.
| teeray wrote:
| The new goal of a company is really to just capture some
| percentage of your total economic output on a recurring
| basis.
| nijave wrote:
| Infinite growth!
| interludead wrote:
| Sustained revenue growth
| scarface_74 wrote:
| No part of the definition of "rent seeking" is selling your
| product directly to the end user who pays you money.
| zadokshi wrote:
| Adobe doesn't primarily sell products, Adobe primarily
| rents its products to consumers. Adobe is a literal
| actual real world example of a rent seeking company.
| sushibowl wrote:
| Simply renting out products is not _necessarily_ the same
| as rent-seeking. Rent-seeking is the extraction of
| uncompensated value from others without increasing
| productivity. The classic example is putting up a chain
| across a river and charging passing boats a toll to lift
| the chain.
|
| _Ostensibly_ Adobe 's customers are paying for continual
| improvement and support of its product and maintenance
| costs associated with whatever cloud features they offer.
| That's not rent-seeking.
| fauigerzigerk wrote:
| True. The distinction is just not always as obvious,
| because rent seekers often don't start out as rent
| seekers.
|
| They usually gain market share based on merit. Over time,
| structural factors such as network effects allow them to
| grow the rent-seeking part of their income while the
| merit based part declines.
|
| Rent-seeking is a very entrenched idea though. Even the
| tiniest bit of merit in the distant past is enough to
| justify renting out inherited land for instance.
| concordDance wrote:
| "Rent seeking" is an economic term where you sell access
| to something with a fixed supply. Classically land. The
| landlord does not need to do anything to gain money and
| it isn't possible to make any more land.
|
| It doesn't really apply to any SaaS.
| eru wrote:
| What is 'wildly-unregulated levels of greed' supposed to
| mean?
|
| > If other companies don't do it yet it's just because they
| don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe has -
| once they reach it, they all behave in the same way.
|
| Google has never charged for search, nor has Facebook
| charged for their social network.
|
| They arguably have bigger reach and market dominance than
| Adobe has.
|
| There are good reasons Google and Facebook behave in
| different ways, of course. They aren't stupid, nor do they
| lack greed.
|
| I am here just arguing that your comical assertion of mono-
| causality.
|
| 'If other companies don't do it yet', perhaps they have
| good reasons?
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| Google doesn't charge for search because it's users are
| their product, same with Facebook. Apples and oranges.
| quantified wrote:
| Google doesn't charge seekers for search. They definitely
| charge advertisers for search.
|
| However, I understand your point, it's the truth of many
| businesses that if you're not paying, you're the product
| not the customer.
| eru wrote:
| > However, I understand your point, it's the truth of
| many businesses that if you're not paying, you're the
| product not the customer.
|
| No, that wasn't my point. My point was that the mono-
| causal point
|
| > If other companies don't do it yet it's just because
| they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe
| has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same
| way.
|
| is wrong.
| blitzar wrote:
| Adobe charges because it's users are their product, same
| with Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc.
| eru wrote:
| That might be true, maybe. My point was that
|
| > If other companies don't do it yet it's just because
| they don't have the level of market dominance that Adobe
| has - once they reach it, they all behave in the same
| way.
|
| was wrong. Clearly, there's more than one reason that
| determines how companies behave.
| toyg wrote:
| Google sells eyeballs to advertisers, they don't sell to
| consumers. They've largely baked their pricing strategies
| in algorithms that self-adjust to increase costs as
| advertisers invest more, so that they don't have to
| expose themselves, but they still push prices up when
| they feel like it. They're also so brazenly exploitative
| that they were investigated and fined by the EU multiple
| times for doing bad things to their customers.
|
| So yeah, they behave exactly the same - towards their
| actual customers, which are advertisers, not you.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Great example of this is to google simply name of most
| businesses. And then see first links in results being
| adds. While they same links are in result slightly down?
|
| How did we end up in situation were anyone would be
| paying in this case? Seems like just pure exploitation of
| their position having combination of add network and
| popular search engine...
| nox101 wrote:
| This is Apple's new goal.
|
| https://www.counterpointresearch.com/insights/services-
| reven...
|
| And they will need access to all of your data to provide
| those services.
| threeseed wrote:
| Most of their services revenue is coming from Music and
| AppleTV+.
|
| Which doesn't require any of your data.
| seaal wrote:
| Most? App Store fees and Google deal revenue are each
| larger than Music and AppleTV+ revenue combined. Margins
| are likely better too.
| windex wrote:
| SAP has been doing this of late with wild pricing and
| customers are being pushed into a corner with forced
| upgrades.
| mbesto wrote:
| It's no coincidence that after Adobe introduced a
| subscription in 2013 that this was the inflection point in
| which the stock grew 10x over the following decade. The
| previous decade it only grew 3x.
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ADBE/
| eru wrote:
| Well, the previous decade also includes the Global
| Financial Crisis.
|
| If you want to make any meaningful statement at all, I
| guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe stock
| compared to eg the S&P500 index. (Oh, and be sure to look
| at the total performance, ie with dividends re-invested.
| Don't look just at the share-price.)
| mbesto wrote:
| > I guess you'd need to look at the performance of Adobe
| stock compared to eg the S&P500 index.
|
| So why not just comment with exactly this?
|
| Here is a comparison of ADBE and SPY, which ADBE
| correlates very strongly to SPY, and also in this
| analysis is AAPL which severly outperformed the SP500:
|
| 2003 -> 2013
| https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-
| portfolio?s=y&s...
|
| 2013 -> 2023
| https://www.portfoliovisualizer.com/backtest-
| portfolio?s=y&s...
|
| See the difference?
| hamburglar wrote:
| Yeah, Apple managed to enter the far more lucrative
| hardware-as-a-service market. It's a subscription you
| only pay every couple of years to have the latest iPhone.
| eru wrote:
| > So why not just comment with exactly this?
|
| Thanks for providing the data. Sorry, I was on mobile, so
| had a harder time finding the numbers in a way that I can
| share.
|
| > See the difference?
|
| For anyone following at home, here's the important bit
| for the earlier period:
|
| > The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe],
| measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.57. Whereas the
| Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.57.
|
| And for the later period:
|
| > The risk adjusted return of the portfolio [Adobe],
| measured by the Sharpe Ratio, was 0.93. Whereas the
| Sharpe ratio of the benchmark [S&P500] was 0.69.
|
| Thanks!
| nothercastle wrote:
| Adobe also caught the AI wave and they can steal your
| content for AI training.
| mysterydip wrote:
| "It's not stealing because you agreed to it in our
| updated terms of service!"
| ta-ciciauau wrote:
| One of the guys responsible named in the lawsuit reports
| directly to Adobe's CEO:
| https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwadhwani
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| There seems to be a perception in big companies that if
| you're not pissing off your customers enough to drive them
| away, you're leaving money on the table. So there's this
| constant pseudo-optimizer running to get the maximum profit
| possible.
|
| Thank you Harvard Business School.
| harha wrote:
| As an upside, once you've pissed off enough customers, you
| can also quit and provide them with an alternative that
| packages an open source tool with some enterprise features
| with marginally better terms
| interludead wrote:
| Yeah, it feels like I saw an example somewhere
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I once read that business is the art of ripping someone off
| without pissing them off.
|
| For better or worse, I agree. If you aren't ripping them
| off you're leaving money on the table, but if you go too
| far and piss them off they're going to take away all the
| money on the table with them.
| amelius wrote:
| Well you can piss people off in some ways, yet in other
| ways give them value.
| alickz wrote:
| > If you aren't ripping them off you're leaving money on
| the table
|
| You're leaving money in their pocket that you might get
| later
|
| How do you quantify loyalty? Because it seems to me that
| it's very easy for individuals to prioritise short term
| gains at the cost of medium and long term losses due to
| trust erosion
|
| I wonder how much client satisfaction and trust would be
| worth on the quarterly report, if it could be calculated.
| I think it would be immense for most companies
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Money in their pocket is not money on the table. You are
| in fact reinforcing my point: Client loyalty and trust is
| critical in business, you're a lousy businessman if
| you've damaged that by ripping off your clients too hard
| angering them.
|
| The most effective business is getting all the money on
| the table and making your client happy. Thusly the art of
| business, ripping off your client without pissing them
| off.
|
| Absolutely nobody gets ahead in business by selling wares
| cheaper than what they could have gone for, unless you
| are deliberately underselling the market to gain share by
| sheer force of will. Likewise by selling wares higher
| than what they could have gone for, clients will just
| look elsewhere because you're just another one of many
| merchants.
| queuebert wrote:
| > Absolutely nobody gets ahead in business by selling
| wares cheaper than what they could have gone for, ...
|
| Explain Costco then.
| Bloating wrote:
| Volume. Its all relative to your less efficient
| competitor
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Didn't Costco get volume by selling things cheaper then
| they could have?
| brianwawok wrote:
| [delayed]
| datavirtue wrote:
| People with Costco memberships view shopping as a sport.
| Instead of golfing, they go buy shit and eat hot dogs.
| lupusreal wrote:
| They do have the best hot dogs.
| isk517 wrote:
| Costco makes the majority of profit from membership fees,
| they've already profited from you before you have even
| made your first purchase. Arguable any profit they make
| from what you purchase is where you are being 'ripped
| off' but because the savings and return policies are
| better than the competition they avoid the 'pissing off'.
| gopher_space wrote:
| Isn't a membership like $35 a year?
| brianwawok wrote:
| [delayed]
| draugadrotten wrote:
| For another example of the same behaviour, watch the
| development of Sports in European cable - Viaplay for
| example. Starting 2016 the headlines of the press has been
| "Viaplay chockhojer priserna" ( Viaplay shockingly raise
| their prices ) They have now jacked up their prices to a
| level where customers are now not only leaving(1), but
| actively hating the company online(2 - see comments), as
| well as teaching friends about pirate IPTV alternatives. At
| the same time the management of Viaplay have raised their
| compensation levels to ridiculous levels. The company
| itself is suffering financially from all this, but
| management is richer and fatter than ever before(3).
|
| 1. https://teknikveckan.se/det-krisar-hos-viaplay-
| over-25-proce...
|
| 2. See comments - https://twitter.com/ViaplaySportSE/status
| /180153322166384670...
|
| 3. https://omni.se/sparkade-vdn-jobbade-fem-manader-
| far-18-milj...
| etrvic wrote:
| The same thing happend with Netflix raising prices.
| Probably everyone nobody canceled their subscription
| after the increased price just becouse it's not worth the
| effort. And the price raise is incremental just so nobody
| will complain.
| jnsie wrote:
| Boiling the frog, so to speak
| inquist wrote:
| Turns out frogs are smarter than we thought
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240118204920/https://www.fa
| stc...
| throwway120385 wrote:
| I canceled my subscription when I found out they wanted
| me to buy two subscriptions -- one for each home I own.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| Where I live Viaplay bought the licenses for showing
| football matches on all levels for the next years.
| Previously we could see the football WC and European
| championships, and national games on the national tv
| channel. With the new viaplay deal the games would only
| be possible to see on their platform or whatever it is.
|
| Fortunately they fell into financial troubles before the
| deal became active.
|
| They massively overpaid for showing all of the matches,
| to force everyone interested in football to get a
| subscription. But probably most people just watch it on
| tv, because "hey, why not, national team of x country (or
| our own team, for whom winning a match is a miracle) is
| playing, lets watch it". Not "I will happily pay tens of
| EUR each month to some company to watch stuff".
| postmodest wrote:
| "We can cut costs if we sell to a few whales and not a
| broad audience"
| vasco wrote:
| I've seen business cases predicting 70% churn that were
| entertained for months because of the revenue potential.
|
| Reminds me of the "men only want one thing and it's
| disgusting" meme but with executives.
| dd82 wrote:
| At a certain size company, you being a professional asshole
| is a requirement for any position. Also being very good at
| lying and deceiving. The danger begins when those people
| start believing their own lies.
| interludead wrote:
| When aggressive, deceitful behavior becomes normalized...
| interludead wrote:
| Indeed, businesses can maximize profits by pushing the
| limits of customer tolerance. And I see that often now
| iamleppert wrote:
| It's important to recognize that the only thing that
| matters is how big of a bag you can get. Making money is
| the only point of tech. Get in, get your bag, and get
| out!
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The fundamental problem with increasing prices is that you
| create an opportunity for competitors.
|
| If Photoshop would cost 5EUR a month, then everyone would buy
| it because it is the best.
|
| If Photoshop costs 50EUR a month, they make more money, but
| they are leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a
| 5EUR a month product.
|
| I actually think the latter is better for the ecosystem.
| There's going to be multiple products, with Adobe at the top,
| but also a lot of apps from smaller developers. On the Mac
| there are for example Acorn, Pixelmator, Affinity Photo --
| none of them are a full replacement for Photoshop, but they
| are decent options for people who just need to edit a photo.
|
| Back when pirate Photoshop copies were ubiquitous, there just
| weren't any opportunities for smaller developers like there
| are now.
| intended wrote:
| This assumes a fair market.
|
| Most (all?) arguments that depend on competition depend on
| a fair market.
|
| However, no industry or government lives in a vacuum.
|
| Firm X develops enough market dominance to constantly
| collect vast sums of money to build their war chest.
|
| This war chest is used to buy out competitors, and kill off
| competing ideas.
|
| Firm X creates clones of lower priced alternatives, then
| outcompetes the smaller firm.
|
| Firm X uses war chest to fob off or weaken regulators (if
| any exist), extending the time they can extract rents.
|
| ----
|
| Little guys have to survive by getting enough money fast
| enough to beat the Big guy. Why bother? Get moderately
| sized, get bought out, and live with your wealth.
|
| PS: I have butchered economics somewhere, forgive me.
| wolpoli wrote:
| > leaving a huge opportunity for competitors to make a 5EUR
| a month product.
|
| Best of all, if the competitor becomes a threat, the
| company with 50EUR a month product can just buy them out.
| winternett wrote:
| CS6 has been running for me well, and likely will keep
| running long after the company collapses on my offline PC
| that I don't do Microsoft OS updates on... Great job on that
| one Adobe!
| anoncow wrote:
| Side question: What should companies, listed on the stock
| exchange, and who have complete market dominance do?
| thombat wrote:
| Be careful about looking as if they're abusing that
| dominant position. Back at the highwater of the "Wintel"
| dominance, early 2000s, Intel staff reportedly found
| Microsoft hair-raising, boasting openly of crushing the
| competition, choking off their air supply, undercutting
| then till they bled to death, etc. Intel had already had
| the antitrust stick brandished at it and had made sure the
| troops all understood the importance of the marketplace at
| least looking like a fair fight.
| Two4 wrote:
| exist, innovate, maximise long-term value for shareholders
| and users, eliminate inefficiencies, externalise risk,
| internalise sources of value, monitor the business
| environment for new opportunities and threats
| polski-g wrote:
| Issue dividends and return profits to their shareholders.
| They don't need to increase revenue by n% every year. Lots
| of electrical distribution companies are publicly traded
| and do just this.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Share price appreciation is like crack. I think a large
| part of the investment market is looking for the share
| price to increase or they aren't interested.
|
| There are inexpensive stocks yielding close to 10% from
| dividends, but you are told not to expect an increase in
| share price. Instead, people go after stocks that yield
| far less (0-3% dividend with a much higher stock price)
| but which may experience a growth in share price.
| queuebert wrote:
| Software companies should do the same thing material goods
| producers do: make the product smaller, faster, and
| cheaper. Instead they rent seek with half-assed updates and
| added bloat that 95% of users never need. Adobe is not
| alone in this.
|
| If microchip producers had done what Adobe has done,
| computers would be developed by adding a few vacuum tubes
| each year and bumping the cost by 5%.
| troyvit wrote:
| Man I want to believe it's short sighted, but Adobe's stock
| price in 2012 was $30.95. It's at $518 today[1],
| outperforming SPY. What drives me crazy is that there are
| plenty of Adobe alternatives that are pretty good, but they
| still can't make a dent in market share despite Adobe's
| contempt for their customer base.
|
| [1] https://portfolioslab.com/tools/stock-comparison/ADBE/SPY
| banannaise wrote:
| The stock price growth looks wonderful until the day it
| doesn't.
|
| The point of this discussion is that Adobe is essentially
| stealing from its future self by making short-sighted
| decisions. To a significant extent, they're cashing out
| their customer loyalty, and that loss of loyalty makes them
| much more vulnerable to attrition. Gradual attrition will
| slow their growth; a major attrition event, which they're
| now making possible, could rapidly reverse it.
| troyvit wrote:
| But if it has looked wonderful -- like really wonderful
| -- for the last twelve years that also says something. I
| would've argued that Adobe was stealing from its future
| ten years ago when they started started using this model
| and I would clearly have been wrong. I don't see what's
| different for them over the next 10 years either because
| I've apparently underestimated peoples' complacency with
| being fleeced.
| devmor wrote:
| Stock price in the modern market is not a measurement of
| company health and long term well being - it's a
| measurement of speculators' willingness to bet on short
| term performance.
| inversetelecine wrote:
| > but they still can't make a dent in market share despite
| Adobe's contempt for their customer base.
|
| Hello, Autodesk
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > Now the only Adobe product most of us at work have is except
| Acrobat Reader.
|
| [I think you didn't mean 'except']
|
| I haven't had an installed copy of Adobe Reader on any computer
| I've used in the last 15 years.
| seemaze wrote:
| I was an architecture undergrad (bricks , not bits) in the
| early 00's and everyone had pirated software. And then we all
| got hired and brought our quiver of technical skills with is
| into industry and convinced our managers to purchase the tools
| we knew so well.
|
| Now as the manager making decisions, I actively search out
| alternatives to Adobe due to the overwhelmingly poor experience
| (cost, bugs, support, tactics).
|
| I know folks who keep VMs for the explicit purpose of running
| releases from 10 years ago.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Figma's pricing is extremely exploitative too, it's essentially
| designed in a way were trivial actions can instantiate new
| subscription seats that have to be manually removed.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Somewhat reminds me of netflix's policy on sharing accounts.
| The CEO used to straight up say they don't care, and it's not
| really feasible to enforce account-sharing rules. Fast forward
| to today, and they "figured out" how to enforce it.
| pndy wrote:
| > It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to
| their almost total market dominance,
|
| I'm pretty sure Adobe went for subscription model as one of the
| earliest big companies and then the trend bloomed all around us
| - especially on mobile devices.
|
| Few years ago my friend had issues with her computer after
| being forced to upgrade from Win7 to 10 - it was something
| drivers related. She reinstalled 7 but couldn't activate her CS
| anymore because servers for that particular version were no
| more active. She could use crack and activate the software but
| she didn't want to risk issues if she'd face the visit from
| Polish tax office (which is permitted to check legality of
| software in business). Purchasing new license was out of the
| question because Adobe already introduced subscription at that
| point and she, as a single-person company couldn't afford it in
| expenses. A colleague suggested her Affinity and she gladly
| switched.
| troad wrote:
| > Polish tax office (which is permitted to check legality of
| software in business)
|
| Ugh, what an egregious misuse of public funds. Maybe they
| should also check the labels on the employees' clothes, in
| case of illegal knock-offs.
| nox101 wrote:
| I tried switching to Affinity. I'm glad it exists. I use
| Affinity Designer but Affinity Photo didn't meet my needs and
| I ended up signing up for a Photoshop subscription. It was
| small workflow stuff but ultimately, for me needs, some poor
| UX choices in Affinity meant editing 200+ files would have
| taking 2-3 hours more. Photoshop was $120 for a 1yr
| subscription. My time is easily worth more than $120 for the
| 2-3 hours I saved.
|
| I'm not dissing Affinity Photo. It seems great. And like I
| said, I use Affinity Designer (never owned Illustrator). all
| I'm saying is $120 isn't that much money if you actually need
| the software for work.
|
| If you just need something for a hobby than there's Affinity
| Photo ($50) as well as gIMP and Krita. There's also Photopea
| which I find is meeting most of my short term Photoshop needs
| so I might switch and give them my $$$ instead of Adobe.
| Though I suspect if I ever have to do 200+ images again I'll
| find Photopea's workflow to be missing the things that made
| me pony up last time.
| pndy wrote:
| Let me bore you with some stories:
|
| Woman whom I met while being at uni one day calls me and
| asks for help with installing Photoshop - I ask her why
| she's doing that. She never was into graphics software and
| in fact, constantly needed my help with the true computer
| basics. She said she went to this photography course and
| the instructor guy ordered everyone to get Photoshop to
| fine-tune their work. I told her she should be careful
| because it's likely she'll be maneuvered into a
| subscription for a piece of software she doesn't need. I
| also mention Gimp but she refused as they were working with
| Adobe software only. Fast-forward to a year later: she
| unsurprisingly cancelled Photoshop sub. Prob with a help of
| her daughter boyfriend who become the personal tech support
| guy for the whole family.
|
| There was also a case of finding her a replacement for
| trial Office she got with her machine with - she was
| familiar with Word for years. So I suggested OpenOffice and
| it worked pretty well up until some document formatting
| issues happen, which were resolved already in LibreOffice.
| I installed LO but she found its UI hard to use somehow,
| and in few weeks she opted to redo her papers with some
| cracked version of Office.
|
| On a side note, I wouldn't be surprised if that photography
| course would be all about getting people trapped within
| Adobe software and the instructor would be paid for each
| head he managed to catch.
|
| Then there's my closest friend: for years she was working
| with pirated Photoshop 7 up until it refused to work on her
| Win11 machine recently and she had to swap to a yet another
| pirated CS version. Same goes for managing photos and her
| drawings pieces - it's always ACDSee 2.xx with the
| commonly-known-serial-number. I suggested her Affinity
| giving the example of the woman from my original comment,
| but she said Photoshop was and is always enough for her and
| she wouldn't want to learn everything all over again in
| another UI. Tho, she's enjoying darktable and rawtherapee
| along with Stellarium for her sky-watching which I
| suggested her.
|
| ---
|
| While two examples may be that much, I do believe being
| committed to familiarizing itself with software in early
| stages makes the switch harder later.
|
| I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people get
| used to a new UI/UX or completely different environments...
| That'd be really interesting stuff to read.
| kaibee wrote:
| > I do wonder if there are such study cases of how people
| get used to a new UI/UX or completely different
| environments
|
| I learned 3d modeling in 3ds Max as a kid, but many years
| and a CS degree later, I ended up switching to Blender
| because the license cost of 3ds Max was absolutely mental
| for a hobbyist ($3,000ish?). This was after the Blender
| renaissance where they overhauled their UI and stuff. But
| it wasn't my first time trying to switch to Blender from
| 3ds Max. In terms of features and workflow, both are very
| similar (and I actually like some things in Blender
| more), but it's the little differences that end up
| bugging you in my experience. Like some alt-mode of a
| feature being missing. Or the camera handling differently
| from how you're used to.
|
| I'm currently going through this again now, switching
| from Unity to Stride game engine. At a quick glance,
| they're extremely similar, but that's almost worse. It's
| like coming home to your house and finding that it was
| replaced with an identical house.
| kilpikaarna wrote:
| Anecdotally, they seem to be doing some subtle shenanigans
| around the install and activatiom of CS versions that still
| require it (4-6 iirc).
|
| Changing the activation flow in non-obvious ways, dark
| patterns on the website leading you in circles when trying to
| download the installers, support chat telling you to just get
| CC...
|
| Probably not unintentional.
| bradgessler wrote:
| That was the best most companies could do before SaaS. Now that
| we live in a SaaS era, it's much easier and acceptable for
| corps like Adobe to minimize piracy and increase revenue with
| subscriptions.
|
| This isn't unique to Adobe--most software companies have
| followed suit because it just makes sense. What is unique about
| Adobe is they're doing some really shady things with
| subscriptions that are abusive to customers, which this suit
| hopefully ends and serves as a warning for other abusive SaaS
| corps.
| crazygringo wrote:
| This is exactly right -- Adobe wanted people to pirate
| Photoshop at home because they knew it wasn't realistic for a
| lot of home users to pay for an entire Photoshop license
| upfront. Back in 2010, that was a whopping $700 [1].
|
| SaaS changed that -- you can now get Photoshop for a month
| (no annual contract) for $10 [2, 3].
|
| Which is truly just an amazing deal -- that $700 in 2010
| would be $1015 today, so the subscription will be cheaper
| until you use it for _eight and a half years_ , plus you get
| upgrades. It's a lot fairer for everyone. Except when Adobe
| pulls sh*t like the FTC is suing them over.
|
| But yes -- SaaS absolutely ended the idea of companies
| wanting home users to pirate their stuff so companies would
| buy it.
|
| [1] https://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/04/12/photoshop.first.look.
| wir...
|
| [2] https://petapixel.com/how-much-is-photoshop/
|
| [3] https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/photography.html
| kbenson wrote:
| Once the infrastructure and social acceptance was there to
| allow for subscription based pricing, the bost benefit ratio
| shifted enough that the benefit of those people using Adobe
| products at home that weren't paid for changed, since they
| could now get the specific products they needed for a small fee
| that only lasted a short while.
|
| I.e. $400-$1200 for a home user is a hard sell for someone that
| only needs it for a bit, so they accepted the benefit piracy
| gained them since the sales lost was minimal. Once they could
| feasibly expect someone to pay $30 for a short term access to
| some tools (whether true or not, it's the perception of that
| which matters), I think there's little incentive for them to
| still allow that piracy.
|
| I'm not sure if this was very forward thinking of them or they
| just got lucky by allowing the piracy instead of allowing
| cheap/free home users, but I suspect they would have had a much
| harder time trying to charge for home users if they had
| previously offered home user free use licenses to legalize the
| benefit that piracy was providing. Raising prices is harder
| than enforcing pricing that was unenforced, and charging
| something for what was previously free is _very_ hard to get
| away with without a huge reputation impact.[1]
|
| 1:
| https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/13/156737801/the-...
| sirspacey wrote:
| Yep, I finally cancelled and didn't take any of the "two free
| months" offer because I just don't trust their billing approach
| anymore. The "pay monthly but can't cancel for one year" model
| ruined it.
| langcss wrote:
| For after effects they offered monthly, monthly with
| commitment and annual. Same pricing structure as a gym. I
| guess they need to make it clear but it was clear to me that
| a cancellation fee applied.
| throwaway743 wrote:
| Pretty sure cc is still piratable
| ljm wrote:
| The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky describes the fall of Behance,
| the fall of Adobe's perpetual licensing, and the rise of their
| cloud subscription offering.
|
| I wonder what he thinks about all that in hindsight, putting
| the many millions he made aside.
| ptelomere wrote:
| Drug dealers also have the same modus operandi.
|
| First, free samples, then you must pay, once addicted you pay
| more and more, no money ? go sell these drugs and be an
| evangelist for us, now your work is our profit.
| magnetowasright wrote:
| They also relied on schools when I was going through school,
| even before the free license for students offers. My schools
| would get cheap or free use of office suite, windows, and adobe
| creative suite, we'd all learn to do our class work on them (or
| have multimedia elective essentially being 'learn adobe
| creative suite' class), pirate them for home use, and have it
| even more entrenched for doing actual work with. Considering
| when I started at school, computers for student use for my
| whole school could be counted on one hand and they only had
| word perfect or something on them, they adapted to that
| particular changing landscape amazingly.
| coolandsmartrr wrote:
| The idea of "use it at work" may have change drastically with
| the advent of social media. Nowadays, anyone can become a
| content creator[1], thereby making their home a place of work.
| This shift in trend may have compelled Adobe to pursue revenue
| from individual users, albeit rather aggressively.
|
| [1] On a side note, I lament how this phrasing became over-used
| by adult content creators, thereby making its connotation
| strongly affiliated with that industry.
| chii wrote:
| > This shift in trend may have compelled Adobe to pursue
| revenue from individual users
|
| if these individual users are deriving commercial revenue
| from the software, i dont see it as wrong to pursue revenue
| from them.
| blitzar wrote:
| [1] On a side note, I lament how this phrasing became over-
| used by people with an instagram account and a phone.
| paranoidrobot wrote:
| > the last Adobe software I really used was Lightroom
|
| Same. But also because Lightroom hands-down beat out everything
| else in existence at the time (and possibly still does?) for
| it's fantastic digital-darkroom workflow.
|
| It also wasn't horribly expensive - I think it was around
| AUD$300 for the full version, and maybe $99 for an upgrade.
| ChrisRR wrote:
| Presumably after a while that didn't ring true. I've worked at
| at least one company where an engineer flat out pirated the
| software he used, and I'd say all others have been a bit lax
| with the terms of the licence
| chefandy wrote:
| I learned Photoshop on pirated copies. However, as a young
| professional that couldn't risk any of the malarkey involved
| with relying on an outdated, pirated tool cracked with a
| program written and compiled by who knows, I needed a real
| license-- that's especially true because PDFs were a major
| vector for malware infections at that point. However, I also
| could not afford to spend many hundreds of dollars upfront on
| their products! When they introduced the CC subscription, it
| was a an absolute lifesaver. Especially for hobby users or
| professionals with low-collaboration or less involved use
| cases, it's easily more expensive over the life of the
| software. But for people that consistently need the latest
| features in any number of their programs, it's actually a lot
| better.
|
| ( _And no, the open source alternatives do not work for my
| workflow, and they REALLY didn 't back then. I might be able to
| squeak by with inkscape's current tools for typesetting, but
| having to work between that and gimp to modify type in an
| interactive layout would be idiotic in a professional workflow.
| It would be even clunkier than having to quickly develop a
| native GUI app a la winforms or in X-code but only being able
| to edit code in a word processor, and then pasting it into the
| IDE for syntax checking and compilation._)
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| I removed the last vestiges of Adobe products from my machine a
| few years ago. It took a while to find all the little bits of
| cruft and licensing daemons that had been spewed all over my
| Mac by their installers. What a mess.
| rightbyte wrote:
| The bank should just have some sort of interface where you can
| cancel recurring charges on the card.
|
| Changing card is a bit to blunt.
| teeray wrote:
| The problem is that that does not release you from your
| contractual obligation to pay every month. The company is still
| free to (and often does) send you to collections.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That's fine with me. We can then let that "debt" linger until
| it is bought up by some company willing to settle for pennies
| on the dollar
| teeray wrote:
| Meanwhile, you can't get a mortgage or a car loan because
| your SiriusXM bill remains unpaid because you "fixed the
| glitch."
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sure, caveats are always included, but if you don't need
| a mortgage or a car loan, fuck 'em.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not just a mortgage or car loan. Credit checks[1] are
| being used by landlords to decide whether or not to allow
| you to rent. They are being used by employers to decide
| whether or not to hire you. They are being used by
| utility companies and insurance companies to decide
| whether or not to do business with you.
|
| It's slowly getting to the point where a low credit score
| will bar you from participating in major areas of the
| economy.
|
| 1: https://www.experian.com/blogs/ask-experian/what-is-
| credit-c...
| antihipocrat wrote:
| 21st century debtor's prison. No walls, chains or guards
| required!
| judge2020 wrote:
| Then it ruins your credit, and technically the three
| bureaus disallow "pay for delete" agreements between
| consumers and debt collectors which would get it off of
| your report entirely (some still do it).
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| One outstanding charge won't tank your score.
| guntars wrote:
| I'd argue that heavily lopsided TOS in favor of the company,
| that can be changed at any time by said company, and your
| access can be cut off unless you agree to the updated TOS,
| does not make a contractual obligation. In a B2C context, the
| business is the more sophisticated entity so it's up to them
| to make sure everyone knows what they are agreeing to. They
| could have put up a bold summary of "this is a yearly
| contract, you will be charged $79.99 to cancel, please type
| YEARLY CONTRACT in the box" somewhere in the signup flow. Had
| they done it, the case could be dismissed.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > Had they done it, the case could be dismissed.
|
| You mean _this case_? Why should that get it dismissed?
|
| This is about abusive (and unlawful) business practices,
| not a lack of knowledge on the consumer's end. If the
| customer had full knowledge of the terms before agreeing it
| would still be unlawful, the law generally doesn't care
| that the two parties consented to an abusive business
| relationship.
| rightbyte wrote:
| You put the ball in their court. They have to do something to
| get your money, which you might contest or ignore.
|
| But ye it is not optimal. You'd probably want to have some
| record of trying to cancel.
| defterGoose wrote:
| Don't trust changing your card either. I had a predatory LA
| Fitness membership. When they made me jump through one too many
| hoops to cancel, I called up WF and had them issue me a new
| card (Visa). Well, Visa, in their infinite wisdom, gave my new
| credit card number to LA Fitness and they kept on charging me
| for almost two years before I noticed. I don't remember the
| name of that program at Visa, but I'm sure they and other CC
| companies continue to do this. Should be illegal.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Netflix does this as well, and is how I found out about it.
| They claim that since you didn't cancel the service, it was
| clearly a lapse in your updating of the new number so they
| just helped you out. Of course it is in everyone's favor
| except yours when this happens.
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| It's only not in your favor if you changed your card to
| cancel Netflix specifically, in which case you should've
| just logged in and canceled.
| kemitche wrote:
| If someone steals my card, and uses it to pay for
| Netflix, how will I log in and cancel?
|
| The simplest, safe route is to not give companies the
| newly updated number. If my Netflix lapses because I
| forgot to update the number after a card change (whatever
| the reason), they can email me, and then I will log in to
| my account and update the card on file.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Do companies that do subscriptions know when multiple
| accounts are using the same card number? Just curious if
| they try to use something like that for fraud detection
| or anything. Then again, I don't think they'd care. Just
| take the monies and let the card people deal with it.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| During the whole clamping down on password sharing era,
| I'd be very surprised if some folks haven't had to pay
| for multiple Netflix subscriptions (for summer houses, or
| their kids off at college, that sort of thing...)
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| > If someone steals my card, and uses it to pay for
| Netflix, how will I log in and cancel?
|
| You dispute the charge, just like any other unauthorized
| transaction. That's quite different than changing your
| card number under their feet, and will be received as
| such by Netflix.
| paulddraper wrote:
| Don't you cancel your card when it has been stolen?
| strickjb9 wrote:
| Don't trust cancelling your card either. I closed my account
| at Capital One, paid the final balance, and six months later
| I noticed a steep drop in my credit score. I had a $3 monthly
| charge that kept recurring even though I had closed my
| account.
|
| Also, because my account was "closed," I didn't receive any
| statements notifying me that I was being charged. I only
| discovered this issue when my credit score dropped by 100
| points.
| stavros wrote:
| The bank allowing a charge on a closed account is some
| bullshit.
| kbolino wrote:
| Closing a credit line penalizes your credit score in
| general. It's why the standard recommendation is generally
| to leave the accounts open, forever.
|
| Another thing for the FTC to investigate/stop.
| thallium205 wrote:
| Closing a personal credit card, in my experience,
| temporarily drops the score a few points and then it goes
| back to normal. It's a myth promulgated by banks to keep
| accounts open.
| kbolino wrote:
| If so, that just raises the question: of what benefit is
| it to the banks to keep unused accounts open? The
| maintenance costs may be low, but they're still nonzero.
| thallium205 wrote:
| Ask Wells Fargo -> https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/wells-
| fargo-agrees-pay-3-bill...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And yet if you have a "dormant" checking or savings
| acccount, many banks will start charging you a monthly
| fee.
| mh- wrote:
| That bank-facing service from Visa is called VAU - Visa
| Account Updater.
|
| https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/vau
| thallium205 wrote:
| You have to report the card is lost or stolen then the new
| number will not propagate. You likely asked for a replacement
| card which will propagate the new number through the network.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Great tips thanks.
| themagician wrote:
| American Express asks you (or at least used to) if you want
| to allow recurring billing when canceling.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I am really amazed how people can go years with not knowing
| what companies are regularly charging them money.
| andoando wrote:
| It needs to be some integration with the actual provider. You
| should be able to cancel through your CC, but they ought to get
| notified you canceled.
| wmf wrote:
| This is a huge advantage for subscriptions that go through
| Apple or Google since they have a central dashboard to
| cancel.
| judge2020 wrote:
| For Apple Pay, they did recently introduce this (or maybe it
| has been a thing for a bit).
|
| https://rr.judge.sh/IMG_1150.PNG
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://privacy.com/
| jordanpg wrote:
| This is the way. Easy solution when forced to do business
| with actors with dark cancellation patterns.
|
| Also good when forced to do archaic practices like writing
| credit card numbers on a form or saying them over the phone.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Came here to recommend this wonderful service...
|
| Allows you to create unique CC#'s for every single company,
| and you can ship to any address (because the "address
| verification" will always respond _< OKAY>_).
| altairprime wrote:
| Amex will let you permanently block a merchant that has
| previously charged you from making any further charges, but you
| have to call and ask for it. Goldman Sachs, under the guise of
| Apple Card, does not permit this by phone or by app. I have no
| other experiences to report data on. (Note that this does not
| exempt you from any contractual obligations to pay ETFs or
| whatever.)
| rainclouds wrote:
| Wow that is great. I've been told that was impossible by
| several cards and ended up reissuing.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| In some countries/banks you can generate one-off CC numbers
| that are tied to your real one. I use it all the time for
| online services.
| crazygringo wrote:
| It doesn't matter, because it's a contract. Even if you cancel
| your card, Adobe can send it to collections, and it will show
| up as unpaid debt and negatively impact your credit score,
| which means you might pay more for your next mortgage or car
| loan.
|
| This is not uncommon for businesses that use annual
| subscriptions. Certain gyms are particularly known for this.
| And with Adobe being so sneaky and aggressive about
| subscriptions, it wouldn't even surprise me.
| jordanpg wrote:
| This doesn't sound right to me.
|
| Damages are generally limited to the extent to which a
| contract is performed or not performed, and the non-breaching
| party generally has a duty to mitigate damages.
|
| So, in other words, you can't continue to perform once the
| other side has stopped performing and then later claim
| damages for non-performance you were aware of.
|
| It's possible the contract itself specifies otherwise for
| this situation, but courts are generally not sympathetic to
| this sort of end-run around common law contract law.
|
| I'm not saying companies have not tried to collect on this
| basis. I'm saying that if they were taken to court over the
| practice that they might lose. If Adobe really does this, it
| might strengthen the case against them.
| otar wrote:
| Long overdue
| brink wrote:
| While we're at it, can we sue Apple for making it too hard for us
| to export our data off of their cloud?
| tempnow987 wrote:
| No - because that's clearly an attack vector to steal
| information as well.
| stavros wrote:
| What attack vector could that possibly enable for a session
| with a valid login?
| tempnow987 wrote:
| The regulations generally have required businesses to
| respond to written requests.
|
| While GPDR and others vary, at least with CCPA two data
| points are enough to get a release of data.
|
| What's done is if general info on you has leaked (say email
| address / date of birth / social etc) then someone can use
| that to go to Apple and now request a full dump of
| everything they have on you.
|
| So you can leverage one dump / leak, and now go after lots
| of players that have to comply with a data export request
| to get everything you want to know about someone.
|
| Google / Microsoft / Apple / etc can have a surprising
| amount of sensitive data (every photo you have taken or
| that's been shared with you) and even though you've been
| hit by one data leak, you may not want those folks to be
| able to leverage that for more leaks.
|
| https://dataprivacy.foxrothschild.com/2019/02/articles/euro
| p...
|
| The liability is usually very high if the companies DON'T
| release data - so the bias moves to releasing data (there
| are folks who go around putting requests in and complaining
| if the data dump is not easy to get).
| stavros wrote:
| But this seems trivial to stop: "you can find the
| 'Download Everything' button in your account settings".
| MaKey wrote:
| Do you have any other source than a generic warning about
| malicious data export requests? Otherwise your take seems
| like fearmongering to me.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Do their instructions at https://support.apple.com/en-us/108306
| not work?
| imzadi wrote:
| So, this might be fixed, but you could get around the
| cancellation fee by changing your plan to the Dreamweaver monthly
| plan and then cancelling that. You'd get a prorated refund when
| you changed plans and then an additional refund for the monthly
| plan when you cancelled it.
| tempnow987 wrote:
| A reminder that like all good companies adept at scamming folks
| they have HUGE ethics policies :)
|
| Ethics and Integrity At Adobe, good business begins with our
| commitment to the _highest_ ethical standards.
|
| We adhere to the following core principles:
|
| Integrity, by conducting business according to high ethical
| standards Respect for our employees, customers, vendors,
| partners, stockholders and the communities in which we work and
| live Honesty in our internal and external communications and all
| business transactions Quality in our products and services,
| striving to deliver the highest value to our customers and
| partners Responsibility for our words and actions, confirming our
| commitment to do what we say Fairness through adherence to
| applicable laws, regulations, policies and a high standard of
| behavior
|
| We encourage you to read our policies to learn more about the
| legal and ethical standards we embrace.
|
| AI ethics at Adobe
|
| Australia Modern Slavery Act Statement
|
| California Transparency in Supply Chains Act Statement
|
| Code of Business Conduct
|
| Code of Ethics
|
| Conflicts of Interest
|
| Global Anti-Corruption Policy
|
| Partner Code of Conduct
|
| Public Policy and Government Relations Policy
|
| UK Slavery and Human Trafficking Statement
|
| Adobe Whistleblowing Privacy Notice
| diego_sandoval wrote:
| In Spanish se have a saying: "Dime de que presumes y te dire de
| que careces".
|
| Tell me what you brag about and I'll tell you what you lack.
| personalityson wrote:
| Leaked messages show Adobe employees worry AI could kill the jobs
| of their own customers, reducing the number of Creative Cloud
| subscriptions. https://petapixel.com/2023/07/31/adobe-staff-
| worry-their-ai-...
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| AI will eliminate a lot of creative industry jobs regardless of
| what people at Adobe say.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| Adobe says "Make amazing transformations in seconds with
| tools powered by Firefly generative AI! Create images with
| just a few words, unlock endless color combinations, and make
| eye-popping text effects! You have to try it to believe it!
| See what generative AI can do for your business!"
| paradite wrote:
| If you buy or still have the perpetual license of Lightroom, can
| you use it to process raws from newly released cameras?
| perfectstorm wrote:
| i tried activating my old Lightroom software (purchased in 2015
| or 2016) and they wouldn't let me activate it. Adobe customer
| service said their activation servers are taken offline for my
| Lightoom version.
| jkaplowitz wrote:
| Why does the version of the complaint embedded in the article
| have so many redactions? Any idea what kind of information those
| would contain and why they would be redacted?
| dagmx wrote:
| Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel
| your sub and they'll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to
| 60% off.
|
| Though, obviously as per the article, this is a pain to do.
|
| It's really a shame there's nothing comparable to Adobe's
| products on the really pro-artist end of things.
|
| Companies like Serif have tried with Affinity but it's lackluster
| when you really need to do some high end work. OSS stuff like
| Krita, Inkscape and Gimp have improved a lot but there's still a
| huge gulf.
|
| Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace, but the rest of the
| suite like Illustrator really has no competition when it comes to
| functionality.
|
| Affinity Designer lacks so many of the gradient tools, shape
| repetition, and even certain alignment tools.
|
| InDesign similarly has many QoL features that Affinity Publisher
| lack.
|
| After Effects has some competition but nowhere near the ecosystem
| it provides.
|
| I guess premiere and animate (previously flash) have a lot of
| competition but that's about it?
|
| For reference of where I'm coming from , I own licenses to the
| full Adobe suite and the full affinity suite. I have
| professionally done art and programmed for features in multiple
| domains for a decade and my work has shipped with major products
| from FAANG-like companies.
|
| I totally think the alternatives can replace Adobe products at
| some level, but the level of tooling I need and that Adobe has
| provided, is currently unmatched.
|
| It would be great to see better alternatives someday.
| imabotbeep2937 wrote:
| This is true of literally everything in the new economy.
|
| Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and your
| bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow magically
| you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone line.
|
| Any subscription service is like this. I sometimes grab a Blue
| Apron when it's 65+% off which is anytime I want. My ex used to
| do this with clothing subscriptions, up to 80% off.
|
| There are laws against things being "always on sale". But now
| they're just being used to punish lazy customers who don't keep
| up on their promos. Only lazy or ignorant people pay the "real"
| price.
|
| Oh hey would you look at that, another billion dollar IPO with
| no plan for profitability went bankrupt. Weird.
| nkozyra wrote:
| I had T-Mobile starting in ~2003 and it included unlimited
| tethering.
|
| After they introduced the Netflix included offer I inquired
| and they offered an "upgrade" that they swore up and down
| would not change my current service.
|
| After agreeing, I was traveling and tried to tether and boom
| nothing. Their upgrade that would change nothing got me out
| of this grandfathered situation. Over time the cost of
| Netflix resulted in a higher fee for Netflix and ultimately I
| pay more for less.
|
| Can't trust any company not to do anything in their power to
| squeeze another dime out of you.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| Why accept oral promises when a contract with the term is
| definitely available? I guess you didn't record the
| conversation so why not giving the papers a look?
| nkozyra wrote:
| It's a lesson we all have to learn at some point, that
| was mine.
|
| Recording calls is always tricky because of party consent
| rules, although telling people you're recording probably
| puts some guardrails on behavior.
| bityard wrote:
| "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance," is
| ubiquitous when calling the official sales/support number
| for any US company.
|
| However, every single one of those call centers _also_
| instructs their employees to hang up immediately if they
| are told (or have good reason to suspect) that the
| _customer_ is recording the conversation. It sounds
| hypocritical (and it is), but this rule comes from the
| company's legal department, whose sole job is to shield
| the company from legal liability.
| reaperman wrote:
| When I'm recording (usually using the Rev app on iPhone
| if its not particularly sensitive or legally confidential
| information) I always start the human conversation with
| something like "hey so this call is recorded right? Thats
| what the message told me when I picked up. Just double-
| checking that we should consider this call to be
| recorded?"
|
| I figure that it is completely legally unnecessary but it
| guarantees there's an understanding between all human
| participants to expect a recording, which brings it in
| line with my own personality morality when conversing
| with an "innocent / relatively powerless human" (my
| morality exceeds the ethical and legal framework we
| operate in).
| anigbrowl wrote:
| You don't have to tell them. You're dealing with the
| company, not the individual employee. If the company is
| recording the call, so can you.
| ixwt wrote:
| I can't find an app that lets me record both sides of the
| conversation on Android. Only my side. When I looked
| into, it seems that Google has disabled that part of the
| API that apps cannot record both sides of a conversation.
|
| Does anyone know of a reliable way to record
| conversations?
| genewitch wrote:
| I got around this by paying for a VoIP line and running
| 3cx to utilize it, 3cx can record calls. I've never
| actually done it - not even to test - because right
| around the time i got it set up covid hit and the people
| i used to spend 1-2 hours a day talking to on the phone
| about tech and other interesting things stopped having to
| drive to work so my phone usage is now down to maybe 4
| hours a month on private calls that no one else would be
| interested in.
|
| Technically i've been paying for a voip line for 20
| years, and shoehorning it into 3cx was mostly to allow my
| young kid to be able to call his aunt or someone who
| isn't on our PBX (grandma and grandpa and his siblings
| are, already).
|
| believe me i was really annoyed when android stopped
| being able to reliably record calls. Another alternative
| that i did actually use is a 3 channel breakout connector
| on my cellphone, a DAC/ADC, PC microphone and headphones.
| You could tell the OS to "monitor" the microphone, and
| record mix (remember those days?). Or now-a-days you'd
| have to use VAC(virtual audio cable) or something to
| manage the routing. Speaker out goes to mic in on phone,
| and vice versa, hit record on your PC, and both the
| remote side and your side will be recorded. I never got
| too deep into this because it's a huge hassle unless you
| have a phone _just for this_ ; but multi-channel
| recordings would let you have synchronous audio, for,
| say, correct transcriptions.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Can't you just put it on speaker?
| bityard wrote:
| Many states in the US do not allow calls to be recorded
| unless all parties on the call consent to being recorded.
| There is no distinction (that I am aware of) between
| companies and natural persons in those laws. In those
| states, you can _technically_ record a call without
| consent, but my guess is that if you try to use it as
| evidence, you open yourself up to being prosecuted for
| wire fraud or somesuch.
| lelandfe wrote:
| There are more "one-party consent" states than two-.
| Notably for HN's crowd California requires all parties be
| aware: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_call_recordin
| g_laws#One...
|
| I am in NY, a one-party state, so I record most important
| calls for use later.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > You don't have to tell them. You're dealing with the
| company, not the individual employee. If the company is
| recording the call, so can you.
|
| The whole point of "this call may be recorded" is to
| establish consent between both parties. In two-party
| consent states (caller or recipient), you still have to
| establish consent to record.
|
| If you're calling from a 1-party consent state _to_ a
| 1-party consent state, you don 't have to tell them,
| although I don't know how that works legally with call
| center routing.
| StackRanker3000 wrote:
| If they've already told you that they're recording,
| hasn't consent already been established? You don't need
| to ask again. It's not like they've gotten consent for
| themselves to record, but not you.
| nkozyra wrote:
| My understanding is that intent needs to be established
| for any recording. If you establish consent and the
| second party records without consent I'm not sure where
| that stands but the spirit of the law seems to suggest
| every party must consent to every recording.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| "This call may be recorded..."
|
| They don't specify that it may not be you that records
| it. They _are_ consenting.
| newsclues wrote:
| I've worked for those call centres and they don't tell
| employees to hang up if it's being recorded by the
| customer, because the company is already recording
| everything and trains their staff to operate as such.
|
| "Cool you are recording too, IT will be happy we have an
| offsite backup" That's been recorded!
| Merad wrote:
| For anyone who might not be aware, this is true for most
| companies. Any changes to your plan will usually require
| the removal of any grandfathered features, regardless of
| what the tier 1 CSR tells you.
| nickff wrote:
| All this back-and-forth about promos and cancellations is
| just the latest form of haggling; there's nothing new under
| the sun.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > Internet? Wait until the moment your "promo" cost ends and
| your bill goes from $80 to $150, threaten to quit, oh wow
| magically you can have $80 again and a free mobile phone
| line.
|
| Careful though. Companies are catching on to the "threaten to
| cancel" trick. Last time I tried this with Comcast, the
| support rep put me on hold, and then instead of sending me
| over to the "retention" specialist, just canceled my service
| and asked if I needed anything else. Oops..
| LegitShady wrote:
| There's no need to be worried about it. Don't just
| threaten, actually switch when a competitor is having a
| promo and stop worrying about it. I switched internet
| service between a few providers almost every year for quite
| a while. It saved a lot of money.
| vngzs wrote:
| In the vast majority of America, there is no serious
| high-speed internet competition.
| LegitShady wrote:
| The they never had the option to threaten to quit and
| don't apply to this discussion anyways.
| genewitch wrote:
| up until 2022 i had 2 options, dialup, or 5mbit DSL. I
| don't consider hughesnet workable for anything other than
| email (seriously, 1500ms latency on a good day?)
|
| As siblings comment, this only works if you're not a
| captive audience.
| accrual wrote:
| > "always on sale"
|
| Lenovo is great at this. Their absurd $3,000+ laptops are
| conveniently priced near market value after their perpetual
| 50% off LENOVOJUNE, LENOVOJULY, etc. coupons are applied. You
| don't even have to do work to use them, they're usually
| automatically applied at check out.
|
| Talk about cheapening your brand and pandering to people who
| only buy things "on sale" out of principal. It almost feels
| insulting to the customer.
|
| This is one thing Apple does right - there are no sales or
| discounts, it costs what it costs regardless of which US
| holiday is approaching.
|
| https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/th.
| ..
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Apple devices go on sale on other platforms (I only look at
| Amazon, but it must be the same for any other retailer),
| that's how they differentiate.
|
| As device registration and customer support still goes
| through Apple, it makes absolutely no difference wherever
| you buy it, and anyone looking for a lower price will wait
| for Prime day or any other bigger sales in the year.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/17/24104233/the-m1-macbook-
| a...
| ewoodrich wrote:
| Exactly. When I bought a pair of USB-C AirPods Pro
| recently they were 70 dollars cheaper from Best Buy vs
| Apple's website and I was able to add AppleCare with no
| issue.
|
| They appear to currently be 60 dollars cheaper and have
| been in a sort of perma sale of varying degrees for the
| last 6 months (not unlike the Lenovo example).
|
| https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sku/6447382.p?skuId=6447382
| jorisboris wrote:
| It's a marketing tactic way broader than the "new economy"
|
| You know coupons in the newspaper? They serve exactly the
| same purpose. Some people take time and effort to cut them
| out every week. Others don't and pay full price.
|
| It's a way to make customers who are willing to pay more pay
| more
|
| Edit: referring to the "always on sale", not to the
| cancellation promotions
| chimen wrote:
| Only if you can cancel your sub. They are taking money from my
| account even after 6 years, each month, and I can't cancel it.
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40619329#40619770)
| acdha wrote:
| Have you disputed the charge? If the bank is refusing to
| honor your request, that's both reason to switch banks and to
| try small claims court to get your money back.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Have you filed a complaint with the FTC and your state's
| attorney general?
|
| https://reportfraud.ftc.gov/
|
| https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
| auggierose wrote:
| That's why you always sign up for one of these things with
| something like Revolut, which will give you a new credit card
| number for each subscription.
| chimen wrote:
| I had no Revolut back then
| noisy_boy wrote:
| I have seen some of the sites not work with these
| "throwaway" cards - when I supplied my regular card, it
| worked.
| auggierose wrote:
| There are two different kinds of Revolut throwaway cards:
| One that works just one time, and one that works
| indefinitely, and you need to cancel it manually. The one
| that you cancel manually works more often, for example in
| scenarios where they will first make a "test" deduction
| of $0.00, and then the real deduction.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| If you're letting the situation go on for 6 years, the
| problem is you. Call your bank or threaten to sue them, stop
| being a doormat.
| chimen wrote:
| easy to call people names on the internet is it not? what
| if i did all that?
| criddell wrote:
| It might be worth contacting the FTC. It sounds like you
| are exactly the type of consumer they are suing on behalf
| of.
| liendolucas wrote:
| Is that a pro-tip? I mean, I wouldn't give them a penny more
| for having this attitude towards customers in first place. The
| real pro-tip at least for me would be to pay once for a product
| that I can use without being enslaved to a for-life
| subscription. It really really pisses me off how most
| commercial software is offered today. F** all that.
| llamaimperative wrote:
| The really pro-tip would be "try paying for an imaginary
| alternative I just made up!"?
| egypturnash wrote:
| I get the impression from my friends in the animation industry
| that Toon Boom's animation suite pretty much dominates the
| industry. Flash hung on a while but TB has _so_ many features
| designed for the particular craft of assembling a small army of
| people who collaborate on making a moving and talking drawing.
|
| I keep on thinking of ditching ~25y of specializing in
| Illustrator for TB lately but I really just do not feel like
| paying $1k/y for a subscription to it. They have cheaper
| subscriptions but one of the ways they differentiate them is by
| limiting the effects, and "constantly pushing the limits of
| Illustrator's effect system" is one of the reasons I want to
| move on from it.
| dagmx wrote:
| Toon Boom's domination really is very regional. But that's
| one reason I list flash as having competitors.
|
| In Canada, you'll find a lot of the larger shops use toon
| boom and the smaller shops use Flash/Animate.
|
| When you move out to Asia, the balance changes quite a bit
| the other way but you also see a lot more players in the form
| of OpenToonz etc entering. Especially on the anime front.
| egypturnash wrote:
| god it's like there's actual multiple viable options, is
| that even legal any more. My animation friends are all in
| the LA scene; they all started out in Flash cartoons in the
| 00s and some of 'em kept on using it for a pretty long time
| but it seems to have pretty much vanished.
|
| I really gotta make some time to grind on tutorials for
| Toon Boom or this copy of Moho 14 I have on my computer and
| see if I actually _want_ to animate again once I get over
| the hump of "how does this giant toolkit even work".
| tomschlick wrote:
| > Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to
| cancel your sub and they'll send you repeat offers at lower
| prices up to 60% off
|
| I have found the same to be true with SiriusXM radio as well.
| You can ask the chat bot to cancel your account when a promo
| runs out and it will take you back down from $19/mo to like
| $6/mo. I setup a calendar item so I know when the promo is
| going to expire and do this. It's a PITA but it only takes 5
| minutes.
| meowster wrote:
| Their discounted rate is $5/month.
|
| I once called them to stop sending me mailers, and they said
| they'll stop for two years, I said no, stop forever.
|
| I took my vehicle to a place that sold my information to
| SiriusXM and they resumed the mailers.
|
| But this time... I just created an account on their website
| and changed my address to their headquarters and phone number
| to their phone number. They can spam themselves for all I
| care!
|
| (I've done this with other businesses that don't respect
| their potential customers with great success! Often the
| people I speak with don't seem to recognize it when I give
| them their company's address or the 800-number that I'm
| called them at.)
| spookie wrote:
| I don't think there's such a huge gulf between Krita and
| Photoshop for digital artists. I do work with it professionally
| all the time, mostly dealing with texture work for CG.
| dagmx wrote:
| Digital artists is a pretty wide term.
|
| But if we're limiting it to stuff like illustrations and
| texturing, it's very capable. I've introduced it in several
| areas specifically for that.
|
| however for other things like photo retouching and product
| design, Photoshop has a pretty wide moat at the moment
| tambourine_man wrote:
| > Photoshop is perhaps the easiest to replace
|
| I wish
| jwells89 wrote:
| For Photoshop specifically (and perhaps other CC programs, but
| I'm less familiar with them) another problem compared to
| alternatives is that a great wealth of instructional material
| (tutorials, paid video courses, etc) are built around
| Photoshop.
|
| While there are ways to make alternatives more Photoshop-like,
| there's always going to be unreconcilable differences which
| bring unwelcome friction when the goal is to learn whatever the
| material is teaching rather than screw around with keybinds and
| UI configuration.
|
| More projects that aim to adjust existing FOSS alternatives to
| more closely clone Photoshop would be of great help here. There
| used to be GIMPShop[0] that did this for GIMP but it's
| unfortunately been defunct for a long time now.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIMPshop
| altruios wrote:
| I've only ever used Krita, really. What features am I missing
| from photoshop? What is that gulf that I do not see?
| dagmx wrote:
| Krita is geared towards illustrative work versus photo vs
| editing/product design. While it can do both, it misses or is
| behind in several areas
|
| 1. Photoshop has a much better template and smart referencing
| system
|
| 2. Photoshop has better photo retouching tools in the form of
| healing or switching working spaces to tune filters.
|
| 3. Photoshop has better image manipulation tools like warping
| and perspective correction
|
| I do really like Krita, and I've replaced Photoshop use for
| illustrative use cases for several studios and individuals
| with it. So it really depends what you do, but Photoshop just
| has a lot of little and big things that add up which prevents
| me switching myself.
| altruios wrote:
| Ah... so it seems there is nothing deficient for artists.
| Just photographers?
| starkparker wrote:
| Yes. Photoshop, which is photo and image editing software
| for photographers, has more features for photographers
| than Krita, a painting program for artists.
| dagmx wrote:
| That's a pretty curt dismissal given that tons of artists
| paint in photoshop and have for decades.
|
| Photoshop is a great painting app that rivals krita for
| painting. That it does other things well or originated
| for just photo editing doesn't take away from that.
| elcomet wrote:
| I think you misread the parent. He didn't say Photoshop
| is bad for painting. He said Krita is bad for photo
| edition.
| shoelessone wrote:
| I don't believe he misread. I believe he felt like the
| reply to the other users post was needlessly curt or
| snarky, which I'd agree with.
| oregoncurtis wrote:
| Davinci Resolve is miles better than Premiere. I don't do a lot
| of compositing, but I know more and more people are starting to
| use it over After Effects as well.
| dagmx wrote:
| Resolve is better than Premiere on its own (hence why I list
| premiere as having competition) but the Fusion compositing is
| not a comparison for After Effects, but rather for something
| like Nuke.
|
| While After Effects does some compositing (and it's decent at
| it but poor in comparison to Nuke/Fusion), its' stronghold is
| motion graphics. There's very little other than Cavalry to
| compete with it.
|
| And with that comes the benefit of Premiere: live updates to
| my edit when using After Effects.
| giobox wrote:
| > Pro-tip if you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to
| cancel your sub and they'll send you repeat offers at lower
| prices up to 60% off.
|
| The issue though is this often only works for many subscribers
| for a small window each year, when the *annual* "renewal"
| occurs.
|
| The problem with much of the Creative Suite subs, and what the
| FTC are also suing over, is that it looks and smells like a
| monthly sub you can cancel at any time, but you often can't -
| its "annual paid monthly" as the linked article describes.
|
| The big problem is their ridiculous "annual paid monthly" plan
| - you often can't cancel, or it takes a ridiculous amount of
| effort to escape "annual paid monthly". I know plenty of people
| who needed Creative Suite for one month who fell into the
| "annual paid monthly" trap assuming it was a typical
| subscription service.
|
| > "Adobe pushes consumers to its "annual paid monthly"
| subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe
| prominently shows the plan's "monthly" cost during enrollment,
| but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount,
| which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a
| consumer cancels in their first year."
| corobo wrote:
| If you are stuck in this situation open a chat with support
| and ask to cancel with the reason "My new employer is paying
| for my Adobe subscription" to get the cancellation fee
| waived.
|
| I can't guarantee it still works but it worked for me and at
| least 3 others I know of
|
| Adobe deserves to get slapped down for this practice and I
| hope they are forced to change it, but something to try in
| the meantime
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| After Effects competition is the furthest away I feel.
| Everything else I could get by but nothing has the same toolset
| as AE
| w10-1 wrote:
| > you ever want cheaper Adobe subscriptions is to cancel your
| sub and they'll send you repeat offers at lower prices up to
| 60% off
|
| That used to be true at NYTimes and WaPo. But new WaPo
| management does the reverse: - offer to keep
| at same price? No? - offer to re-up at 50% more? No?
| - offer to re-up at 100% more? No?
|
| With the election coming up, they're determined to raise
| prices, and they know all they need to about you.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| This and the unified user interface - most Adobe products have
| the same look and feel, and it happens to be a good one.
| robotnikman wrote:
| This used to work for me. Then this year I tried it again, and
| they only offered me 2 options:
|
| 1. Get 50% off for 3 months
|
| 2. Get access to only Photoshop for the same price
| esskay wrote:
| You can also sometimes get it very cheap via random country
| specific deals. They had one last year for Latvian students.
| Excecpt it had zero checks in place to ensure you actually were
| a student. I think I paid something like $4 for a year of
| Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, Premier, Adobe Stock, etc.
|
| Of course it goes without saying, if you do this use a burner
| card. They dont ask for/check for a valid address or anything
| like that so when it comes to the stupidly complex to cancel
| renewal process you just walk away and let their threats go to
| an empty inbox.
|
| I've got zero issue with anyone pirating their software at this
| point, Adobe deserves it for the crap they've pulled over the
| last few years.
| SuaveSteve wrote:
| Want Amazon Prime and can wait? The free trial will come around
| again. Or the reduced one.
| sinecure wrote:
| You are spot on about Adobe's products not having adequate
| alternatives. I see a lot of new artists online saying to use
| Affinity or Gimp, but they do not compare. Even Blender lovers,
| myself included, who have embraced the open source alternative
| would be shocked to see what features they are missing compared
| to the top tier tools like Maya.
|
| I'm curious why certain categories of software receive little
| to no competition, while others see a lot. I feel that Silicon
| Valley's focus on social media oriented smartphone apps has
| drained a lot of the talent and capital that could have been
| working on alternatives to Microsoft Office, Adobe's suite,
| Maya's 3D, etc.
|
| Procreate is an excellent example of a young team coming in and
| dominating the tablet art tool market. For a measly $12 you own
| procreate forever, and it is easily the most functional art
| tool on the iPad. I don't know why we haven't seen similar
| attempts at Adobe's dominance anywhere else.
| ebiester wrote:
| It's almost like if you have tens of millions of dollars to
| invest in your product yearly, you can afford to maintain and
| build more features.
| mcpar-land wrote:
| "FTC charges Adobe their annual Business Practices fee"
|
| Not to be a pessimist, but what's the chance this is just another
| suit that's a rounding error compared to the revenue Adobe gains
| from these unethical business practices in the first place?
| wmf wrote:
| Presumably Adobe will have to stop these practices to settle
| the case.
| bachmeier wrote:
| Yes - and the penalties would not be a rounding error the
| next time.
| josephcsible wrote:
| IMO, fines for deceptive or unfair business practices should
| never be less than the total revenue resulting from them.
| bogwog wrote:
| The FTC has been more aggressive and actually doing their job
| under this administration. Idk if this particular case will
| have a satisfying conclusion, but I'd say the chances are as
| good as they've ever been.
| amne wrote:
| I see the complaint naming individuals by name.
|
| I wonder how far the chain one can go to punish individuals for
| something like this .. can a dev or qa tester get fined for
| this? Should they get fined?
| lagniappe wrote:
| To be a fly on the wall at Planet Fitness HQ right now..
| katangafor wrote:
| Or any gym I've tried. Washington sports club kept charging me
| after email/verbal confirmations that the account was closed.
| Trying to do it in the app resulted in a "server error" lmao.
|
| Had to pester them so many times, and of _course_ they never
| refunded me for the months where they lied to me and I thought
| the account was canceled
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| My local-to-Chatt gym (unfranchised) allows no-hassle
| cancelation, pro-rated.
|
| I now only attend the county's _free gym_ , which is actually
| decent (and true athletes, not just social meetups); or buy a
| daypass to local college facility ($5).
| slater wrote:
| Did anything ever come of those proposed "cancelling
| subscriptions must be as easy as setting up the initial
| subscription" laws?
|
| I kept hearing about them in discussions about the infamously
| impossible-to-unsub NYTimes subscriptions, then nothing happens.
| nottorp wrote:
| Hmm. So the FTC has no power to enforce the rules it makes? Has
| to resort to lawsuits?
|
| How about the other US government agencies regulating ...
| something? Is the FDA as toothless as the FTC?
| acdha wrote:
| Agencies have the powers specifically delegated to them by
| Congress. That's different in every case because there are
| different politicians in power when various laws are passed and
| the political factors vary. In cases like this, you really want
| to contact your congressional representatives because they will
| hear a lot from the companies who see enough revenue to make it
| a lobbying point and might figure that the general public
| doesn't really see it as a priority.
| nottorp wrote:
| As an outsider, I'm just surprised to find out another
| weirdness of the US system :) I have no congresscritter to
| contact.
|
| Around here if an agency is regulating something it also has
| the power to impose changes and/or fine. Those can be
| contested in court but involving the legal system for years
| isn't the first step.
| acdha wrote:
| They often do here as well. It's just very situational
| whether they have the ability to levy a fine directly,
| force action (e.g. the FAA can decide that an airplane is
| unsafe and they're immediately grounded), or sue.
| Consistency would be nice, but every time someone proposes
| changes they're going to hit industry opposition unless
| there was just a big failure, at which point they'll
| probably try to let it go forward enough for the initial
| news to fade and then water it down.
| kbolino wrote:
| Civil action _is_ enforcement. The standards of proof and costs
| involved are lower than for criminal prosecution.
| dynjo wrote:
| Totally deserved for a morally corrupt business.
| EncomLab wrote:
| Went to GIMP years ago and never looked back.
| powersj wrote:
| Cancelled my lightroom cloud account last night and was very
| surprised at the "early cancellation fee". Only made me upset and
| more determined to move off to something else! Very happy to see
| this post this morning.
| uptown wrote:
| What'd you switch to?
| powersj wrote:
| Darkroom [1], my scenario is I am editing my photos on my
| iPad and it can do all the same basic edits and modifications
| with it and I can use my photo library to organize things
| rather than have them in Adobe's cloud
|
| [1] https://darkroom.co/
| focusedone wrote:
| Please do share what you moved to. Lightroom is the only Adobe
| product I'm still on the hook for.
| powersj wrote:
| Darkroom https://darkroom.co/
| jxcl wrote:
| I'm currently on the free trial of Capture One Pro. It's a
| $300 license for the current version, which gets updates for
| a year. It's super pricey but it's the only program I've
| found that plays well on Mac, has the features I want and is
| intuitive to use.
| gorkish wrote:
| When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent
| value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS
| strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate
| photoshop ever again?" type of product.
|
| Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become
| $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it. The big
| difference today is that instead of people returning to the high
| seas and continuing to use adobe software, they are just moving
| to different ecosystems -- procreate, davinci, foxit, etc.
| Eji1700 wrote:
| > When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent
| value. I was actually quite supportive of Adobe's initial SaaS
| strategy. It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate
| photoshop ever again?" type of product.
|
| This is the entire issue with these kinds of things. They
| always launch at a good value because they know they can
| capture the market. Yes if they were benevolent or whatever
| it'd be fine, but these things almost ALWAYS turn into cluster
| fucks.
|
| They couldn't launch at worse value than the current product
| line because they need full adoption before they can put the
| screws to you.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| agree but I would reverse the cause and effect.. launch great
| experience on the web+cloud to gain traction.. then Because
| it is so Easy to Do It, change the terms of service, the
| benefits, the longevity, the billing practices, the prices..
| etc
|
| IMO pathetic to see a well-loved brand degenerate in the
| public.. especially while Apple counts that cash (and ways
| they ran rough over their former "friend" )
| swores wrote:
| Maybe I'm misreading somehow but you seem to be saying the
| exact same thing as the person you replied to, without
| reversing anything?
| Matl wrote:
| If I am reading the post you're replying to correctly
| they're saying that maybe it's not that they launched
| with a good value prop with a plan to screw you later,
| but rather that because the initial launch went so well
| and everyone says what a good value it is that maybe the
| SaaS vendor says to themselves, 'screw it, we're
| delivering so much value, let's raise prices'. But I
| agree that there's little difference between the two
| ultimately.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| Adobe did not "capture" the old single license sales
| customers, they are just walking away from them.. any way
| they can, into the cloud.. the results look similar but
| thinking about the power dynamics that drive them,
| here...
|
| what I meant to say is.. that the driver to launch a
| great experience is first, then it is easy and tempting
| to change the cloud terms.. not compared to the deal you
| get with desktop purchase.. not because you captured the
| single license customers with better deals in the cloud..
| but because the cloud is just so easy to change, the
| money so tempting..
|
| maybe the anecdote.. when Apple stopped caring so much
| about the desktop, after the iPhone.. they did not
| "capture" the single sale customers.. they just walked
| away to focus completely on the new, more profitable
| model
| duped wrote:
| Or you do what everyone else does, which is force everyone to
| adopt the SaaS model by revoking their licenses or otherwise
| bricking the software.
|
| That's why it's important to own your own data in a way that
| can be reused and adapted when they try and screw you later.
| You see this all the time with video games nowadays. Everyone
| wants their own launcher and subscription services.
| exe34 wrote:
| I'll never again learn another proprietary tech unless I'm
| getting paid to do it. open source or nothing.
| jandrese wrote:
| 100% agree. I would also add an explicit exception to the
| DMCA. Cracking copy protection on software you bought
| legally because the copy protection has failed in a way
| that prevents the software from working should be legal.
| exe34 wrote:
| I don't buy ebooks with drm anymore, and when I buy
| movies on Amazon I treat them as a long term rental.
| boringg wrote:
| Buying movies online is such a waste. Long term rental
| mentality indeed.
| exe34 wrote:
| I try to save it for obscure things that aren't easily
| available
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| That's sadly why I stick with Windows. I am perfectly
| comfortable in Linux, but I know my next place of work
| will inevitably throw Windows hardware at me. And some
| vital professional tools only have Linux support in the
| most superficial stance.
|
| But yeah, trying to make sure anything else I have
| control over.
| whycome wrote:
| You can "own" a copy of Adobe's software (like earlier
| Creative Suite DVD versions) but then Adobe essentially
| bricked them by killing the activation server.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| That really should be illegal. They need to be forced to
| patch out the license check if they're going to shut down
| the server.
| veeti wrote:
| I recall they used to have a free Photoshop CS2 download
| on their site with the activation removed. Strictly for
| existing license owners of course, but anyone could
| download it ;-)
| starkparker wrote:
| Interesting. I just installed a copy of CS4 Design
| Premium and InDesign CS5.5 without issue. Looks like CS5+
| still has live activation servers, and CS4 didn't seem to
| care that its were gone.
| whycome wrote:
| https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite.html
|
| "CREATIVE SUITE 2, 3, AND 4 You can no longer reinstall
| Creative Suite 2, 3 or 4 even if you have the original
| installation disks. The aging activation servers for
| those apps had to be retired. "
|
| Those poor servers.
| starkparker wrote:
| I know, I read that too. And I also have an official
| boxed copy of CS4 Design Premium that I installed from
| the DVDs, which loads and works without issue. Weird!
| jimbobthrowawy wrote:
| I don't think I tried with anything older than CS5 stuff,
| but blocking the program in the firewall and putting in
| any valid CD key (people posted them online) worked
| flawlessly.
|
| I assume it worked this way so people with airgapped
| machines could still be sold the software.
| Lammy wrote:
| An activation-free version of CS3 was available for about
| a year after the activation shutdown. You had to create
| an Adobe account, provide your original serial number,
| and get a new offline installer and new offline serial
| number to use with it.
|
| Source: have Offline CS3 Master Collection and use PS CS3
| daily to clean up my flatbed scans
| https://i.imgur.com/8tS8ced.png
| Prickle wrote:
| This is honestly why I advocate for pirating software. I
| purchased it once. So long as I don't make copies and
| send it to people I should be allowed to use it no matter
| what.
|
| If the distributor no longer provides the software, or
| does not allow activation, I should be allowed to use any
| and all means to make it usable.
|
| Any software that is no longer sold, should be free for
| anyone to get, by any means, regardless of prior
| legality.
|
| Reminds me of an issue I had recently with Milkshape 3D.
| I needed to re-acquire some old 3D models out of an old
| game. But their service does not appear to work anymore.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Which of course should be considered a violation of
| copyright law, but who's going to stand up for the public
| domain?
| CrimsonCape wrote:
| Every corporate leader has the opportunity to "bring value"
| to the company by upping the subscription fee a few dollars.
| Profits increase, shareholders are happy. Better than trying
| to solve twenty year old bugs or worse, refactor legacy code.
| shostack wrote:
| Which is where they shift focus to lock in and growing the
| amount of your things that live in their walled cloud garden.
| doe_eyes wrote:
| And we keep falling for it, too. Folks on HN and elsewhere
| are fawning over Fusion360, despite Autodesk having a long
| history of being _worse_ than Adobe and pulling the rug on
| individual features more than once.
|
| People spend thousands of dollars on 3D printers or CNC
| mills, but the idea of spending several hundred bucks on
| "buy-to-own" software is so outmoded...
|
| The other reason you have all these subscription models is
| that they obscure the total cost of ownership. Spending $300
| on photo editing software seems like a big commitment. Paying
| $20/mo for a decade is easier. But when you add up Creative
| Suite, Office365, Xbox Game Pass, Spotify, Netflix,
| Squarespace, and whatnot, it's all of sudden a big chunk of
| your disposable income.
| atoav wrote:
| Just as if the goal of corporations isn't to provide value,
| but to extract value.
| richbell wrote:
| > When creative cloud was very first released, it was excellent
| value.
|
| Your wording reminds me of this infamous video where Adobe's
| CEO refuses to answer a question about them overcharging
| customers in Australia.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnrMhbWG0Pc
| whycome wrote:
| For the longest while, Adobe charged Canadians in USD despite
| having an entirely Canadian version of the site etc. It meant
| that the price of the software varied each month!
| behringer wrote:
| I only pay 32/mo for creative cloud.
|
| Sign up for the free trial, then "cancel" you'll get a screen
| that says "offers" and you can choose a realistic price plan.
|
| Remember to "cancel" before your year is up or else you'll be
| automatically charged the full price the following month.
| qingcharles wrote:
| I've been on the $29.99 full Creative Cloud plan for over 2
| years. I got it as a Thanksgiving offer in 2021. Just last
| month they told me the deal was over and I needed to pay full
| price. I went to faux-cancel and they gave me 2 free months,
| but I still need to find a way to get a reduced price again.
| behringer wrote:
| the 30 dollar/mo offer is still on the table for me, as of
| a few months ago. Just go to cancel you should get 3 offers
| including the 30/mo offer.
|
| it might be regional though (I'm US).
| qingcharles wrote:
| Yeah, I hoped to get it on the cancel screen but the only
| offer I got was 2 free months. I'll try again in 2 months
| :) [USA here too]
|
| Maybe I could also look at another location? My YouTube
| sub is from Venezuela.
| londons_explore wrote:
| They should release a home-user version with some restrictions
| unpalatable for commercial use - eg. "Can only edit 5 files per
| month" or "All edited images get non-commercial use licenses
| attached".
|
| Or even "May only be used during evenings and weekends".
| alt227 wrote:
| I like this idea,
|
| Or even better it could run on credits. 100 credits per
| month, and then various things in the software cost a credit
| each. Load a file = 1 credit. Save a file = 1 credit, etc.
|
| You could even turn this into an ecosystem by itself, so
| instead of buying or 'renting' the software users are buying
| credits to actuallyt operate the software.
|
| Newer features like AI could cost more credits up front.
| There could be sales on credits etc.
|
| Somebody please show me a downside to this model?
| swores wrote:
| I think there's multiple downsides, but the biggest one is
| that it makes it a massive pain in the ass for any price-
| conscious users to decide whether it's worth paying for.
|
| Right now if I want to install some software to edit images
| on my PC, I can look at how much Photoshop costs, how much
| rival 1 costs, and look at Free Alternative 2, and decide
| what I'm willing to pay.
|
| But under your scenario, I have no clue how much more (or
| less) expensive Photoshop will be than the paid or free
| alternatives, unless I can first forecast all the
| individual steps that will be needed to do the editing I
| have in mind, and then spend time adding up each action's
| costs to get an idea of the total price. Not only would it
| be extremely hard to accurately list every action that
| would be needed before actually doing them, but even if I
| thought that were possible then the amount of hassle would
| be a big enough deal breaker that I just wouldn't be
| willing to bother with it.
| whycome wrote:
| > it makes it a massive pain in the ass for any price-
| conscious users to decide whether it's worth paying for.
|
| The goal would be to dissociate the software from the
| price/value. It happens when people are enticed to get
| loyalty points for things like grocery purchases. No one
| would move if the deal was "save 30cents" but they would
| for "and get 300 bonus points!" (See McDonald's or every
| other loyalty system). Entire ecosystems have been
| created around inflated point value too.
|
| Adobe should just call them "Adobe points" and make it
| essentially a digital currency that can also be used for
| stock photos, etc too. Or maybe even for cloud computing
| for fast render farms of your increasingly complex
| video/3Dworks. Heck, it could be blockchain based too
| (AdobeCoin?)
|
| They're already trying the kind of "buffet" model with
| their cloud subs. Maybe they can shift to a credit system
| to encourage other users.
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| Autodesk has this system with "credits". Seems hokey.
| alt227 wrote:
| Wow, this Autodesk Flex Tokens system is exactly the sort
| of thing I was suggesting, it looks really cool!
|
| https://www.autodesk.com/buying/flex?term=500&tab=flex
|
| Looks like they do it per day per user, so 1 token allows
| 1 user to use the software for 1 day. Really good idea
| for licensing teams to use expensive industry software
| IMO
| throwaway48476 wrote:
| No, different applications have different token/day cost.
| kbolino wrote:
| > Somebody please show me a downside to this model?
|
| For whom? The user? It's an absolute clusterfuck. Always
| online video games have already done this shit, and it's
| been a nightmare for the end user, and that software
| doesn't do anything "important".
|
| Can you imagine not being able to open or save your file
| because the servers are overloaded? Or getting charged a
| premium at the end of a long day because you weren't
| carefully counting your credits and you need to save your
| file?
| alt227 wrote:
| I would argue gaming does not equal business.
|
| I was just suggesting that something like this could be
| offered alongside existing models, and so offer a cheaper
| alternative to people who only want to edit a few files
| per month.
|
| >Can you imagine not being able to open or save your file
| because the servers are overloaded?
|
| This happens all the time in business since the world
| moved to the cloud. Microsoft is down? No opening or
| saving office files, say goodbye to email. Amazon down?
| Your website is now not currently taking customer orders.
| kbolino wrote:
| Fair point -- the delta to be considered is against the
| existing SaaS/cloud offering, not the old-school
| everything-local model.
|
| That having been said, not being able to save a file
| you've worked on because you ran out of credits would be
| a serious issue.
| alt227 wrote:
| > not being able to save a file you've worked on because
| you ran out of credits would be a serious issue.
|
| Yeah I agree with that, I think I went down the wrong
| path with credits = individual functions. Ive since seen
| that Autodesk does a credits system where tokens are used
| for time using the software. I think thats a much better
| idea than mine.
|
| https://www.autodesk.com/buying/flex?term=500&tab=flex
| hmottestad wrote:
| If it's Photoshop, Illustrator and/or InDesign that you want
| I would recommend Affinity instead:
| https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/#universal
|
| You can actually buy the software, not just rent it.
| lbotos wrote:
| Long time fan of Affinity, they were just acquired so I'm
| waiting with baited breath....
|
| https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-
| press-...
|
| https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/affinity-
| and...
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Been using Affinity since Adobe started requiring me to
| rent their software. Designer, Photo, even Publisher.
|
| I use Affinity Photo the least though -- for pixel-based
| drawing I prefer Pixelmator Pro.
| alt227 wrote:
| I had forgotten that they offer the 'Elements' range where
| you can buy Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements. These
| are stripped down versions of the full software, but they are
| not subscription. You pay once, you own it.
|
| https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop-elements.html
| Trollmann wrote:
| Not for students. CS6 single product was up to $250, CS6 DS
| $350, CS6 MC $800 compared to CC 1st year $240 increasing to
| $360. If you only needed a single product you were off worse
| after one year. Even doing a bachelors which required all
| products would have been less expensive with the one time fee
| if you had the money.
| duped wrote:
| Back in the day (a decade ago) you would go to the lab which
| had Autodesk/Solidworks/Matlab/Adobe/$expensive-software
| installed instead of buying it for your personal (and
| probably underpowered) device. It was one of the few things
| that your tuition actually paid for.
|
| And you'd have to learn time management to make sure you
| could get your project done on time instead of crunching at
| the last minute, because the lab would be filled with people
| who didn't.
|
| </grumble>
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Our lab used to let you remote desktop in for that stuff,
| but it was unreliable at best (especially during project
| crunch times) because anyone physically at the lab could
| kick you off your computer by unplugging it. Was still
| really nice to have if you were letting a rendering run
| overnight.
|
| On the Autodesk side, they give out free access to student
| accounts, so I had that stuff both in the lab and on my
| home computer.
| wnevets wrote:
| > Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become
| $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it.
|
| Classic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| jonathankoren wrote:
| It's not. The quality stayed the same, even improved. It's
| run of the mill monopoly pricing.
| crote wrote:
| It is 100% enshittification. The definition is even in the
| linked article:
|
| > Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their
| users; then they abuse their users to make things better
| for their business customers; finally, they abuse those
| business customers to claw back all the value for
| themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification,
| (..)
|
| The core point here is "abuse the user", not "make features
| worse". Price gauging would be included in that definition.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Enshittification usually refers to companies that run
| two-sided markets ("platforms"), like rideshare and
| delivery apps. Adobe raising prices on everyone isn't
| really the same thing. Enshittification works by first
| subsidizing everything for everyone, then alternately
| squeezing the sellers and buyers on the platform by
| increasing their cut and raising prices. It's about
| playing a game where you alternately squeeze one side or
| another of a marketplace that you control.
|
| Adobe doesn't really run a platform, they're selling a
| product and finding ways to raise the price.
| Retric wrote:
| Ensnittification definitely applied to home appliances
| like washing machines.
|
| IMO inkjet printers where the front runner here before
| online platforms really took off.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I don't think any of that stuff really follows the
| definition as quoted though. That definition is all about
| a middleman squeezing buyers and sellers. That people use
| it to mean "any scummy business practice that uses lock-
| in or corner-cutting to squeeze customers" doesn't make
| those uses fit that definition.
|
| That stuff is not new, enshittification was coined to
| refer to the relatively _new_ ways that _platforms_
| started to squeeze people.
| Retric wrote:
| The original word is really just descriptive of the
| unpleasant side of optimization you see in commerce.
|
| Walmart finding the minimum product quality they can sell
| is no different than Facebook finding the maximum number
| of Advertisements people will tolerate.
| roywiggins wrote:
| People can use words however they want, but it _wasn 't
| coined to refer to that in general_. You can read the
| blog post: https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-
| ai/
|
| > "I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly
| inevitable consequence arising from the combination of
| the ease of changing how a platform allocates value,
| combined with the nature of a "two sided market," _where
| a platform sits between buyers and sellers, holding each
| hostage to the other_ , raking off an ever-larger share
| of the value that passes between them." (emphasis mine)
|
| All I'm saying is that citing back to the original
| definition (which is talking about _platforms_ ) does not
| bolster the case that what Adobe is doing counts, because
| it plainly doesn't fall under that definition. Adobe is
| not running a two-sided market. For it to be
| enshittification you need to use a much more expansive
| definition. Which is fine, but in that case you _can 't_
| cite the original definition!
| Retric wrote:
| He applies the word to more than just that kind of 2
| sided market. https://doctorow.medium.com/googles-
| enshittification-memos-2...
|
| In his own words the enshitificstion of Google is:
| _"curse of bigness."_
|
| > With no growth from new customers, and no growth from
| new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing
| workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock
| buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next
| 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with
| Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue
| conspiracy), or end-users.
|
| _Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly
| signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring
| out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not
| to do it because it liked the money too much._
|
| _How did a company like Unity -- ... -- turn into a
| protection racket?_
|
| So, while he may describe Enshittification as platform
| decay he's not limiting its use to such.
| cdoctorow wrote:
| > Enshittification names the problem and proposes a
| solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting
| worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want
| to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have
| der Rat fur englische Rechtschreibung. English is a free
| for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
|
| https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-
| kerle/#ich-...
| Retric wrote:
| I am not saying he is using it to say 'things are getting
| worse' but rather 'things are being optimized in ways we
| don't like by large companies' which is meaningfully
| different.
|
| However, because he's using 'platforms' so broadly it's
| not just marketplaces but basically any business. It's
| hard to draw a meaningful circle around Facebook, Amazon,
| Uber, Google, and Unity that excludes Walmart's online
| store.
| tomcam wrote:
| Are you Cory Doctorow? That would make this contribution
| moderately surreal
| LocalH wrote:
| They subsidized things for everyone by turning a blind
| eye to personal piracy for so many years. They got
| entrenched as a defacto standard, and then they started
| tightening the vice.
|
| It's enshittification. Why defend a multibillion dollar
| corporation who doesn't care about you one bit?
| roywiggins wrote:
| I'm not defending them, I'm saying that their behavior is
| probably a different sort of bad. There are lots of ways
| for companies to extort consumers, they can't _all_ be
| "enshittification".
|
| If enshittification is anything a company does that
| involves delivering a worse product for more money,
| that's fine, but then it becomes a less useful concept.
|
| My attitude in general is that diluting useful ideas to
| the point where they encompass an entire vibe is
| unhelpful. If anything anti-consumer a company does is
| enshittification, the causes are so disparate that
| solutions seem impossible. If you draw a tighter boundary
| around it, you can try to nail down causes and solutions.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Are you sure you read the article? The very first
| sentence of the article is, "Enshittification is _the
| pattern of decreasing quality_ observed in online
| services and products[.] " (Emphasis added.) If the
| quality remains the same, or improves, it's by definition
| not decreasing, and therefore not enshitification.
| Furthermore, as other people pointed out, this is a
| reference to two sided marketplaces.
|
| Just because there's a new buzzword, doesn't mean it
| applies. In fact, it usually doesn't.
| whycome wrote:
| Adobe has removed features from Premiere and Flash/Animate
| (those are the ones I know personally and have been pissed
| off at)
| crazygringo wrote:
| Nevertheless, they've added _far more_ features to
| Premiere than things they 've removed.
|
| So it's not "ensh*ttification", which is when prices go
| up while the product gets worse.
|
| Nobody can seriously argue that Premiere hasn't been
| getting better overall. It has been. And it's continuing
| to.
|
| (Which is totally separate from how scummy their
| subscription cancellation/renewal practices are.)
| wnevets wrote:
| It absolutely is. I now dread every single time I am forced
| to open a modern creative cloud product.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| For people who hate or simply can't justify the subscriptions,
| big shout out to Affinity suite v2. Currently 50% off at $83,
| permanent universal license for Mac/Windows/iPad
|
| https://affinity.serif.com/
|
| That includes Photo/Designer/Publisher, which are competitors
| to Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign respectively.
|
| It's not a drop-in replacement and if you're collaborating with
| other people who are in Adobe-land then you'll need to stick
| with Adobe too. But for people who occasionally need an image
| editor for solo work and have been priced out of all the Adobe
| products, it's a solid option.
|
| One caveat is they're now owned by Canva, things haven't gone
| to shit yet but they might in the future.
| sirn wrote:
| Another caveat is that if your workflow requires dealing with
| complex text layout on a regular basis (e.g., Asian
| languages), Affinity suite support for it is pretty much non-
| existent. For example, lack of a working right-to-left
| support, no vertical text support for CJK, broken tone
| markers handling in Thai layout, lack of complex word-break
| for any languages that is not space-based, etc.
|
| Sadly, Adobe is still the only option in the market for this.
| x0x0 wrote:
| It's really striking to see two things in this thread: (1)
| complaints about price, and (2) repeated (cjk, lightroom
| library management, a half dozen other things) that Adobe
| offers features that have no competition. Feels like Adobe
| is charging for being the sole provider for various
| features that people need.
| MarketingJason wrote:
| "you will also receive free updates until such a time Version
| 3 is released!"
|
| This is what stops me. I've experienced too many instances of
| a full version upgrade with a sunset on previous versions.
| kyle-rb wrote:
| At $83 though, it only takes 5 months for you to break even
| on the most basic Photoshop-only Creative Cloud plan
| ($20/month).
|
| And when they actually release version 3 you can decide
| whether to upgrade or just stay on V2.
| nulld3v wrote:
| But you can keep using your previous version after you stop
| getting updates. With Adobe you have to keep paying, even
| if you don't care about updates anymore.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| I expect the previous versions to stop getting
| compatibility updates which is a bigger problem on macOS
| than Windows, but that's the deal with buying a license vs
| monthly subscriptions.
|
| It's so much cheaper that I'll take that trade any day. I'm
| guessing v3 will be an eventual AI focused update since
| that's an area where they haven't tried to compete with
| Photoshop in v2.
| atoav wrote:
| I was one of those who wasn't supportive back then, because it
| was pretty clear where things would go from there. They
| wouldn't switch for a subscription model to earn _less_ money,
| that was sure.
|
| And being a quasi monopolist meant keeping working with that
| old CS6 version was less and less of an option. So what are you
| going to do? Complain? Suck it up?
|
| Even back then it was clear they are going for the slow-
| warming-the-water temperature-till-it-boils-strategy.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| $20/mo. was not a good value.
|
| I probably would only have used Photoshop and in two months of
| my subscription money I could have instead bought/owned
| Affinity Photo.
|
| I might use Photoshop for a week and then not use it again for
| 6 months. Did I just pay $120 for that one week?
|
| Renting software will always suck.
| FrozenSynapse wrote:
| maybe you're not the target audience then.
|
| photographers make that subscription fee in 10 minutes?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Agree, but I'm surprised Adobe rushed headlong into cutting
| off their "long tail" without an alternate solution.
|
| It made Affinity happy, I imagine.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| And that cost per month is for a 12 month contract that if you
| try to cancel early will require you to pay 1/2 of the
| remaining contract to get out of it. You cancel on day 32...
| that'll be 5.5 x your monthly payment to cancel.
|
| Adobe makes all of this insanely hard to understand and fully
| grasp as a consumer. It's also almost completely unique in
| software licensing. I tried to find out when my current
| 'contract' was up a couple months ago and it was nowhere in
| their website account section nor in the Adobe Creative Cloud
| app on my PC that I could find. I had to call them and wait
| something like 30 minutes on hold to find out.
|
| I wound up getting an extremely discounted rate for a year, but
| I now know the date it will end and have set reminders to
| cancel before and have begun transitioning to DaVinci Resolve
| now and will start transitioning to Affinity soon.
| maronato wrote:
| Adobe should explain it as "it's exactly like your rent
| contract". Because that's what it is. Rent seeking.
|
| Software rent seeking. Not even the greatest dystopian sci-fi
| writers could come up with this one.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep.
|
| It reminds me of the shenanigans that Sirius radio does, esp
| here in Canada where there is less protections against it.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| It was well and truly a "why would anyone ever pirate photoshop
| ever again?" type of product.
|
| Nah. Lightroom is/was the primary Adobe product I used. Pretty
| much the _only_ new features they 've ever introduced that
| meant anything to me revolved around supporting new cameras. At
| $80 for a perpetual license it was great because I rarely
| upgrade my camera bodies. Aside from supporting new cameras the
| only other worthwhile to me feature Adobe's introduced was a
| 64-bit installer. Yeah, LR 4.4 was a 64-bit app, but the
| installer remained 32-bit because Adobe is that lazy or greedy.
|
| None of that justifies renting the newer versions from Adobe.
| Were I using LR professionally I'd just have buy something
| capable of running Windows 7 and keep it air gapped instead of
| upgrading.
|
| Sadly, as bad as Adobe is, they still way ahead of the
| competition. Some come close with photo editing capabilities,
| but nothing touches Lightroom for library management. DxO comes
| with a rootkit (and has for years). DarkTable and Raw Therapee
| suffer the open source curse of mediocre (yet strongly
| opinionated) user experience.
| mbesto wrote:
| > Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become
| $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it.
|
| Counterpoint - most management teams undersell their sales
| relative to what the market is willing to pay them. Adobe is
| figuring out where that local maxima is (still).
|
| > they are just moving to different ecosystems -- procreate,
| davinci, foxit, etc.
|
| Are they though? Source?
|
| These figures would suggest otherwise:
|
| Year Active Subscribers 2013 1.4 million
| 2017 12.0 million 2020 19.5 million 2021 22.0
| million 2022 24.5 million 2024 29.5 million
|
| https://photutorial.com/adobe-statistics/
| iamthirsty wrote:
| It's crazy to think that $29.5m x $19.99 (old smallest price)
| is $589m. That's just a starting point for revenue. Wild.
| zuppy wrote:
| honestly, i found a solution for this. it is a little
| unethical, but is as unethical as them forcing me to never be
| able to unsubscribe (there's only a short time where you can
| unsubscribe once per year). i have a card that i use only for
| recurring subscriptions, when one of the recurring
| subscriptions gets problematic, i first block the card (this is
| important!) and then delete it and create a new one. this way
| they can not continue to charge me.
|
| if you don't block it, they may be able to use the associated
| card payment token to charge you even after the card has been
| deleted. on one of my banks i can even see the associated
| tokens and delete them individually.
|
| they can sue me, sure, but nobody will do that for 10EUR/month.
| halyconWays wrote:
| >Fast forward a decade and that $19.99/mo product has become
| $89.99/mo and the value prop has plummeted on top of it.
|
| Photoshop is $35/mo. If you sign up for a year, it's $23/mo.
| Topgamer7 wrote:
| I don't want to pay for a subscription for software I use thrice
| a year. I was looking forward to having Affinity's suite be the
| replacement, where I could buy it, and use it.
|
| However I don't want to support another company that is
| inevitably going to go subscription. Since they've been bought by
| canva, it's just a matter of time.
|
| I even went so far as to get Affinity Photo being able to start
| on Wine. But lost interest since their acquisition.
|
| (I'm sure people will question why I don't just use inkscape,
| krita, or gimp. And its because all of them have a subpar vector
| experience IMO)
| tombert wrote:
| Corel's (or whatever they call themselves now) stuff is
| generally pretty ok, and most of their stuff still lets you buy
| it outright.
|
| I don't know much about Affinity Photo but Paint Shop Pro and
| Aftershot have been "good enough" for the limited uses I have
| for photo editing (though I'm definitely far from a
| professional). CorelDraw is, I think, a very decent vector
| drawing program if nothing else.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| CorelDraw is great, but for years they were also
| subscription-only. In the last six months or so they finally
| started offering a single-price license again--at a
| prohibitive level.
|
| I bought the previous single-price version years ago, and
| it's so stale that I prefer to use Inkscape, despite the more
| limited feature set, and I've been using the Affinity suite
| as a more professional replacement.
|
| Now it looks like they let you buy it again, but at $550, I'm
| still giving them the finger. Their upgrade price used to be
| ~$200; I would pay that once ever 3-4 years or so, and
| consider that a reasonable expense to get a good product and
| have it available when I did need it. But for $550, I'd need
| to be planning on keeping it for something like a decade to
| get a similar value--and it's too much to justify buying at
| my limited usage level.
|
| All of these subscription services should get over themselves
| and allow you to rent them for occasional usage for a
| reasonable amount of money. If I could give them $20 for
| intermittent (time-limited? operation-limited?) use, with no
| "auto-renewal", I might do that every time I actually needed
| the product.
|
| But no, they need to be greedy and demand that you pay for a
| year of usage in advance (or by using deceptive practices
| like Adobe above).
|
| I've used Paint Shop Pro, and I really don't like it. I can
| use Corel PhotoPaint and Affinity Photo, and they're fine,
| but PSP makes me crazy when I try to use it. I'd almost
| rather use Gimp.
| tombert wrote:
| Fair enough. I've never paid full price for any Corel
| product. They're frequently on Humble Bundle where you get
| a bunch of them on the order of like $30 total. It looks
| like right now there's even a sale going on:
| https://www.humblebundle.com/software/corel-productivity-
| cre...
|
| My CorelDraw license is for 2020, so not super up to date,
| but I've generally liked it. I've not tried the Essentials
| package.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| I'm stuck with CorelDraw X8 which dates to 2016. If they
| were selling a buy-it-once license in 2020, I wasn't
| aware of it. I swear they had switched to subscription-
| only by then? But maybe it happened that year and I
| missed the last opportunity to buy a permanent license.
|
| Last time I looked at Essentials, it looked to me like
| they had hamstrung it too much. I don't remember the
| specific restrictions they put on it, but I didn't want
| what they were selling. Might be worth another look with
| the Humble Bundle though.
| gmjosack wrote:
| I ended up grabbing the Affinity bundle since it's half off
| despite concerns about Canva. I'd expect even if they end up
| moving to a subscription I'd at least have the versions I
| bought for an extended amount of time. I still have a working
| copy of Photoshop CS 5 as well. Hopefully we see Affinity
| remain committed to affordable non subscription plans but if
| they don't I think the one time purchase will last me a long
| time. If they put out a version 3 without subscription and it's
| compelling i'll upgrade, if not i'll continue to use 2 for I'm
| sure years to come.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Completely agree! I also refuse to put gas in my car because I
| know that prices will go up later...
|
| Or on a more serious note: I use Affinity professionally
| (previously PhotoShop). Why would I care the slightest about
| what they might or might not do with their pricing model in the
| future? I need software that delivers right now.
| earthling8118 wrote:
| I don't want to pay for the car nor the gas. Let's not let
| the same hostage situation extend to other aspects of our
| lives it we can avoid it.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| If you don't want to pay for the car, why are you
| complaining about car dealerships? I don't think anyone
| here is opposed to the concept of paying for professional
| tooling in any way, shape, nor form.
| anonymousab wrote:
| For the same reason that you would care with Photoshop or
| Premier or Lightroom; you're investing money in learning and
| building your workflow around a tool that is guaranteed to go
| down the subscription and enshittification path.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Your computer will not explode if or when Affinity changes
| to a subscription model. You'll still have the software and
| can use it until the next ice age if you please.
| roughly wrote:
| Well, until there's an OS update. Most of us have gone
| down this road before - the old software works until it
| doesn't, it runs on the old hardware until that doesn't,
| it's usable until it's not. The actuarial table for any
| given software release is north of 5 years and south of
| 10.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| We're talking about professional software. If you're a
| professional you have a machine dedicated to that work.
| If a software update will break software you've paid for
| and need to use, you don't update that machine. Between 5
| and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run time for paid
| pro software. You can also keep the old machine around
| for the software and have a new machine for other needs.
| roughly wrote:
| > Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run
| time for paid pro software.
|
| Not really a reasonable run time for a career, though.
| What do you do after that?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| If I was successful with my career, I hope I would have
| saved up 50 dollars in 10 years so I could buy the new
| version of the software or buy an old used computer to
| run my old version on.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _If you 're a professional you have a machine dedicated
| to that work. If a software update will break software
| you've paid for and need to use, you don't update that
| machine._
|
| Yes, that's exactly the right thing to do. Only then the
| security folks will start whining about factories and
| shipping terminals being controlled by ancient PCs with
| WinXP (not to mention power plants with hardware and
| software older than most of us on this site). In fact,
| the security folks and the business folks align enough on
| it that professional software is force-feeding you
| updates too, and you can't do anything about it unless
| you're a multinational megacorp and can afford to make
| bespoke deals with OS vendors.
|
| > _Between 5 and 10 years is a perfectly reasonable run
| time for paid pro software._
|
| 5 is the minimum. Legal minimum for some documents, in
| some cases.
|
| Still, the problem usually isn't upgrades per se, it's
| that universally these days, newer versions of products
| are almost always inferior in terms of functionality,
| performance and ergonomics. So, I might be easily able to
| afford refreshing my software tools after 5 ways of using
| them to earn a living, but then I discover they all went
| to shit and new versions are worse than the versions I
| have (and even worse, half of the software is now
| subscription-only).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > So, I might be easily able to afford refreshing my
| software tools after 5 ways of using them to earn a
| living,
|
| That's just how all of tech works. Some pockets of
| software may be able to be fundamentally unchanged over
| decades, but the fact is that the software I used 5 years
| ago is not the same as the software I used now. Your
| choices are the same as ever:
|
| - Don't upgrade for as long as possible
|
| - Upgrade and eat the inefficiency cost for a while until
| replacements are found/made
|
| - go the FOSS route and either do it yourself or rely on
| the goodwill of the community until its inevitable next
| schism.
|
| There is no perfect solution unless you're willing to
| become a domain expert in that specific kind of tech and
| roll your own.
|
| The only silver lining is that most of the fundamentals
| remain the same so you're not starting from square one.
| Whatever new web stack is being used today is still
| probably based upon React, which is based on JQuery,
| which is based Javascript. ES6 isn't a complete
| recvolution from ES3 (even if there are new major
| concepts to learn over those 15 years). So you have some
| knowledge transfer of seeing where and how things.
| mrandish wrote:
| This is true on Mac but Windows is remarkably good at
| allowing most old software to still run. I still run
| games and professional applications from the 90s on Win11
| and only occasionally need to set "compatibility mode" or
| change resolution. I haven't even had to resort to
| running a VM with an old version of Windows yet (although
| that's always an option).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| And that's exactly what subscription model kills. Stuff
| only works for as long as you pony up - and it's only the
| newest, stuff. When the new version turns to be less
| useful and more bloated than previous versions, you're
| out of luck, because eventually the old version won't
| authenticate against license servers.
|
| Not to mention, the push to run everything in the cloud,
| via the browser, means that for a lot of software, you
| literally have zero flexibility and control.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >The actuarial table for any given software release is
| north of 5 years and south of 10.
|
| even at full price, $200 for 5 years of usage from a
| professional tool seems pretty good for me. That's
| $3.33/month if you want to convert to the subscription
| model way or thinking.
|
| No way any potential subscription model would be cheaper
| here if you are in it for the long haul.
| vsuperpower2020 wrote:
| I just don't understand why you're using your own time to
| defend predatory business models that inevitably screw
| over the user. You can't just sit on an old piece of
| software and expect it to work forever because the
| companies do not want that. I know you're not being
| malicious but we have so many receipts of this happening.
| People have plenty of reasons to not want to support
| companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in
| this direction.
|
| 10 years down the line their DRM stops working because
| you're on locked down, ancient hardware and they don't
| want to support your OS anymore. Steam is relatively
| benevolent and now there are games you bought and paid
| for that require a version of windows that steam no
| longer supports. Maybe they just do what autodesk did,
| revoke your perpetual license, and tell you to buy a
| subscription?
|
| Maybe you need to replace your motherboard and it counts
| as a "new" computer, and it no longer runs on. Maybe they
| take away your ability to reinstall it on another device
| because offline authorization no longer is enabled, and
| their online services don't support your old license.
| Both of these were done by reason studio. I hope you
| didn't buy a $400 perpetual license and expect it to work
| until the ice age.
|
| Maybe they change the ToS like blizzard, and you now have
| to agree to the new ToS to continue using the software
| you bought and paid for?
|
| Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and
| then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate
| amount of money that you never agreed to, like the whole
| unity fiasco?
|
| I am so sick of people pretending the free market of
| software isn't rigged against the user. Every single
| company screws us over and I hate to see people defend it
| because they think you can just opt out of it.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| And I don't understand why you would write such a long
| rant about something that hasn't happened and "get sick
| of people". Learn to love yourself and you can love
| others.
|
| I'm happy to pay for quality software, both professional
| and consumer. With Affinity it took exactly one project
| to recoup much more than the cost ($50) of the software,
| and I expect that to be true for 99% of graphics
| professionals.
|
| > Maybe the company switches to a subscription model, and
| then updates the ToS to say you owe them an indeterminate
| amount of money that you never agreed to
|
| Yeah, and then I'll laugh my ass off at them. It's like
| me writing that anybody who reads this comment owes me a
| hundred dollars. Now you read it, now you pay. Or not.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >You can't just sit on an old piece of software and
| expect it to work forever because the companies do not
| want that.
|
| also because users don't want that. I don't think any of
| us would necessarily be satisfied playing Doom 1993 on
| Windows 95 because 256KB of RAM is all we'll ever need.
|
| I'm not even saying it's a bad way to live, to be honest;
| that's just not how user demand works. They'll inevitably
| want Doom 2/3/4/etc. until the franchise jumps the shark
| or stagnates into nothingness.
|
| > People have plenty of reasons to not want to support
| companies doing this, and to be wary when they move in
| this direction.
|
| Well we're both probably cynically minded here on this
| topic. It's equally unlikely, but I've taken the path of
| walking away wherever I can for companies that keep
| pulling off these stunts. I've more or less de-googled
| myself over the last year outside of mail and Youtube,
| for instance. At some point, consumers need to put their
| foot down, but they won't. How many times does it need to
| happen before we evaluate who's really the fool?
|
| >Steam is relatively benevolent and now there are games
| you bought and paid for that require a version of windows
| that steam no longer supports. Maybe they just do what
| autodesk did, revoke your perpetual license, and tell you
| to buy a subscription?
|
| Yes, that's why I don't even trust the benevolent actors
| for stuff I really care about. If I can find it on GOG,
| it's likely DRM free and I have no worries about what
| Steam's runtime looks like 20 years from now. The
| internet may flame me for that mentality, but I remember
| when Google was in similar acclaim, down to their long
| buried "Do No Evil" motto.
|
| Again, not perfect, but the worst thing to do is dump all
| your eggs in one basket. Always be on the lookout for
| your own interests and be ready to jump.
|
| >I am so sick of people pretending the free market of
| software isn't rigged against the user.
|
| I agree with you the same way I agree that locks in an
| ideal world should not be required. They shouldn't be; I
| should have a reasonable sense of privacy, respect and
| security among my fellow man. an unexpected knock on the
| door shouldn't give me anxiety over it possibbly being an
| irrelevant sellsman, a crazy relative, or simply a
| package I forgot about.
|
| But I'll keep my keys ready in the meantime until that
| ideal time comes. I can only look out for myself until
| then.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I bought the Affinity suite and have gotten good value out of
| it. If at some point in the future new versions go to a
| subscription model, I just won't buy them.
| duped wrote:
| Is that the exact situation that subscription pricing (in
| principle) solves? If you only use it thrice a year then you
| can pay for it as you go instead of needing pay for the thing
| outright.
| paulmd wrote:
| none of these companies offer monthly subscriptions - they
| offer a 12-month subscription billed monthly or annually
| (with a slight discount), your choice.
|
| This is adobe's whole schtick with the cancellation fees for
| example. You pay 50% of your remaining subscription balance
| as a termination fee. So if you subscribe 3 times a year for
| a month and then immediately cancel you are paying more than
| a yearly subscription.
| 8n4vidtmkvmk wrote:
| Even a 1 month subscription for 2 hours of need is too much
| though. Thrice a year, for a few hours each... But have to
| pay 3 full months usage is nuts. 12+ months is even
| crazier.
|
| Bill per hour would be OK.
|
| Or buy once, give me 1 year of free updates but I can use
| it as-is forever (like intellij) is also fair.
| ketzu wrote:
| > none of these companies offer monthly subscriptions
|
| Adobe does offer monthly subcriptions, but for individuals
| only.
| protocolture wrote:
| You would think wouldnt you.
|
| But some of these subscriptions, including the one I think
| this thread is about, will obligate you for a period of time.
| This happened to me, signed up to a trial of Adobe to test a
| graphic designers pc, once it ticked over to paid, I was told
| that I had a 12 month sub, just billed monthly. (I screeched
| and pulled my hair out and went all karen and they ended it,
| but they wouldnt do it twice)
|
| The "Apps on Tap" enthusiasts got absolutely mogged by Adobes
| commercial reality.
| nucleardog wrote:
| Yep. You're usually signed up for an "annual plan, paid
| monthly". I apparently am and wasn't even aware of it until
| I tried to cancel it one time.
|
| To cancel, you need to immediately pay out 50% of the rest
| of the year. And you'll lose access to the products at the
| end of the month.
|
| So unless you're not even getting 50% of the subscription
| cost worth of value out of it, it pretty much makes more
| sense to continue it and cancel just before renewal.
|
| As soon as you run over that 7 day trial, you've got a 30
| day window a year from now where you can cancel without
| penalty. Miss it or forget? Set a better reminder for next
| year...
| shostack wrote:
| I use Lightroom and Photoshop very irregularly. I now can't
| access Photoshop 5 that was installed on my Macbook because it
| doesn't work with the current MacOS. So now not only can I not
| deauthorize the license to free it up for my Windows machine, I
| can't actually use it either.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I keep older hardware running older OS's for just this
| reason.
|
| There was one version of Apple's Photos for MacOS that has
| not been topped in terms of its retouch tool (actually got
| much, much worse). Since I restore a lot of old scanned-in
| family photos I keep this aging iMac just for photo editing.
| sureIy wrote:
| > one version of Apple's Photos for MacOS that has not been
| topped in terms of its retouch
|
| When? Do you have any articles/videos showing the
| difference? I can't find any.
|
| The only major loss I'm aware of is when they left iPhotos
| and Aperture in the dust.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| It might be a bit esoteric ... but the Photos that
| shipped _after_ macOS Sierra introduced a clever new
| editing view built upon, I think, CoreImage so that it
| could do all the processing of levels, temperature, etc.
| extraordinarily fast -- leveraging the hardware -- for
| real-time changes as you dragged the sliders.
|
| Unfortunately the retouch tool in Photos for cloning,
| fixing scratches, etc. took a huge step backward in
| performance. Like it became unusable.
|
| So simply for dealing with old scanned family photos that
| have lots of scratches, tears, etc., I have stuck with
| Sierra Photos on my one machine.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >However I don't want to support another company that is
| inevitably going to go subscription
|
| why not buy Affinity now and use it until you need to upgrade?
| unless there's some horrible TOS, I'm sure that tool as is will
| last you 5+ years before some new hit feature drops in.
| 42lux wrote:
| If affinity would just get their act together and release their
| suite for linux we could all get over adobe real quick.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Has Adobe released their suite for Linux?
| 42lux wrote:
| That's not the point. Industries such as VFX and game studios
| often either run dual-boot systems or provide two
| workstations per artist. If there is a usable equivalent for
| Linux, they will adopt it because the rest of their tooling
| runs on Linux anyways. Currently, they have no incentive to
| switch.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Ah, I see what you're saying. It's not that Linux users
| can't switch off an existing Adobe setup to Affinity, as
| that having a native Affinity build on Linux would enable
| people to switch off Adobe.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I have never heard of any VFX artist running linux. Is that
| really true?
| SSLy wrote:
| https://www.autodesk.com/support/technical/article/caas/s
| fdc...
|
| Operating System
|
| Rocky Linux 9.3 Rocky Linux 8.7 Rocky Linux 8.5
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| I meant more are most VFX artists actually using Linux
| like the commenter claims. There are DAWs for linux too
| but everyone is using mac or windows in music.
| 42lux wrote:
| All the big studios run on Linux.
|
| https://vfxplatform.com/linux/
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Very cool!
| djbusby wrote:
| I had similar issues with OVH. Got an annual contract, didn't
| like their service, went to cancel but it had already renewed
| into second year and I had to cancel 30 days before that. So I
| missed my small window. Now stuck with another year because to
| cancel means just pay out the rest of the contract. Grrr.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| I recently used Privacy card to purchase a monthly subscription
| to Adobe Acrobat for a one-time need. They've been failing to
| charge me $30 for weeks now. Sad that I have to resort to this
| kind of stuff to protect myself from businesses.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Be aware that they sometimes send folks to collections (with
| the corresponding credit hit) over this; most of the
| subscriptions are worded as annual commitments.
| tombert wrote:
| I haven't used any Adobe products since they started doing the
| subscription-only model. I _want_ to use it, they typically make
| good enough software, but I have a line in the sand that I will
| not pay for a subscription. I want to buy my software and own it
| and use it for as long as I want.
|
| Basically my options if I don't want top pay a license fee for
| forever is to find alternatives, or pirate the software. I've
| opted for the former, but either leads to Adobe getting $0 from
| me, where they could have gotten >$0 if they had had a "pay
| outright" program.
|
| I have generally found good enough alternatives with their
| competitors (Toonboom is generally good enough for basic
| animation, Krita is good enough for artsy stuff, Final Cut Pro is
| good enough for video editing).
| johndhi wrote:
| You'd pay $1500 or whatever for a perpetual Photoshop license?
| I wouldn't
| tombert wrote:
| I mean, sure, there's probably an upper bound of a number I'd
| pay, and I don't do enough photo editing to justify paying
| really any amount of money for Photoshop.
|
| For software I'd actually use though? Upper bound is probably
| $600 judging by what I paid for Toonboom Harmony. Honestly if
| I had known about Moho at the time I probably would have
| gotten that since it's considerably cheaper and on Humble
| Bundle fairly often.
|
| I'm not in a creative industry so it's tough for me to know
| "fair" numbers, just "what can I justify as a toy" numbers. I
| like to occasionally whip out an animation tool and draw
| stuff with stick figures, and I like having that readily
| available, and I don't want my tool to change from under me
| so I don't want transparent updates. I just want to buy my
| software once.
| bobim wrote:
| That's dirt cheap for a software you can make a living off.
| For FEA or CFD one would need to shell off in the order of
| 50-100k plus 20k per year. 1500? I would.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| But not all of us _make a living_ off of Photoshop.
|
| I'm a programmer. I periodically need to make a tiny tweak
| in a file that's been created by a real artist, or I want
| to edit a photo I took, or whatever.
|
| It's insane to spend $1500, or even $500 (the CorelDraw
| buy-it-outright price) for hobby and occasional-use
| software like that.
|
| And yeah, I use other things like Affinity Photo, which is
| Good Enough for many of my purposes, but it's just annoying
| to not be able to use the same software as my artists--
| unless they flatten the image before giving it to me, it's
| a crap-shoot whether I can import it in anything but the
| exact version of PhotoShop they were using.
|
| It feels like extortion: I have to pay the artist to make
| the tiniest changes because I can't edit the original file,
| or I have to pay Adobe an outrageous sum to do it myself.
| Lose-lose.
| bobim wrote:
| Fully understood, this carefully engineered vendor lock-
| in is the cherry on the cake. It's in all CAD software
| for no reason and forces you to follow the herd. Open
| standards should be imposed by state actors...
| goosedragons wrote:
| If you're paying artists to make art in PS, are you not
| doing it for something you make money off of? Or are you
| just really deep in the hobby that you're nearing
| professional level?
|
| Photoshop was never $1500 either. CS6 was $700. The
| design standard CS6 suite was $1300.
|
| Maybe hunt for artists that use the reasonably priced
| Clip Studio Paint instead? It's pretty popular among
| manga and the like artists anyways.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| Realistically, I'm looking for artists that are _good_
| first. And 98% of them use Photoshop. Not going to
| restrict myself to non-Photoshop artists.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > I have to pay the artist to make the tiniest changes
| because I can't edit the original file
|
| Hire the artist and ask them for the files exported into
| a format you can open. If they refuse, hire somebody
| else.
|
| I do agree with the sibling that open standards should be
| set by state actors. But they should only make them
| available, not mandate them into private actors.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| > ask them for the files exported into a format you can
| open
|
| They already _do_ that. That 's not the problem.
|
| If the original Photoshop file has 200 layers, and 60 of
| those layers have effects that use advanced Photoshop-
| only features, then _no other art program can open the
| source material_. Period.
|
| At best you can get _approximations_ of the original
| Photoshop render if you open the image in another
| program. But generally what you get is garbage if it 's
| not a recent version of Photoshop.
|
| The point of getting the Photoshop original with the
| layers is that I might be able to make a tweak to one of
| the layers and have it re-render a result that is better
| for what I need. Something that is difficult or
| impossible if I just have a JPEG.
|
| And asking the artist to do the work in a program that
| _doesn 't_ have all of those features is roughly
| equivalent to asking a software engineer to use
| Mac/Windows/Linux (pick one they don't know) and to write
| all of the code in Visual
| Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one they
| don't know). Yes, technically anything is possible in any
| environment, but it might take 10x as long and be 100x as
| painful--with a result that may not be as good due to the
| tools not being as good.
|
| Artists are professionals with an acquired skill set. You
| can't ask them to work using unfamiliar tools and expect
| them to be happy or productive.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > And asking the artist to do the work in a program that
| doesn't have all of those features is roughly equivalent
| to asking a software engineer to use Mac/Windows/Linux
| (pick one they don't know) and to write all of the code
| in Visual Basic/Perl/PHP/JavaScript/C/C++/COBOL (pick one
| they don't know).
|
| You mean the thing that every single company does for
| their work for hire?
|
| When a developer doesn't know, they go after another
| developer. (And they should restrict the number of
| constraints to what is really important, but almost no
| company does that.)
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| No company I've worked for in the past decade has told me
| what kind of computer I should work on. Even the W2 gigs
| have allowed me my choice of Mac/Linux/Windows. I work
| for tech-savvy companies, though. I'm sure there are
| tech-naive companies that force everyone to work on Mac
| or whatever.
|
| And companies that want programmers who write, say,
| Delphi or Visual Basic, are going to be getting crap
| developers, and would be better off porting their
| software to something more modern. I did some work on a
| Delphi project to help out a friend, and no, I wouldn't
| go to work for a company to work on Delphi full-time.
| They couldn't possibly pay me enough.
|
| But that's my point: Just like they would get crap
| developers, I would get crap artists. Or extremely
| expensive artists. Not interested. It would literally be
| cheaper to pay Adobe the extortion they ask than to try
| to work with non-Adobe artists.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I mean, sure. But on the other hand:
|
| - Paint is not only free but built-in
|
| - Paint.net is free and covers most of what I'd need to
| do
|
| - GIMP is free. Cumbersome, but if I need to do any batch
| operations that's when I bring out a full suite.
|
| If I only need to do a quick edit for some hobby thing,
| I'm not frought for options.
|
| >but it's just annoying to not be able to use the same
| software as my artists
|
| So you are a professional? If you have artists at your
| beck and call and it's not a forboding deadline, I don't
| know why you wouldn't ask the artist to make the edit.
|
| There's definitely a debate to be had about proprietary
| file formats (I work in games, so I completely understand
| that with its 3d equivalent that is the FBX format...
| thankfully there are very slow moves to cast that away),
| but I'm not sure I have a good solution. I don't
| necessarily think a company should be forced to open
| source/spec its own tooling.
| SomeCallMeTim wrote:
| > I don't know why you wouldn't ask the artist to make
| the edit.
|
| Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce
| technically precise artwork?
|
| The point would be that sometimes it takes 4-5
| turnarounds with an artist to get something exactly
| right. Something that I, as a non-artist but skilled app
| user, can do in less time it takes to explain what I need
| to the artist a single time. So it's about saving my time
| and not having to pay for hours of artist time for
| something I can do in 10 minutes.
|
| What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being
| greedy and I refuse to patronize them. That's what it
| comes down to. I'm not saying they should be forced to do
| anything. Just that I don't like what they're doing, and
| therefore end up having to work around their software
| rather than using it.
|
| I have a license for the last one they offered for a
| fixed cost; bought it for a steep discount when the new
| licenses were the Next Big Thing. But they won't get any
| more of my money until they offer the software at a
| reasonable price tier.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Have you ... worked with artists? To get them to produce
| technically precise artwork?
|
| Yes. But I work in games, so maybe I was expecting
| professional artists working on complex assets and not a
| grab bag from fiverr for some UI art. Anything "simple"
| probably takes them 2-5 minutes and maybe a few
| turnarouns while I could maybe take an hour of edits for
| much worse quality.
|
| >What I'd like to see is tiered licenses. They're being
| greedy and I refuse to patronize them.
|
| I agree completely. But I know there's no such thing as a
| smooth migration, especially when working as a team.
|
| It's sad, but they have a lock on the market for a reason
| and that moral stance won't be without some growing pains
| or compromises. I'm sure we both know trying to get an
| artist to migrate tools is much harder than a programmer.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I wouldn't pay $1 for Photoshop when GIMP is free and open
| source. It's been my daily driver in a personal and
| professional capacity for ages, and Photoshop offers nothing
| special for me.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| If GIMP is a replacement for you, you're not Adobe's target
| customer.
| ipaddr wrote:
| But you are their average customer
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I'd be interested to know exactly what task Photoshop is
| capable of that GIMP isn't.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| I agree with you in principle, but there is one big task
| where Gimp can't compete: importing PSD files. Kudos to
| Gimp developers for the level of psd support it has, but
| it's not perfect (naturally).
| adzm wrote:
| AI features. Content aware fill. Better masking /
| feathering tools. Layer effects and composition. Text
| handling by far. Vector layers. Smart objects. Dynamic
| link to other creative applications. Brushes x1000. Pen
| input. Smart selections.
| tombert wrote:
| DiffusionBee on Mac has AI infill on images, and the
| models run locally and it's free and open source. I have
| to think that someone is looking at implementing that in
| GIMP, at least as a plugin.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I've been using a content aware fill extension in GIMP
| that works nicely
| szvsw wrote:
| Genuinely don't know: can you do scripting/batch
| processing with GIMP? I have set up some complex
| workflows in photoshop using JS to manage the batch
| sequencing IIRC, though it was quite a while ago.
|
| Another one I don't know: can you embed a gimp file into
| a layout editor? A common workflow is to embed a
| photoshop file into an indesign file; you can then edit
| your photoshop file and have your indesign file updating
| automatically. This is a common workflow in several adobe
| products, eg I believe after effects sequence embedded
| into a Premiere timeline is possible/common.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >can you do scripting/batch processing with GIMP
|
| You sure can. I'm not even an artist and that's the one
| part of GIMP I can speak for. It has its own Python
| library, so almost anything you can do in editor you can
| do programmatically, but I made a few scripts for batch
| processing an entire album of images.
|
| (documentation is about as awkard as the GUI, though. You
| will eventually find what you need after putting in 3-5x
| more effort than what should have been necessary, but
| it's somewhere in the docs)
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| To be fair, singular or very small businesses in general
| aren't the target consumer for companies that switch to
| these subscription models. They are penny slots while
| Adobe is discussion contracts with larger studios.
| vsuperpower2020 wrote:
| I'm glad there are people willing to pay for the
| development of software so I'm not stuck using GIMP. It's
| actually a good thing when people get paid for their work,
| the issue here is that adobe's predatory pricing models and
| making it difficult to cancel.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| "ToonBoom, is generally good enough for basic animation".
|
| What? This is the premier 2D animation package used by most of
| the top studios.
| tombert wrote:
| Oh no question, bad phrasing on my end, I sort of meant it
| inverted.
|
| Toonboom is _excellent_ if you 're a professional. I'm very
| much _not_ a professional, I barely know what I 'm doing. I
| think Flash/Animate appealed to someone like me, because I
| found it easier to draw some goofy thing really quick and
| animate it.
|
| I feel Toonboom has a much higher learning curve and isn't
| really for people like me. It's not insurmountably difficult
| or anything, just that I'm not really the target audience and
| as such I don't know that it's a good fit for "basic" stuff,
| if that makes any sense.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Adobe software isn't quite "good" in my experience. The company
| is an Oracle: all-in on giving the right bullet points to
| pointy-haired managers but with a palpable paucity of technical
| merit.
|
| I have to work with Adobe Experience Manager and it's a weird,
| painful, slow/inefficient kludge, not to even get into the
| licensing terms and what devs are "allowed" to do on their own
| servers.
|
| Acrobat Reader stands out in my memory only as that extremely
| slow, bloated thing you launched by accident, then closed 5
| minutes later once it loaded to use Sumatara instead.
|
| They killed Flash by neglect after buying it from Macromedia -
| we might still have it around if they invested in it properly
| and made it up to par for the iPod. Thankfully we finally have
| good emulators that work in the browser to see the vast amount
| of old Flash content.
|
| Creative Suite is _fine_ and mostly functional from what I
| hear, but they didn 't make that codebase either, and I've
| never felt limited by free or cheaper alternatives like GIMP or
| Sony Vegas. (I find it baffling how people rag on GIMP - I use
| it in a professional and personal capacity and I love it, and
| I'm familiar enough with Photoshop to compare it.)
| tombert wrote:
| I don't think Vegas has been Sony for quite awhile has it?
|
| Vegas is great, but as far as I'm aware there's not really a
| way to get it running on Mac, and I don't own a Windows
| computer anymore (I still will VM it if I really need it).
| For my video stuff I've been using Final Cut Pro and Apple
| Motion for the last couple years since it's a one-time
| purchase and I think pretty good. I'd like to use Premiere
| and After Effects but, as stated, I don't want to pay for
| subscriptions.
|
| I don't know enough about photo editing to say if GIMP sucks,
| I've used it before and it seems fine.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| It's Vegas Creative (MAGIX), now...
| https://www.vegascreativesoftware.com/us/vegas-pro/
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah I looked it up shortly after posting that comment.
|
| I wish they'd release a Mac version, because that was
| actually my favorite video editor on Windows. It would be
| _really_ great if they made a Linux version but I 'm not
| holding my breath for that.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Surely Apple bears a ton of responsibility for killing Flash.
| That was the beginning of their mobile walled garden.
| tombert wrote:
| I know that there were almost certainly patent issues and
| the like that made this difficult, but I firmly believe
| that if Adobe had open-sourced the Flash player, then Flash
| would still be as big or bigger today.
|
| If it were opened up, it could have been integrated
| directly into browsers and maybe even the web standards.
| The Flash desktop program would still probably be the de
| facto means of creating Flash content but at that point it
| could have conceivably still been on iPhone, at least
| eventually.
|
| It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but fundamentally
| Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I think it was a
| matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going to die.
|
| The death of Flash kind of makes me sad. A lot of HTML5
| stuff feels like it's playing this huge game of catchup
| from what we had in Flash in 2004, and I still think that
| Flash was one of the most _fun_ development platforms ever;
| the ease of quickly going from "drawing" to "animation" to
| "code" was so streamlined and as a teenager I had a lot of
| fun with it, and I haven't found a tool since then that
| I've had as much fun playing with.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| It's easy to blame Apple for this stuff, but
| fundamentally Steve Jobs' complaints were fair and I
| think it was a matter of "when", not "if" Flash was going
| to die.
|
| I just do not believe it. It was the best available rich
| presentation/interaction game in town. Trivial to get
| started and no need for a platform to sign off on your
| work.
|
| No doubt there was a never ending litany of security
| problems, but if Flash had been available at the birth of
| smartphones, I suspect it would have flourished. Or even
| led to a competitor targeting the same space with better
| characteristics.
| tombert wrote:
| There were performance issues too, and it was pretty bad
| on Android phones, at least when I used it in 2012.
|
| I think it might have been able to live on in the form of
| Adobe AIR if Adobe hadn't given up on it. I think AIR
| could have occupied the space that Electron does now.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Totally. I still think that more development can cover a
| lot of sins. Look at JavaScript. It started for changing
| text colors or something. Now it is one of the fastest
| interpreted runtimes.
|
| Years of incremental improvements on this bustling
| platform could have made Flash into a performant beast.
|
| Anyway, we will never know what could have been if Flash
| had been a mobile option on day one.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| The ruffle.rs project has most of newgrounds back up
| running flash inside a wasm runtime. Is there any reason
| we can't all use the same old development tools in a vm
| to create more new flash content?
| tombert wrote:
| I don't see why you couldn't, other than getting hands on
| legitimate versions of Flash that still have ActionScript
| support.
| vr46 wrote:
| Kindof, but there was a ton of work done on ActionScript 3
| making it all ECMA (?) compliant and there was a heck of a
| lot of road left on that. It was TypeScript before there
| was modern Javascript. And that could have been parlayed
| into a different runtime, like Haxe did. Flash the runtime
| had many problems, but the IDE and tools behind them were
| mature and well-understood.
| tombert wrote:
| AS3 is a pretty underrated language. It was ridiculously
| fun to make stuff with it, and if you bought the official
| Flash Builder IDE (which was Eclipse based), you had
| decent autocomplete and everything.
|
| The runtime definitely needed to be improved, but I feel
| Flash gets a bit more hate than it deserves. By the tail
| end, there was even decent 3D graphics support, and
| CrossBridge was a pretty cool predecessor to Emscripten
| that allowed you to convert C++ programs into SWF stuff
| (IIRC an early version had the Doom engine ported over).
| vr46 wrote:
| I couldn't agree more. AS3 was my gateway drug into
| static typing, IDEs, all manner of things. I did have
| Flex/FDT at one client, but after that I ended up using
| Flash Develop because it was so good, even if it was
| Windows.
|
| Having first MTASC and then the as3 compiler on the
| command line was another route into modern-day build
| pipelines. The 3D engines were great, Box2D port was
| great, and looking at it all now in 2024, the APIs still
| hold up and Adobe could restart an entire multimedia
| division with it.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| This is what actually happened
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713706
| simondotau wrote:
| > Apple bears a ton of responsibility for killing Flash.
|
| Correct, and that might have been the single greatest gift
| Apple has bestowed upon the open Internet. Flash was the
| walled garden of the web -- closed source, proprietary and
| a perennial security nightmare -- and the community owes
| Apple a huge debt for gratitude for hastening its demise.
|
| I know some people have fond memories of flash games, flash
| art and, in some instances, Flash websites. I do appreciate
| that it was a cultural moment. I do appreciate that it was
| accessible to novices and artists in a way that HTML5 is
| not. But the web is not, and should never have been,
| reliant on a closed source proprietary platform.
| b3ing wrote:
| Adobe has let pretty much all of the Macromedia stuff fade
| out
|
| Sure Apple is to blame partially for Flash, but even now they
| rarely add new features to "Animate". There are other
| applications out there that are doing more interesting
| things.
|
| Dreamweaver has been outdone by visual studio code and
| sublimetext, granted it was really only good for ColdFusion.
|
| Fireworks was left to die, oddly enough it could of been the
| next Sketch, although Figma probably would of beaten it
| eventually anyway
|
| Freehand was killed to let Illustrator be dominant
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The truth is that Adobe said they could get Flash running
| on the first gen iPhone with 128MB of RAM and a 400Mhz
| processor.
|
| Safari barely ran on the first gen iPhone. If you scrolled
| too fast, it would display a checkerbox while the rendering
| caught up. It didn't even have enough memory to have a
| background image on your Home Screen.
|
| When Flash finally came to mobile in 2010 on Android, it
| required 1Gb RAM and 1Ghz processor and it barely ran. I
| had an HTC that met those specs. The first iPhone that met
| those specs didn't come out until 2011.
|
| Adobe was always over promising and under delivering on
| Flash for mobile to the point where the Motorola tablet
| that advertised flash support didn't ship with it and
| embarrassingly enough, you couldn't even view the Xoom's
| home page on the web with the tablet because it required
| Flash.
| zsims wrote:
| Blame for Flash? Or celebrated for killing Flash?
|
| Flash was a security nightmare
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There is also the affinity suite where you can get the whole
| suite for less than the annual cost of photoshop alone.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Affinity software is exceptionally good. 50% off right now,
| btw... https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/
| eastbound wrote:
| DaVinci!
| https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
| Blackthorn wrote:
| I so wish they were a viable option to replace Illustrator
| for certain printing things. But they just have this slightly
| different output that the printing house I'm trying to use
| (Tayda) doesn't jive with.
| w0m wrote:
| > subscription-only model
|
| When did they do that? I guess I only really use Lightroom; but
| you've been able to buy each major release outright for
| ~1.5years of subscription (last I worked it out)
| tombert wrote:
| I believe CS6 was the last version of Adobe Animate you could
| purchase outright. I don't know about their other products as
| much.
|
| I even emailed Adobe sales representatives two years ago to
| see if I was missing something, and maybe there was a way to
| buy it that I wasn't seeing. They made it very clear that
| subscriptions are the only way now.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| CS6 was followed by Creative Cloud for all their products.
| sureIy wrote:
| > Adobe getting $0 from me
|
| Yeah but they're getting all the money from everyone else.
|
| Adobe are not idiots, they ran the numbers and figured that
| subscriptions bring in more money. If that means tombert won't
| give them money, good riddance.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Realistically, you can't use the software forever anyway unless
| you're planning on never upgrading your computer.
| jmount wrote:
| I was at a party once and was introduced to a nice person who
| worked for Adobe. At the time I was heavily into photography, and
| I started praising Adobe Photoshop. Unfortunately (due to a lack
| of editor) I continued with how Photoshop was great, unlike so
| many other Adobe products. Then I attempted to apologize by
| saying I was wrong and rude, but it is just that Adobe policies
| are so nasty. Saw the guy on BART the next day, he didn't make
| eye contact. I still feel both bad and right.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| >I still feel both bad and right.
|
| Stand tall for your righteousness.
|
| It's time to bring shame back to inherently-sociopathic
| corporate NPCs.
| iamleppert wrote:
| Customers should be required to pay out the FULL contract
| enterprise value under force of law.
| twosheep wrote:
| "annual contract billed monthly" is a dark pattern - it's not
| monthly, it's annual, and deliberately confusing
| terpimost wrote:
| As a happy paying customer of Photopea (photoshop in a browser by
| not Adobe) I'm glad Figma isn't under Adobe but there is a
| revenue/investors pressure and Figma is becoming more and more
| affected by it.
|
| I would be fine paying for Adobe if their software would be the
| beat example of UX and performance. But sluggish brush stroke on
| M1 is just not acceptable.
| returnInfinity wrote:
| Figma is VC funded, and will soon IPO. It will soon be owned by
| the same people that own Adobe.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| They're "figma" find out about Adobe's _best practices_.
| kaetemi wrote:
| I had the "cancel anytime after the first year" plan, and after
| that first year was over, they tried charging another whole year
| as cancellation fee.
| drra wrote:
| I own an ancient box copy of Adobe Photoshop CS4 and use it just
| because of muscle memory. Since a year or so, periodically it
| bullies me with a popup that my unlicensed software is going to
| be disabled and it shows every 15 minutes regardless if I run
| Photoshop or not. Can't close it without going to Adobe website.
|
| I'll never going to buy or support anyone in buying anything
| produced by Adobe. Not going to cry if they go down either.
| focusedone wrote:
| I'm also nursing along CS4 but (very fortunately) haven't seen
| that error. I'm woefully out of date, so maybe got lucky with
| that.
|
| After many sleepless nights fighting with Adobe's licensing
| servers, which had erroneously declared my installation no
| longer valid, I keep an extra desktop offline with my 2nd
| licensed install ready for their next round of shenanigans.
| rglover wrote:
| The funny part of this behavior is (I'd imagine) Adobe would make
| far more money if they just offered simple plans and a "cancel
| any time" option alongside a "pay once for one year of upgrades
| and then that version works/is supported until the support window
| ends" option.
|
| So many great businesses have been ruined by the need for endless
| growth leading to dark patterns.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Oh no, I guarantee you the current way is making Adobe more
| money. They wouldn't be doing it otherwise. It's not a mistake.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| It absolutely can be a mistake. It's probably making them
| significantly more money in the short term, but it can be a
| total self-own on the scale of years, and perhaps not even
| that many years.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Short term is what matters to them. CEOs want to cash out
| the bonus
| crazygringo wrote:
| Thank goodness, it's about time!
|
| My only question is, what the heck took the FTC this long? Why
| didn't they do this years ago?
|
| The problems with cancelling Adobe CC are well known:
|
| - Consumers think they've subscribed to a monthly plan only to
| discover it's yearly
|
| - If they cancel before the year is over they still have to pay
| 50% of the remaining time, while the software stops working
| immediately, and they had no idea
|
| - But worst of all, if you want to set it to NOT autorenew at the
| end of the year, YOU CAN'T [1]. You can't cancel renewal but keep
| the existing subscription through the end of the year. Which is
| insane. You have to wait until some brief "cancellation window"
| period at the end of your year, and cancel it AFTER the window
| has opened up but BEFORE it actually renews. Again, this is
| INSANE
|
| And all this is on top of the complaints that people try to
| cancel over the phone even _within_ the cancellation window, and
| either can 't do it, or think they've done it but it hasn't.
|
| There's no way the FTC won't win here. And I hope the FTC levies
| a _truly_ massive fine on Adobe, ON TOP OF refunds to consumers
| of all previous cancellation fees.
|
| It's absolutely despicable behavior, and there's no way Adobe
| would be able to get away with it if they didn't have network
| lock-in effects from what have become the industry file formats
| of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, etc. If you collaborate in
| the graphics space you need to use their tools period, so you can
| edit files people send you and vice-versa. Conversion tools never
| work perfectly, or even well, when they even exist at all.
|
| [1] https://helpx.adobe.com/manage-account/using/manage-auto-
| ren...
| hparadiz wrote:
| I hope they get the book thrown at them. Absolute scum.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| >My only question is, what took the FTC this long? Why didn't
| they do this years ago?
|
| In general, the government and its agencies move _very_ slowly.
| Compared to the FTC, Adobe 's move over to subscription is
| quite recent. Adobe's only been doing subscriptions for what,
| maybe 10 years? And these problems are even more recent than
| that.
|
| It also takes time to build up a case, even if they had looked
| into it immediately. Get a nice long paper trail, lots of
| documentation, consumer complaints, etc. That can take years.
|
| As they get more familiar with the modern world of software, I
| think cases like this will take less and less time to deal
| with.
| 0xcde4c3db wrote:
| Bill Gates once expressed a similar view about rampant piracy of
| Microsoft software in China [1]:
|
| > Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in
| China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will,
| though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to
| steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow
| figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
|
| [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-
| micro...
| jpeter wrote:
| Well did they figure it out?
| shuckles wrote:
| My feeling is this logic only holds if your product is being
| pirated because it's the best. Windows was certainly better
| than Linux, but ultimately when a consumer can afford it
| they'd rather buy a Mac.
| DSMan195276 wrote:
| I don't think it's that simple. Plenty of people won't buy
| a Mac because it's "different", which of them is 'better'
| never factors into it.
|
| While I don't use Photoshop I'd assume that logic holds
| even stronger - if you know how to use Photoshop you're
| going to ask for that rather than a tool you don't know how
| to use.
| shuckles wrote:
| If people were pirating Photoshop only because it was
| easy to pirate, my guess is when it came to professional
| work or another occasion where they had the funds to pay
| for image editing software, they would overcome whatever
| friction necessary to buy the best. That definitely
| happens in other cases like video editing where easy to
| access software is different than what studios pay for.
|
| As a thought experiment: if Photoshop was means tested
| and free to anyone who couldn't afford it, would that
| actually convert users when they had money?
| fragmede wrote:
| How many people ever got rich enough to pay for a copy of
| WinRar?
| popcalc wrote:
| The US government is one of WinRar's biggest customers.
| shuckles wrote:
| I think this is irrelevant. WinRAR's core feature set for
| most users was made available for free with zip files and
| operating system support.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I grew up on pirated windows, and never had the
| opportunity or means to pirate Mac software. I now cannot
| stand the mac software - alt tab is broken (for me), as
| are copy / paste. I think piracy had a huge involvement
| in my preferred software.
| shuckles wrote:
| Remapping the command key to alt is a pretty
| straightforward feature built into the OS.
| RussianCow wrote:
| I think they were likely referring to the behavior and
| not the choice of shortcut keys. On Windows, alt+tab
| switches between all open windows across a apps, whereas
| in macOS, you have separate shortcuts for switching
| between apps vs windows within the same app.
|
| Personally, I find the macOS behavior really irritating
| and unintuitive, but thankfully there are plenty of apps
| out there that solve this issue so it's not really a
| problem.
| shuckles wrote:
| Interesting -- I didn't think about the difference and
| could see how it is annoying.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| 10 year old me didn't know this. I'm comfortable enough
| with windows (and anything other than mac) that there is
| zero chance I'll switch to the OS or their key layout,
| which I will concur is superior.
| mixermachine wrote:
| I switched from a PC to a Mac at work. Macbook Pro M2 Pro,
| 32GB RAM. The performance and battery life are absolutely
| lovely. Compile tasks run great.
|
| MacOS on the other hand not really. It is better/acceptable
| after I installed some Plugins. But I still wish Linux was
| fully supported (and my company would allow it). Even
| Windows would be an upgrade currently for me.
| plufz wrote:
| What plugins do you use? And what do you miss from
| windows?
|
| As a long time mac user I am probably unaware of neat
| stuff from windows.
| cwillu wrote:
| Probably the biggest one for me is alt-tab switching
| between windows, without regard for whether its the same
| app or not. This matters, because keeping track of
| whether the documentation I'm referring to are currently
| in a gvim window vs a vim terminal vs a browser, and
| whether the work I'm currently doing _with_ the
| documentation is in a gvim window, a terminal, or a
| browser, is enraging.
|
| The key to bring back the last window I looked at should
| not change depending on whether the app name happens to
| be different.
| nehal3m wrote:
| By default the hotkey for tabbing through app instances
| is Cmd + ~
|
| I bound it to Option + tab though, more intuitive to me.
| aseo wrote:
| ^ b/c of this, I actually like how MacOS separated app
| and window switching. It's a bit more fine grained, and I
| can use either of the two depending on the specific
| intention.
| nox101 wrote:
| that doesn't actually solve the OP's problem as it still
| requires you to be aware of all your windows and which
| ones are in current app vs which ones are in different
| apps.
| cwillu wrote:
| You're just re-describing the behaviour I already
| described as irritating; did you perchance reply to the
| wrong comment?
|
| Scenario: I'm in a terminal doing something, and I have a
| second window I'm switching back and forth between that
| contains the man page for a command. In isolation, I
| haven't given you enough information to tell whether I
| should be pressing opt-tab or cmd-tilde to swap windows:
| maybe the man page is in a browser, or maybe it's in a
| second terminal.
|
| Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between an editor
| and some reference document in another window; you can't
| tell which key I should press to swap without knowing if
| I'm looking at the document in another editor instance or
| a browser window.
|
| Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between a terminal
| and some reference document from a cloud provider. You
| can't determine which key to press to swap without
| knowing if I'm ssh'd in a terminal or using a web-based
| cloud terminal.
|
| Scenario: I'm switching back and forth between an image
| editor and a client's low-resolution logo they emailed
| me. You can't determine which key to press to swap
| without knowing if I'm looking at the reference image in
| another image editor window or a browser.
|
| I run into this _constantly_.
| nehal3m wrote:
| There are some apps that change that behavior if you
| want. [0]
|
| I didn't reply to the wrong comment, I was just trying to
| be helpful.
|
| This OS behavior has seemed second nature to me ever
| since browsers implemented tabs. Like in each of your
| described scenarios I usually forget which browser tab is
| in the foreground when I switch, I will have to Ctrl+tab
| until I find the relevant one. It will stay on top once I
| do though.
|
| That is what MacOS does; the window of an app you had in
| focus last will stay on top of the stack. It makes
| intuitive sense to me personally but I agree it does make
| finding stuff a little onerous.
|
| In your scenarios, _you_ know which applications you have
| your relevant documents opened in so once you have them
| on top switching is easy. But again, I understand that a
| decade of muscle memory and using a different paradigm
| will make this behavior infuriating.
|
| [0] https://superuser.com/questions/193922/is-there-any-
| program-...
| zoky wrote:
| I haven't tried it, but Contexts (https://contexts.co/)
| seems to do what you want.
| cwillu wrote:
| It wasn't a request for assistance; when was required to
| use a mac for work, I found a plugin. It's still
| irritating that I _have_ to use a plugin.
| zoky wrote:
| Well, if you weren't asking for assistance, then why use
| something that ultimately comes down to personal
| preference as an example of an OS feature not working the
| way it objectively "should"?
|
| I mean, I'd argue that the way Windows does it is
| illogical and confusing, and if I used Windows regularly
| I'd want a plugin to make window switching work the way
| it does on MacOS, which I find far more convenient. But
| that doesn't make the way Windows does it objectively
| wrong, and it wouldn't justify my irritation at the OS
| not working the way I would prefer it to.
|
| All of the issues you've described are limited to your
| particular use case, and as has been pointed out by
| myself and others, are easily solvable with a relatively
| inexpensive program. So your entire argument really boils
| down to "I don't like the way MacOS does something by
| default, but fortunately it's an easy and cheap fix so
| it's not really a huge deal".
| cwillu wrote:
| > So your entire argument really boils down to "I don't
| like the way MacOS does something by default, but
| fortunately it's an easy and cheap fix so it's not really
| a huge deal".
|
| ...yes, and?
|
| Somebody was asking for an example of the sort of plugin
| someone might want to install, I provided an example.
| There was no argument being had, no claims that OSX is
| objectively wrong for doing things that way, just a pile-
| on of people not reading the context.
| zoky wrote:
| So, what, you're just complaining about an easily
| solvable problem that ultimately comes down to not
| everybody agreeing with your personal preference? Don't
| you have, like, a cloud you should be yelling at?
|
| You could have just said, "I don't like the way MacOS
| does X, and here's the plugin to use to change it so it
| does Y." Instead, you went on a long-winded screed about
| _why_ your view was obviously the correct one, while
| providing no solution to the problem (and implying that
| there was no obvious solution, because you "run into this
| problem _constantly_ ") and strongly implicating that
| anyone who dared to suggest otherwise was clearly wrong.
|
| And then you wonder why people thought you were being
| argumentative.
| slb_ wrote:
| Does it matter? It's a helpful response for those facing
| the same issue as you, but aren't aware of possible
| solutions.
| ttepasse wrote:
| There are multiple 3rd party window switchers, Witch is a
| popular one, afair:
|
| https://manytricks.com/witch/
| philsnow wrote:
| > The key to bring back the last window I looked at
| should not change depending on whether the app name
| happens to be different.
|
| This is a great formulation of an annoyance that I've had
| for 10 years but hadn't put into words.
|
| If you happen to use virtual desktops / "spaces" or
| whatever macos calls them these days, it's annoying that
| the default cmd-tab switcher will switch to apps that
| have no windows on the current workspace. I know, that's
| part of Mac's app model and it is self-consistent
| (especially since even if you don't use virtual desktops,
| you can still have an app running with no open windows,
| switch to it and usually cmd-N to get a new window) and
| that it's at odds with Windows's model (where usually
| closing the last window of a program closes the program).
|
| A sibling comment suggested Witch to get app-agnostic
| window-switching, I haven't tried Witch but you can do
| almost all things with Hammerspoon, including window-
| switching. I cribbed from a bunch of other peoples'
| configs and made a simple switcher: https://gist.github.c
| om/philsnow/ef8532c3fa3304336ffb0198163... . I think it's
| worth investing in learning Hammerspoon because of the
| sheer amount of things that you can integrate.
| RussianCow wrote:
| I'm going to chime in here with another solution to the
| alt+tab problem, since I have the same gripe about macOS.
| I've been using the FOSS AltTab.app and have been really
| happy with it so far. It's a really simple yet superbly
| useful piece of software.
|
| https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
| mixermachine wrote:
| I have a lot of windows open, sometimes from the same app
| (IntelliJ x 5, Android Studio x 4, Firefox x 5 for
| example).
|
| # AltTab brings back the ability to switch to specific
| windows. MacOS is still annoying here because it brings
| -all- instances of the program in foreground (overlapping
| a Firefox instance in wanted to look something up for
| example). Feels like MacOS is designed mainly for one
| screen. I have about 4x that size on my ultrawide. Still
| this Plugin helps a lot.
|
| # Commander one is a better file manager for me
|
| # Shottr makes taking screenshots easy and actually works
| with ultra widescreens
|
| # UnnaturalScrollWheels makes the scroll function of my
| mouse nice again. Personal preference oc but MacOS has no
| option to invert the scroll behavior.
|
| In general I encountered quite some bugs in MacOS. I was
| disappointed tbh because I came back after many years of
| Windows and Linux. Macs and MacOS are build in the same
| house and should "fit together".
|
| A selection: - System settings search broken. Does not
| navigate to item - Finder sometimes does not find
| programs (which are found 2 min later without a problem)
| - Crash of MacOS after sleep. The automatic recovery is
| good however. - Selecting to only share a window (in
| Teams for example) shares sometimes more than that
| window. This can reveal sensitive information
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Alright.
|
| My current laptop was about 750$ , has a 8845HS and I added
| a 4TB SSD for 200$.
|
| If I wanted to do the same thing with a Mac I'd be spending
| over 3k.
|
| I actually have a M1 Air, but Apple decided soldering SSDs
| would be a good idea.
|
| Dualboot Linux and Windows for the best experience...
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If I wanted to do the same thing with a Mac I 'd be
| spending over 3k_
|
| Right, "when a consumer can afford to."
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Ok.
|
| So instead of being able to upgrade to a 8TB in a few
| years when the prices come down, I can just throw out my
| 3K Mac and buy a new one. Only 5k for the 8TB Mac.
|
| I make music and I'm getting into photography and film
| making. I prefer more space over being having to carry
| around an external SSD with me
|
| I also enjoy gaming, which is still much better on
| Windows. If I want to play some COD or Tony Hawk HD,
| that's very well supported.
|
| Not really going to work on a Mac.
|
| Macs do have a much more premium feel to them, but I've
| had great experiences with cheap laptops. Even if I drop
| it, shucks, I'm out 750$, not 3k.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _instead of being able to upgrade to a 8TB in a few
| years when the prices come down, I can just throw out my
| 3K Mac and buy a new one_
|
| Mac buyers fall into two groups: those who don't need
| that upgrade (most consumers) and those who can afford to
| spec it up at the beginning, cost be damned. That's what
| OP meant by "when the consumer can afford to."
|
| > _also enjoy gaming, which is still much better on
| Windows_
|
| 100%. I don't think Apple has meaningfully contested this
| space.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| Realistically I can afford a 1500$ M3 Pro with a 512
| drive.
|
| I'd just prefer to save my money and get significantly
| more storage.
|
| I will miss Logic though...
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| I submit a third camp: some of us use a NAS or other
| networked storage solution because no laptop sanely
| provides the amount of storage we want or need, or don't
| want all our data local.
|
| Or something cloudy, though not necessarily iCloud Drive.
| II2II wrote:
| > Macs do have a much more premium feel to them, but I've
| had great experiences with cheap laptops. Even if I drop
| it, shucks, I'm out 750$, not 3k.
|
| Not to mention that feeling premium doesn't mean that it
| is more durable. I used to joke that those cheap plastic
| bodies found on cheap products did a much better job of
| protecting a device from the shock of a fall than the
| glass and metal bodies of premium feeling products.
|
| And while my experience with Macs is dated, I had an
| optical drive in one that refused to accept disks because
| there was a minor bend in the case. That machine never
| suffered from a fall, though it was likely a result of
| how I stuffed the machine into my book bag.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| You don't need an 8TB Mac. You need a 1TB Mac (at most)
| and a good external SSD.
| eru wrote:
| How do you know what 999900000999 needs better than them?
| filoleg wrote:
| > I make music and I'm getting into photography and film
| making. I prefer more space over being having to carry
| around an external SSD with me
|
| The rest of your points are all valid, but for
| photography storage purposes you can just use SD cards.
| They take up virtually no space, and MBPs (since at least
| M1 gen) have an SD card slot built-in.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I use SD cards, but I still copy my photos to my PC to
| back then up to the cloud and edit them.
|
| If I had to use a Mac, I guess I'd change my workflow a
| bit.
| II2II wrote:
| When a consumer can afford to means they have the
| opportunity to, not that they will. If you told me that I
| could buy widget A for $10 or widget B for $30, where
| both widget A and widget B will satisfy my needs, I am
| going to buy widget A. It doesn't really matter if widget
| B tries to justify that premium by doing a bunch of stuff
| that doesn't reflect my needs.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if you told me that I could buy widget A for $10 or
| widget B for $30, where both widget A and widget B will
| satisfy my needs_
|
| Sure. But most high-income consumers value many of the
| perks that Apple products provide.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| But widget A is objectively worse. My MacBook M2 Air last
| two workdays before needing a charge, it's light and
| silent. An x86 Windows PC has none of those attributes.
|
| I can actually use a MacBook Air on my lap without
| endangering my ability to have little scarface_74's
| II2II wrote:
| You could choose a collection of metrics that would make
| either widget look better. In the end, the individual
| metrics may be objective yet the selection of metrics
| will be subjective. For example: those who prefer widget
| A may cite things like software availability,
| repairability, and upgradability.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| It's a battery powered portable device. Wouldn't it have
| better battery life and being lighter - ie better
| portability - be kind of important?
|
| Also a "laptop" computer that doesn't fry your
| reproductive organs when working on your lap is an
| obvious metric.
| II2II wrote:
| To many people these days, computers are synonymous with
| laptops. They have limited need for portability or, if
| they need portability, a couple of hundred grams does not
| mean much to them. As for battery life, it is possible to
| get PCs that will run for a full day without charging.
| Yeah, that is not as good as two days. On the other hand,
| it's not necessarily meaningful. People who travel a lot
| or do a lot of field work may need it, but it won't be a
| primary concern for most.
|
| I'm still trying to figure out the reproductive organ
| bit. It sounds like an issue for people who use their
| computer in awfully unergonomic postures, particularly
| since most computers radiate heat towards the back rather
| than the front.
| shuckles wrote:
| Exactly. This is now 15 years out of date, but in 2009,
| Macs had 91% marketshare in the >$1,000 computer market
| per some industry estimate. My guess is they're still
| doing great in that segment.
| https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-has-91-share-of-
| premiu...
| layer8 wrote:
| Nah, the hardware is neat for the most part, but a lot of
| people don't necessarily like macOS.
| nijave wrote:
| No
| tempestn wrote:
| Definitely not true for me. I had a windows pc and mac
| laptop for years (as well as Linux home and work servers),
| but when it came time to replace the laptop I switched to
| windows, mostly because it's more configurable. Also
| integrates better with my Android phone, which I prefer to
| iOS for similar reasons.
| eru wrote:
| Apple has shiny hardware, yes.
|
| Compatibility for many programs people care about is a lot
| better on Windows than on Mac (or Linux). That has improved
| a lot in recent years, of course. Especially for games.
|
| Linux has great compatibility for lots of hardware, but
| Windows is still better supported. Mac has almost non-
| existent compatibility for hardware: you need to buy an
| Apple branded device to run Apple's operating system. For
| peripherals Windows has probably the best compatibility
| list, but Linux can often be better for very old stuff.
| Mac's record is spotty at best.
| mulmen wrote:
| > Mac has almost non-existent compatibility for hardware:
| you need to buy an Apple branded device to run Apple's
| operating system.
|
| Not only an Apple device but a recent Apple device. I
| have a 2014 RMBP that works flawlessly. I haven't been
| able to install MacOS on it for a couple of years now.
| eru wrote:
| Oh, the same for my 2016 MacBook Pro.
| jabbany wrote:
| I guess in a way?
|
| They learned from XP/7 that they'll never recoup it though
| licenses so now its ads and subscription upsells for
| everybody.
| SR2Z wrote:
| I think they would have moved to ads and subscriptions
| either way. It's hard to resist that sweet, sweet cash
| flow.
| tomrod wrote:
| Foolishly though. Ads don't work nearly as well as what a
| lot of companies pay for them.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| That's foolish for the companies paying for them, maybe
| not for the companies charging to vend them.
| colpabar wrote:
| Yeah, they're putting ads everywhere and selling all your
| activity data.
| gibolt wrote:
| "Ghost" Windows is a thing of the past, and most modern
| installations in China are legit. Bing is also an approved
| search engine, even if not used by a majority of people. I'm
| sure their revenue is significantly higher than a decade ago.
| rblatz wrote:
| Honestly google search has gotten so bad I've been meaning
| to try Bing out, but old habits die hard.
| eru wrote:
| If you want to try it: https://www.bing.com/
|
| Knock yourself out!
| greentxt wrote:
| Google search hasn't gotten _that_ bad. But nice of you
| to help out.
| eru wrote:
| To explain the joke:
|
| I like to procrastinate just as much as the next guy, but
| procrastinating over trying out a different search engine
| is a bit too much even for me.
| metadat wrote:
| They've managed to hoist from Windows OS biz to staying
| relevant, so yeah I'd say they're doing okay.
| hrisng wrote:
| Not from China but in the same region. Most new machines here
| now have a legit OEM copy of Windows. It's getting much more
| affordable, even in third-world countries now that it's not
| worth it to risk going for a pirated copy. Still happen, but
| much less common than it was.
| p1necone wrote:
| > Most new machines here now have a legit OEM copy of
| Windows.
|
| Are they legit legit? Or is this just because it's
| trivially easy to get a "legit" OEM license for free via
| Microsoft Activation Scripts?
| nirav72 wrote:
| OEM licenses for windows 11/10 are dirt cheap even here
| in the U.S. You can get a single use (can only activate
| once) for around $10-15. Most of those online sellers are
| based in China or HK. So yeah, those are legit OEM
| licenses. Since MS doesn't seem to have issues activating
| them. (I've bought them for VM use before)
| chii wrote:
| > a single use (can only activate once)
|
| i am unfamiliar with windows activation, does it activate
| once only, meaning that if you tried to reinstall on the
| same machine, you can't reuse the same license?
| nirav72 wrote:
| Correct. If you need to do a fresh install on the same or
| new drive, then you'll need a new key. I only use these
| cheap OEM keys for VMs and use more expensive retail keys
| that persist with MS login on physical hardware. Although
| I know plenty of people that build own gaming machines
| with OEM keys.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Ahh, yes, the "drug dealer" model of sales.
|
| Netflix also famously went this route, allowing rampant
| password sharing and then deciding "Hey, we want to get paid!"
| On one hand I don't have a problem with companies wanting to
| get paid for what they produce, but on the other, given that
| allowing the piracy is a _deliberate_ decision they made from
| the get-go, I don 't have a problem telling them to get bent
| once they decide "Time for profits! Enshittification it is..."
| okr wrote:
| I wish i had a product that people just wanna use and i have
| not figured out yet, how to monetize it. What a luxury
| position to be in. Sigh.
| eru wrote:
| You can give away dollar bills. It's a service that lots of
| people really want to use. You just need to figure out how
| to charge for it.
|
| (Lest you think I am joking, have a look at the 'MoviePass
| economy.')
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| There's defintieyl some MBA's crunching numbers, but I don't
| think piracy is "deliberate" per se. It's more an
| inevtiability, as inevitable as it is that businesses find
| ways around it. Deliberacy is companies dumping low key
| sanctioned torrents themselves (which is stupid, because even
| back in the 90's there was the idea of
| "lite/trial/watermarked" versions of software).
|
| That said, this strategy is surefire when it comes to
| consumer products like Windows. Consumers will stick with
| what thye are comfortable with. The Network Effect. It's a
| huge gamble for professional tools like Adobe, and they are
| somewhat lucky there wasn't a timeline where GIMP un-GIMPED
| itself, nor where Krita and other modern competitors didn't
| get adopted faster. There's money at stake, so professionals
| can and will learn new tools if the tools bite them.
| jameshart wrote:
| I'm not sure you can get away with the syllogism that just
| because some business practice is used by drug dealers it is
| automatically unethical if a legitimate business does the
| same thing.
|
| It's like when someone offers to sell you a product weighed
| in grams, you can't just say 'ah yes, the drug dealer
| measurement system' and dismiss their business out of hand.
|
| Because I don't think the moral issue people have with drug
| dealers is that they take a deliberately easy going attitude
| to theft of their merchandise and allow others to profit from
| selling it to a territory, only to later on increase their
| prices.
| caseyohara wrote:
| This is an especially weird thing for you to point out
| because they made no judgement of the ethics of the sales
| model, only remarked on the likeness.
| dotancohen wrote:
| To be fair, the consumer computer industry is the only
| industry other than drug dealers who call their clients
| "users".
| biglost wrote:
| Here un Chile, pacients at hospitals are called users by
| nurses and others alike. It's really weird
| eru wrote:
| Well, 'patient' comes from the Latin word for 'sufferer'.
| So I'd rather nurses and doctors call me a 'customer' or
| even a 'user.
| fastball wrote:
| Also drug dealers don't even do that. No drug dealer is
| just gonna give you drugs for free because you're a first
| time customer and they want you to get addicted.
| eru wrote:
| You are right. But proverbially drug dealers give you the
| first hit free all the time.
|
| See also how 'picking the low hanging fruit first' would
| get you fired from any picking gig: the fruit higher up
| the plant tends to ripen first. So that's what you pick
| first.
|
| There's lots of other funny (business) metaphors going
| wrong.
|
| See also how a 'quantum leap' is the smallest possible
| change possible, not something big and amazing.
| bustling-noose wrote:
| Cocaine dealers work similarly right ? The first ones are free
| so that you get addicted and come back for more when you have
| to pay for it.
| sneak wrote:
| No, this isn't true.
| girvo wrote:
| Not at all. Drug dealers have never "given the first hit for
| free": drugs are expensive, and they're (to a first
| approximation) lots of fun, they don't need addiction to be
| sold.
| eru wrote:
| And: how would you even ensure that the person who just
| scored a free hit will come back to you, and not some other
| drug dealer (especially if she can just score another free
| hit for first time customers there)?
|
| However, I think it is a pretty common occurrence that
| first timers often get their first hit from friends or even
| co-workers.
| dang wrote:
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40707515.
|
| (there's nothing wrong with it other than it being a bit of a
| generic tangent, but I'm trying to prune the top-heavy
| subthreads)
| michael_vo wrote:
| My dad was accidentally paying 89.99$ a month and hasn't used
| their service for a year. I cancelled it for him after going
| through his taxes/finances. They use all sorts of dark UX
| practices at signup and cancellation.
|
| Honestly there should be a law where if you haven't logged into
| your account in 3 months you should get a notification asking if
| you want to cancel. It's one thing if the company is storing your
| data (like google photos) as that has an associated cost, but
| inactive accounts just feels like corporate theft.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I've never really understood how someone could "forget" they
| were paying for something. Like, doesn't everyone check their
| bank balances and purchase histories at least once a month? Or
| at least just skim their credit card bills? How do you even
| make sure you have enough money for things? I have Quicken open
| pretty much constantly, and refresh at least once a day. Of
| course not everyone is as anal as me, but you'd think at a bare
| minimum most people took a peek at their finances once a month?
| Once a year even? How do people just stay on autopilot for
| months/years and just wing it?
| beretguy wrote:
| Some people are rich.
| popcalc wrote:
| Let's say most Americans wouldn't question a $5
| unrecognized charge showing up every month because the
| statement delta isn't enough to peek their suspicion.
| Especially true if they're not paying statement balance
| every month. In the consumer's mind, they treat their
| credit card balance like casino chips. Fostering mental
| fiscal compartmentalization and cognitive dissonance is
| your best bet in screwing over the American consumer for
| that $$$.
|
| Meanwhile, an Eastern European grandma would show up at the
| branch office of the company with a pitchfork.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| > Fostering mental fiscal compartmentalization and
| cognitive dissonance is your best bet in screwing over
| the American consumer for that $$$.
|
| Yeah, pretty much. Especially when customer service is
| one of the most painful, drawling experinces imaginable
| for someone already working 60 hours a week and taking
| care of family. Or spending an hour+ on the line with
| excuciating elevator music hoping you don't disconnect
| and need to repeat that process. It's financially and
| mentally not worth the hassle unless it's over a certain
| delta. Maybe that's where some of this cultural
| difference lies.
|
| But I think it's more an age thing than a country thing
| though. Look at who's in a phone store or grocery or any
| other establishment with a streamlined complaint pipeline
| on your next off day.
| themagician wrote:
| Once you have enough money it doesn't matter. You don't spend
| time looking at bills. You know roughly that credit card X
| has a bill of $4-5k a month and as long as it's close to that
| why bother. You set an autopay with an upper limit and just
| never think about it. You rely on things like email
| notifications to "catch" odd spending. Look at a bill maybe
| twice a year. You don't go through line by line, you just
| look for things that are odd and if nothing stands out you're
| done. Maybe you spend 30 minutes a year looking at bills.
|
| Oddly, poor people make similar choices for almost opposite
| reasons. They don't want to check because it causes anxiety
| and they feel like they don't have control anyway.
| michael_vo wrote:
| Yea I briefly glance over and struggle to recall what I
| bought. I was going to dispute a charge that was 15 minutes
| apart and a few Pennies different for the same grocery
| store. Then I realized it was the gas station outside owned
| by the grocery store.
| ryandrake wrote:
| This has been an enlightening thread. I can see now why
| companies use every dark pattern in the book to get you to
| subscribe, because apparently, for many people, once a bill
| is on "autopay" then as long as it's a low enough charge,
| the company probably doesn't even have to provide any
| service for it. Just milk that forgetful customer forever.
| And multiply that customer by... at least everyone in this
| thread!
|
| So wild, I guess I'm actually an outlier. I actually keep
| paper receipts and compare with what I was charged when it
| hits my balance. You'd be surprised how often restaurants,
| grocery stores, hotels and so on are off by a few cents or
| even a dollar or so. You'd think with everything
| computerized these errors wouldn't happen. I also never use
| autopay for bills.
| genevra wrote:
| I assume some, like myself, don't want to spend time on
| that
|
| I do glance at my statements every few months though
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah. Put it like this: if you are paid $50/hr (which is
| a very low end for this audience on HN), and you see some
| $2 coupon not applied, you'd need to be able to resolve
| it in less than 3 minutes for it to make sense to dispute
| (in a purely holistic sense. ofc time is invaluable for
| many).
|
| If this is on some normal $200 grocery receipt you
| probably won't be able to find the mistake in 3 minutes,
| let alone go back and take the time to flag a busy
| cashier, find a manager, and resolve the error. At best,
| it'd be a lesson learned to check at scan time extra
| hard.
| themagician wrote:
| So what if they are off by a few cents or dollars? Do you
| actually spend time to contest this? It seems like there
| is some minimum threshold just for the hassle... it's got
| to be at least $15-$20 by now. I you really going to go
| back and forth scanning paper receiptes for $5?
|
| To some extent I just I figure law of averages should
| even it all out. You see the reverse wtih ecommerce on
| Amazon et al. If you buy something and get the wrong
| thing, or it's partially broken, or just late, or even if
| you are just unhappy--you can click the refund button and
| like 33% of a time you just get your money back as part
| of a returnless refund and get to keep the item.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > So what if they are off by a few cents or dollars? Do
| you actually spend time to contest this?
|
| I have. It's not a hassle. Especially if I'm already
| there for some other reason. I clip coupons for the same
| reason. A $5 discount is a $5 discount.
| zamadatix wrote:
| A $5 coupon is also worth ~100x more than a few cents so
| it's worth ~100x the hassle. For a sense of scale imagine
| if the topic of grocery coupons came up and someone
| started mentioning they still make sure to take the time
| to enter their $500 off member code at checkout because a
| $500 discount is $500 discount - well duh, it'd be free
| groceries at that point!
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| I go through every transaction on our credit card every
| fortnight. It's less about keeping on top of sneaky
| companies and more about the discipline of sticking to a
| budget.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I look at every credit card transaction every time I pay
| the bill, so once a month.
|
| I look at my bank transactions slightly less regularly,
| but at least every other month or so. I don't use a debit
| card so really the only things that directly hit my bank
| account are the credit card payments, a couple of auto-
| pay utilities, mortgage, and a few other things. It's not
| hard to spot something out of the ordinary.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Once you have enough money it doesn't matter.
|
| That threshold must be VERY high!
|
| Over half my income is disposable. My wife (who also works)
| and I end up eating out way too much and still manage to
| put 40% of my after-tax salary into savings each month.
|
| I still log into my bank and credit card accounts every
| week to make sure nothing suspicious has appeared, and I
| manually pay off my credit card with every paycheck on the
| 1st and 15th of every month.
|
| > Oddly, poor people make similar choices for almost
| opposite reasons. They don't want to check because it
| causes anxiety and they feel like they don't have control
| anyway.
|
| An utterly dangerous action to take based on that mindset.
| I've been poor (though not really destitute, just could
| only budget ~$3 per meal), and I watched my finances like a
| HAWK. I even had a Post-It note stuck to the side of my
| monitor with the due dates of all my bills as well as the
| typical range (ie, Electric $30-100 depending on season),
| so I always knew what was coming.
| themagician wrote:
| Most places I go out to eat I just rely on the law of
| averages if I go there often enough. If I'm going to a
| place I go to once a week or more I won't even look at
| the bill. I just don't care. Why should I? I'm going to
| come back here 100 times. Sure, occsaionally I'll get
| someone else's bill or whatever but it also happens in
| reverse and you are on the receiving end. I only notice
| it when the notification hits and the difference is oddly
| large. If it's within $20-$30 I probably wouldn't even
| notice.
|
| I think many people start to internalize the cost of
| their time as their income rises. You don't think about
| it expliclity, but if you are making $100/hr, is spending
| 20+ minutes to save $20 really worth both the time AND
| hassle? I mean maybe. At $200/hr is it still worth it?
| Probably not.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I think many people start to internalize the cost of
| their time as their income rises. You don't think about
| it expliclity, but if you are making $100/hr, is spending
| 20+ minutes to save $20 really worth both the time AND
| hassle? I mean maybe. At $200/hr is it still worth it?
| Probably not.
|
| I think this is only true if you'd _otherwise_ be working
| and making that $200 /hr. For most of us, the opportunity
| cost of our time is nowhere near our working wage. If I
| would otherwise be horsing around watching TV or playing
| video games, then the opportunity cost of my time is zero
| and it's worth it to spend time on these things.
|
| If I can show that my credit card was charged $1.50 more
| than the check said (maybe they transposed some number on
| the tip or whatever), I lose nothing by bringing it up
| with the restaurant and getting it corrected. Especially
| if I was already planning on eating there again--just
| bring the previous bill along next time I go--I'm not
| even wasting gas because I'm already going there. I mean,
| sure, I could just ignore it but $1.50 is $1.50.
| hbn wrote:
| Not a good habit but I rarely check my credit card
| statements, I'm lucky enough to be in a situation where money
| isn't a stressor for me so I just wait for the email that my
| next statement is ready and pay it off.
|
| To be fair, itemized credit card charges are always formatted
| so badly and it usually just ends up stressing me out because
| I see some $83 charge on there for something in all-caps that
| doesn't look familiar, then I search my emails and figure out
| what it was and I don't know why they're named like that when
| the charge is put through.
|
| But man, thank god for this thread because I thought to check
| just now and I realized my bank didn't email me when my last
| statement was ready, and I would have been late to pay if I
| didn't by tomorrow.
| shaan7 wrote:
| I find going through monthly statements quite cumbersome, so
| instead what works better is to enable notifications for each
| transaction. That way I just get an email when something is
| charged to the card, makes it easier to notice unused
| subscriptions.
| michael_vo wrote:
| The elderly forget. My dad forgets his login password every
| single time. He does a password reset to login to anything.
| rockinghigh wrote:
| I only look at the details every few months and rank by
| descending amount to focus on high ticket items. I have
| certainly missed some of these subscriptions that only happen
| once a year. If you have enough savings, small expenses are
| not always worth chasing down.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >doesn't everyone check their bank balances and purchase
| histories at least once a month?
|
| Nope. I can be guilty of it as well and I make a habit to
| cancel reoccurring subscriptions. But if it's not some
| hundred dollar charge, I don't look too closely in the "good
| times".
|
| I even use budgeting software and I can fall for this on rare
| occasions. I have (had) maybe $100 reserved for reocurring
| subscriptions, so if I see that budget met and don't see any
| crazy $50/month charges, it just slips through. I overall
| just see a ballpark expected budget and my savings go up.
| Small fry slip through.
|
| I can only imagine those unknowingly paying some small amount
| every month. It's a more realistic version of the whole
| "steal a penny from every citizen and become a millionaire!"
| scheme. But now times are harder and I'm calculating finances
| by the dollar.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I used to. Then at a certain point in my life it was no
| longer a top priority in my life to run a tight financial
| ship. This usually happens around the time you invite a
| partner and children into your life. There's just too many
| expenses to question.
|
| I'll do maybe a yearly audit but apart from that, if nothing
| seems out of the ordinary, I don't check.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| It's absolutely easy to forget, though it's especially the
| case for annual billing. I found out today (from my bank app
| sending me a spending notification) that I've been paying for
| a basic Curiosity Stream plan for the past 4 years, with the
| price slowly rising. Looking back through my emails, I can
| only find one mentioning a change in my subscription price.
|
| It's fortunately not a huge amount of money in this case (it
| was the cheapest plan), and they did refund me for this
| year's renewal, but I was annoyed that a service that I never
| log into would keep renewing with no notification. Digging
| through emails, I found two. One from a while back, talking
| about a change in my subscription, and another talking about
| changes to their terms of service, which I would expect to
| get even if I wasn't subscribed.
|
| For as evil as Amazon is, at least you can easily cancel
| Prime after it auto-renews and get your money back.
| annexrichmond wrote:
| Reminds me of [1]
|
| > There are still 1.5 million people paying a monthly
| subscription service fee for AOL -- but instead of dial-up
| access, these subscribers get technical support and identity
| theft software.
|
| > The number of AOL dial-up subscribers is now "in the low
| thousands," according to a source.
|
| [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/03/aol-1point5-million-
| people-s...
| michael_vo wrote:
| What a scam! I have seen companies who offer to check your
| subscriptions and automatically cancel for you.
| simondotau wrote:
| In the case of Adobe, it shouldn't just be whether you've
| logged into the account, because many people will have the
| Creative Cloud agent software running idle on their computer,
| continually re-authenticating in the background. The pertinent
| question is whether you've actively used any paid component of
| the subscription, specifically, opened an application. (To be
| especially fair, I'd say there should also be at least one
| document opened where at least one action was performed.
| Accidentally opening a file and immediately closing it
| shouldn't count.)
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| They absolutely deserve it. A number of these companies have
| started abusing their customers in illegal ways by forcing them
| to accept new terms and conditions before they can even login to
| cancel subscriptions or access things they have already paid for.
|
| This needs to be ended through legislation, but also needs to be
| retroactive, with fines and jail time for the senior most
| executives. Adobe is not the only problem company. Blizzard and
| Roku and TP Link and Sonos are all recent examples.
| docmars wrote:
| _Adobe Color_ me absolutely shocked! ;)
| gist wrote:
| Not a fan of HN posts like this that devolve into a bunch of pile
| on anecdotes which end up creating chatter which obscures the non
| anecdotes.
| deliveryboyman wrote:
| Unfortunately this is the epitome of the HN comment section.
|
| Instead of comments by users who have read the linked article,
| you have comments by people using the discussion as their
| personal diary.
| qwertox wrote:
| After letting them do their shenanigans for over a decade...
| datahack wrote:
| Honestly, cancelling Adobe after getting my kids school account
| shadow billed for 6 months was a nightmare and obscenely
| difficult. I really think Adobe has gone full vulture on their
| users and they need a change of leadership of a breakup.
|
| I was so relieved when the Figma acquisition fell through -- the
| only serious competitor to their ecosystem almost died in that
| deal.
| unsignedint wrote:
| The concept of "annual paid monthly" subscriptions is similar to
| other services offering annual payments at a discounted rate
| compared to monthly subscriptions. However, the presentation can
| be somewhat deceptive. Adobe's challenge lies in its relatively
| steep pricing, which may cause consumers to experience sticker
| shock upon seeing the total amount. A pricing model akin to
| JetBrains, with more reasonable options to individual, could
| potentially be more appealing to customers.
| RRWagner wrote:
| I tried to block Adobe from automatically billing my account for
| a monthly fee, Adobe phone support said if I couldn't tell them
| the email that was billing my bank account, they wouldn't cancel
| it. I then told the bank to block further billing. Then the
| billing name started changing on my statement: Adobe -> Adobe
| Inc. -> Adobe _Creative C - > Adobe _Stock, so the "new name(s)"
| didn't get blocked. The bank eventually refunded a portion
| because I had called the first time. Wonder if the bank would
| have a claim against Adobe in addition to the FTC?
| slater wrote:
| I'd forward screenshots of those shenanigans to the DOJ folks
| on this case, sounds like they'd want to know about that too.
| bowsamic wrote:
| That's honestly insane
| mixtureoftakes wrote:
| they really know what they're doing don't they I imagine the
| implementatioin of this as some executive saying "surely we
| can't get away with that" and then of course, them getting away
| with that
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| If you're in the US, I wonder if you could get your state's AG
| to charge Adobe with wire fraud.
| rm_-rf_slash wrote:
| Threatening to call my state AG and the AG of a company's
| incorporating state for fraud has 100% always cut the
| bullshit and gotten me to rightful resolution when customer
| service gives me the runaround.
|
| I've never had to make the calls. It's a bluff but the cost
| of legal compliance to answer AG calls always outweighs the
| cost of rightful resolution.
| nycdatasci wrote:
| Can you confirm that all of these transactions were for the
| same amount, equal to your monthly payment when you were a
| subscriber? I get that they're the bad guy, but I highly doubt
| they have intentionally developed systems to side-step blocks
| from payment processors. A compromised credit card is a much
| more likely explanation given your inability to provide the
| email address for the account and charges for multiple
| products.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I too doubt it's to sidestep blocks, but it could very much
| be a case of normal fallbacks.
|
| E.g. if Adobe or a contractor uses one service to process
| payments, if that API fails they use another service, if that
| API fails they use another service.
|
| And it shows up as a slightly different name in each case,
| because it was a different person registering each service,
| and the names don't need to be consistent anyways.
|
| I set up categorization rules in my personal finance app
| Monarch and have discovered that exact names of charges vary
| quite a bit. Always the same two or three variations for a
| given company, but it might be six months of one, then six
| months of another, then back to the first...
| vardump wrote:
| I didn't actually _dare_ to subscribe due to horror stories I 've
| heard about Adobe.
|
| Luckily Open Source tools have been sufficient for my limited
| needs. Like Krita, Inkscape and Gimp.
| FredPret wrote:
| The subscription model is awful because of the dark patterns in
| cancelling.
|
| But it does open up their product suite to people who would be
| hesitant to shell out a couple of hundred bucks upfront.
|
| Adobe was a stagnant business until 2014. Revenue is up 500%
| since then: https://valustox.com/ADBE
| cjensen wrote:
| Very interesting here is the charges against a pair of specific
| executives who are _not_ at all C-Suite level. Makes me wonder
| why them, specifically. E.g. could it have been something like
| emails between them suggesting the illegal activity, but no
| evidence they told anyone above them?
| whatever1 wrote:
| The first saas with a hidden cancellation fee! When I first saw
| it I ran away.
| gjs4786 wrote:
| I just recently went through this nonsense sand that was just
| getting my money back after canceling on day 3 of their 7 day
| trial. it had been years since I last used photoshop, so I wanted
| to see what they had don on the generative side.their tactics
| from the perspective of someone in the maze is unflattering to
| say the least. they deserve this
| holler wrote:
| About six months ago I was auditing my bank statements and
| realized I've been paying Adobe ~$40 for the past 5-6 years or
| so, almost $3,000 for software I very seldom used if at all in
| recent times. Closed my account, downloaded gimp, and won't be
| using Adobe in the future.
| jb1991 wrote:
| I'm just curious how you miss something like this for 5+ years?
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| An alarming number of people don't check their bank/credit
| card statements.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40709523
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| Just as an example: I didn't notice a former landlord had
| immediately placed a STOP PAYMENT on my rental deposit return
| (with no notice/reason given, $thousands) until _ten months
| after I had moved out_!
|
| I have spent the majority of my blue collar adult life
| earning <$50k/yr.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| A list of Adobe alternatives:
| https://untested.sonnet.io/Alternatives+to+Adobe
| Osiris wrote:
| The FTC is on a rampage lately.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| I'm not a professional designer but I do quite a bit of design,
| photo, and typography work these days.
|
| The Affinity suite of programs (Photo, Designer, and Publisher)
| have been the perfect alternative for someone like me who does
| casual work, isn't locked into the Adobe ecosystem, and doesn't
| want to spend $60+/month on a subscription.
|
| Their programs are full-featured, blazing fast, integrate with
| one another, and are - most importantly - pay once per license.
| Funnily, they're doing a 50% sale right now, which brings the
| entire line of products to a one-time payment of $83. Likely to
| capitalize on the Adobe's bad press cycle.
|
| The value of this package is undeniable. I'm a very happy user.
|
| The only caveat is that they don't yet have all of the cutting-
| edge high-end features that Adobe offers (AI integration, etc).
| But the nuts and bolts functionality is rock solid and they are
| adding more and more features each day. I find the lack of bloat
| and a massive codebase really help to streamline the performance.
| It's been flawless for me.
| bentt wrote:
| I'm a game developer and Affinity Photo is missing a couple key
| features which make it nearly useless for us. In particular, it
| doesn't have individual channel editing. This is sort of
| baffling because it's only a UX issue... the tech to edit
| individual channels (including Alpha) is innate in image
| editing.
| misswaterfairy wrote:
| Is this the feature you're referring to?
|
| https://affinity.help/photo/en-
| US.lproj/index.html?page=page... channels
|
| https://affinity.help/photo2/en-
| US.lproj/index.html?page=pag... channels
|
| Although not as feature rich as Photoshop, they are quickly
| catching up.
| breakingcups wrote:
| Yep, just got this package yesterday and I was pretty amazed at
| how easy it was to switch over. Their PSD compatibility seems
| quite good too, although obviously some of the effects are
| implemented subtly differently.
|
| I've tried to quit Photoshop before with GIMP, Krita and even
| more obscure alternatives but gladly shelled out the cash for
| the Affinity Suite.
| teekert wrote:
| The law in the Netherlands says you can only prolong
| subscriptions by a month after the first year. I was only able to
| cancel my 2.5 year Adobe subscription after speaking to 3 people,
| in English arguing they are breaking local laws (not many people
| here can have the discussions I had to have in English). I never
| used anything from adobe again after that. I filed an official
| complaint with our government after someone here in HN suggested
| it, never heard anything about it anymore. Glad someone is doing
| something about it now.
| silcoon wrote:
| I subscribed for a month for try photoshop and got locked for an
| entire year with costo growing after few months. I was able to
| terminate my subscription by changing payment to an empty prepaid
| card.
| jarbus wrote:
| Lina Kahn, once again, is the greatest thing to happen to America
| I've ever seen in my short time alive.
| nabaraz wrote:
| I did a trial of Creative Suite on my mac. When it was time to
| uninstall, I couldn't do it using Creative Cloud Uninstaller.
| Because, Apparently I have to uninstall photoshop and other
| softwares from Creative Cloud App before uninstalling Creative
| Suite. I couldn't uninstall Photoshop etc. because my login to
| Creative Suite App didn't work. So, I contacted Adobe, there was
| some issue with getting 2FA to my email for some reason. So I
| couldn't login to CC to uninstall Photoshop to uninstall Creative
| Suite.
|
| I had to reset my mac just to get rid of Adobe spywares.
| bentt wrote:
| I would love to know if and how Adobe has obstructed a FOSS
| competitor to Photoshop (akin to Blender in 3D). There must be a
| good reason that nothing has emerged over the years. My guess is
| there are some features they get territorial over and then start
| to lawyer scare programmers who tread too closely.
| fritzo wrote:
| I haven't used photoshop since the 1990s, GIMP has plenty of
| features.
| solfox wrote:
| Good, I've had such bad experiences with this company. Adobe is
| the king of dark patterns.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Adobe F-ed around for soooooo long. Too bad the "find out" part
| won't effect those who have been making the decisions to put
| these practices in effect.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Or anyone outside the US.
| poopcat wrote:
| I am just glad that I finally learned that I do not, in fact,
| have to pay for Adobe Acrobat to be able to edit a PDF and can do
| it for free in Preview on Mac.
| paxys wrote:
| If by "edit" you mean rearrange the order of pages or add a
| signature then sure, but Preview can't do too much more than
| that.
| poopcat wrote:
| Lol yes exactly! XD I used to pay Adobe to be able to do
| that. What a scam
| einpoklum wrote:
| For me this is another example of why, all things said and done,
| we need free software for image processing and for final-form
| document processing - not Photoshop and Acrobat.
|
| For Acrobat, at least, a combination of tool sorta-kinda-mostly
| gets the job done; look at Xournal++, qpdf, and the various PDF
| printers (gradually being superseded by library-based PDF export
| filters).
|
| For image processing, we have simple programs like Paint.Net or
| Krita, and we have GIMP - which is quite featureful but I don't
| know if it's a "match" for Photoshop.
| chipsdip wrote:
| Until recently, I was using the Adobe suite extensively. I
| decided to switch to a competing software exactly because of the
| practices mentioned in the article.
|
| I don't want to elaborate unnecessarily, but I can confirm that
| these accusations are absolutely valid, and I even recently told
| my friends about how unfair Adobe's practices towards consumers
| are.
|
| I also personally know someone who decided to block their payment
| card at the bank because it was the only way they knew to free
| themselves from Adobe's subscription.
| polak84 wrote:
| Thanks.
| sinecure wrote:
| Photoshop is, unfortunately, the most comfortable art application
| out there for a lot of art related workflows. The pattern preview
| mode allows for painting tiling textures easily (a feature oddly
| lacking from all competitors--except asperite oddly), the filters
| are all top notch, the ability to do non-destructive adjustments
| is insanely useful and not seen anywhere else, and the brush
| engine is the industry standard. There are a lot of nice things
| about how Photoshop approaches art that others are missing. The
| fact that Photoshop can manipulate images as easily as it can
| create them is what makes it special. Procreate is great for
| painting, but lacks even 10% of the features Photoshop has. Gimp
| is a decent photo editor with terrible painting tools.
|
| There is a massive opportunity in the market for Procreate to
| come out with a desktop version that expands on its
| functionality, but my theory is that it is probably the #1 iPad
| selling point for many people and Apple is paying them to keep it
| iPadOS / iOS only. Some big name Japanese anime studios are now
| working a big percentage of their workflow on iPads with
| Procreate.
| polak84 wrote:
| Thanks
| ryanmccullagh wrote:
| I hope FTC gets DirectTV next -- which also fails to adequately
| disclose to consumers that by signing up for a subscription
| your're agreeing to a 2 year contract.
| nbzso wrote:
| The biggest problem for design and collaborative canvas software
| companies is AI.
|
| How to inform your professional audience that their Figma, Miro,
| Adobe files are used for training, a result which will remove
| them from the work market and give their knowledge to the
| unprofessional masses.
|
| As a professional designer with more of 20 years experience,
| moving through graphic, web, UX, PM I have a strong disdain with
| all Adobe connected software.
|
| In the past, when Macromedia started eating their market by
| introducing more affordable and capable software, I jumped on a
| bandwagon and supported Freehand, Firefox, Flash and Director.
| Only to be again in Adobe hell.
|
| When moved from Sketch to Figma, the news of possible acquisition
| made me mad.
|
| The Adobe products are total bloatware, and nothing of substance
| or innovation in their base offering has never materialized. They
| are the epitome of corporate greed, dark patterns and
| monopolistic hell.
|
| But now we have a lot of monsters around. Microsoft. Apple.
| Google. Meta. And the new kid under the block: Closed AI. The
| same type of illness but in a new form. They appointed NSA head
| for security and announced that will pursue profit first.
| Surpassing in speed, Googles transition from "Don't be evil" to
| "Be evil at any cost".
|
| The software industry is eating the world, killing careers,
| stealing copyrighted data, centralizing and integrating in a
| monster of deals to deliver nothing of substance. Just food for
| shareholders who have no ability of systemic thinking and did not
| see the elephant in the room: Communistic Tech driven Dystopia.
|
| Propaganda of empty promises and no government control. Future
| for the people who trust the machine more than a professionals
| and experts.
|
| What bright future for humanity will deliver AI art? The
| delimiting factor when removing technical skill set will be
| taste. So how the next generations will form this taste without a
| curriculum and practice?
|
| They will prompt the taste? Good luck with this.
|
| Here is a list of alternatives for the Adobe crapware.
|
| Vector illustration:
|
| Learn Inkscape, aside of instability under macOS, the software is
| capable and has fine tools which will deliver everything you need
| as a designer.
|
| Affinity will become a subscription based software eaten by Canva
| and AI "art".
|
| For digital painting: Apple Pencil removed 60 percent of my Wacom
| workflow, and Procreate is a monster of an app. For the desktop
| stuff, I use Krita.
|
| 3d: Blender for polygonal modelling, animation, rendering,
| sculpting (Plasticity if you are into mixed workflow), Rhino 3d
| for surfacing and generative modelling (The price is high only at
| a first glance).
|
| Photography: I learned that all the one app solutions are not
| future-proof. Moved my workflow into a system of folders and
| markdown notes. The capability of Raw Therapy combined with Krita
| are more than enough.
|
| Video editing, compositing and Mogrpaph There is a champion:
| Blackmagic Design with DaVinci Resolve and Fusion.
|
| You can use Unreal Engine and Blender for Mograph to escape After
| Effects black hole.
|
| Rive is a mix between After and Flash which is gaining popularity
| (sadly subscription based).
|
| For UX/UI design, we have a real contender to Sketch and Figma in
| the face of Penpot. Free. Open source. Possible enterprise goals
| with option of self-host installation. Baked in interface for
| token centric design process, real grid and flex box
| implementation (not the fake auto-layout) and developer friendly
| without Figma upselling strategies or mac only dungeon of Sketch.
| capital_guy wrote:
| Good. Adobe is one of the most annoying subscriptions to cancel.
| Lina Khan continues to do great work.
| 65 wrote:
| I was able to get around Adobe's cancellation fees by switching
| my subscription to the cheapest subscription option they had,
| then cancelling that subscription (which, for whatever reason,
| didn't have cancellation fees most likely because I was a "new"
| subscriber).
| kopirgan wrote:
| About time. Hopefully they'll pay a fine that'll deter others
| too. In any case spend billions on lawyers.
| shortformblog wrote:
| Tip for anyone looking to get an Adobe subscription without any
| BS: Buy a yearly subscription from Amazon. If you have an Amazon
| store card, it's expensive enough that you can actually put it on
| a 0% APR plan for six months or a year, so you have some
| flexibility in paying it back.
|
| Plus, Adobe never gets your credit card.
| janeerie wrote:
| Ww wa
| hunter-gatherer wrote:
| A few years ago I ran a gambit with my wife's lightroom
| subscription. We kept cancelling and getting confirmations that
| we had cancelled but they kept charging our card. Eventually I
| had to get screenshots of a chat conversation between myself and
| Adobe where the Adobe rep suggested I send our correspondence to
| my credit card company and have them put a block on it. Lol
| BeautifulOrb wrote:
| I'm a professional graphic designer and I think everyone I know
| pirates it. It's an insane amount of money to spend if you're
| freelancing. Freelance creative work is often a tough life with
| thin margins. The price point is egregious. I regularly use
| Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects. None of the software
| has had any meaningful update in over a decade, except for maybe
| some masking/selection tools. The AI stuff is trash and no
| professional would use it.
| FrozenSynapse wrote:
| you make money of it, it's scummy to pirate. I would understand
| someone who uses the software once a month to pirate it, but
| you literally make money of it.
| meow_mix wrote:
| FTC is cooking lately
| zinga124 wrote:
| Very much welcome this!
| gepardi wrote:
| Imagine being the company that people hate, but feel the need to
| keep using said companies software simply because of market
| dominance.
| nnurmanov wrote:
| I have only one question. Why did it take them so long?
| danpalmer wrote:
| In my previous role an Adobe representative attempted to bribe me
| with a free personal Creative Cloud subscription if I dropped my
| attempt to cancel a bunch of company licences. Horrifying
| practices, I hope they get enough of a fine to force real change.
| nox101 wrote:
| As a spoiled tech worker, $120 for a year of Photoshop is about
| worth less than 1 hour of my time. But, if there's one thing I
| wish I could get rid if is effing Adobe Cloud. I only need the
| apps (Photoshop, Lightroom). I don't need or want any cloud
| integration nor do I want any services running on my machine.
| throwaway4837 wrote:
| I tend to think this is a pattern with needless subscription
| models. They likely have a semi-bimodal distribution of users:
| full-price payers vs. discount/promo payers, so they probably
| increase the price for the full-price payers to compensate for
| the people taking advantage of crazy promos. Making it hard to
| cancel also compensates for the discounts they offer to rope
| people in. I hypothesize that a company that offers excessive
| discounting probably also has a sketchy way of compensating for
| it, and they are probably fabricating margin that could've been
| priced out by competition (if sufficient competition exists).
| Therefore, I would bet that Adobe is an overpriced product.
|
| Reminds me of typical gym memberships. It once took me months to
| cancel a Crunch subscription. My card expired and they had the
| audacity to send me a letter stating they will collect unless I
| enter a new card instead of just cancelling for me. They
| constantly gave me the runaround in person and over email;
| eventually I just sent an email to their legal/management team
| and threatened to escalate with the bank if there's another
| charge and it worked. Sadly, I was never refunded for the 3-4
| months they charged me for during this period.
|
| You'd think these sorts of subscription filibusters would be
| scrutinized more by the FTC to protect consumers. Glad to see it
| being looked at in this case, but seriously gym memberships need
| some attention too.
| 3lit3krew wrote:
| This is unfair to Adobe, if you can't take two minutes to learn
| the excruciatingly minute differences between Photoshop and GIMP,
| you deserve to pay the idiot fee.
| megamix wrote:
| I miss the buy-once-option
| refurb wrote:
| Rather than going after individual companies, seems like a nice
| solution would be federal legislation that says "All subscription
| services must provide: mailing address, email and phone number.
| Subscriptions can be cancelled by contacting the company through
| any method by including: a) request to cancel, b) name, email.
| Cancellation is effective immediately."
|
| Companies seem to respond very quickly when you forward legal
| code to them that they need to follow.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| That was really about time. Such a scammy company. They deserve
| to be destroyed.
| ratsimihah wrote:
| This is great. I've lost a significant amount of money to that
| scam.
| maksyd wrote:
| Good to see this! I've personally experienced their unfair early
| termination fee. It's about time companies are held accountable
| for these deceptive practices.
| Blammar wrote:
| Apologies if this has been posted already, but my search fu
| failed to find a similar post.
|
| 1. Start the cancellation process for your current license
|
| 2. When offered a discount or to switch to another plan, choose
| the cheapest new plan
|
| 3. Once your membership is updated, start the cancellation
| process again immediately
|
| 4. The cancellation fee is now $0.
|
| (Source: https://ui.dev/rwd/articles/cancel-adobe-without-paying-
| the-... )
|
| I can vouch that this worked earlier this year.
| ultracakebakery wrote:
| but then you have been charged for the cheapest new plan lol.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I was being charged monthly for 2 years and the subscription
| didn't actually appear in their UI but somehow I was still being
| charged. Some sort of update/bug fix must have happened and I
| could finally cancel. The process was obviously horrendous in
| that I think I had to talk to someone on Text Chat but at least
| both of us could see the subscription to be able to cancel it.
|
| I don't think companies should be allowed to charge for
| subscriptions that people aren't using personally.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| If I remember well, when I was living in the UK I could
| block/stop a recurring payment. I am now using Revolut, and it
| does give you the option to block all future payments to a
| specific account/charge. So, if they don't listen, you can
| always send them a nice FU message for their "bug" which costs
| you real money, and block the payment. And when they start
| bitching about the missed payments refer to the (ignored)
| message and move on with your life.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I did try talking to Barclays and they were less than
| helpful...
| montag wrote:
| The more benign version happened to me. Over $1k for an
| Illustrator subscription that I forgot to cancel and didn't
| touch for 2 years. No email from them that might have reminded
| me. When I went to support, they offered me nothing. Say what
| you will about personal responsibility, but I won't pay for an
| Adobe product again.
|
| edit: Also want to mention that I used a couple different
| subscription trackers like Trim, and they didn't identify the
| Adobe charges. Weird.
| esskay wrote:
| I'm just so glad they didn't get thier hands on Figma. Screw
| Adobe, they're complete parasites.
| eitland wrote:
| Good. After that, go after Google and Microsoft for abusing their
| market positions other markets to destroy the browser market
| (again in Microsofts case).
| josephd79 wrote:
| On a consumer level this is the first time I've heard of a
| software company charging you an early termination fee. What
| other b2c software companies do this?
| rootlocus wrote:
| I think all who offer a discount if you buy a license for a
| whole year but pay by month. I don't see the problem with them
| requesting you pay the original amount for the months you used
| the product if you cancel before the year is out.
|
| You entered a contract where you promised to pay for a year,
| and they gave you a smaller fee. You cancel the contract, so
| they should cancel the discount.
| quitit wrote:
| It's interesting to me that this isn't a wider complaint by the
| ftc. Like here's some examples that I think also deserve some
| attention:
|
| - Adobe released a stock image service, then bundled this deeply
| into their products. This could be considered anti-competitive
| bundling. There's also other examples of bundling which could be
| considered here as well.
|
| - Adobe's file formats create not just lock-in for people
| willingly using their tools, but also require other agencies to
| use the adobe software to be able to work with the files. There
| is also limited backwards compatibility and limited ability to
| export to earlier versions while maintaining compatibility, this
| forces people into the subscription product. A similar issue was
| brought against Microsoft Office's formats.
|
| - Adobe shutters apps/services on short notice while providing no
| migration off-ramp, or an off-ramp that requires the user to
| subscribe to a more expensive product. This is seen repeatedly
| with their own experiments, but also with acquisitions.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| I remember 15 or so years ago a colleague of mine ( in the
| nordics outside of EU ) wanted to purchase a photoshop licence
| for personal use.
|
| It was a crazy expensive licence ( I do not remember how much but
| it was more than I made a month at that time I remember ) but she
| is a woman of principals and refuses to run pirated software.
|
| It took her weeks to get the licence as Adobe did not distribute
| to personal user licences in our area at the time. Only crazy
| enterprise fee.
|
| She managed to get a personal license through US after weeks of
| emails and phone calls.
|
| I however pirated until the subscription model came out,
| initially I thought the monthly fee was kinda brilliant as it
| allowed me to actually legally run photoshop for a price I could
| afford.
|
| Just buy the occasional month when I actually need it and then
| cancel for all the 10 months a year that I don't use it. Seemed
| like a win/win to me.
|
| Sadly someone at Adobe considers this a worse crime than pirating
| it seems and casual users are tricked into these insane
| contracts.
|
| I sincerely hope this practice of a hidden cancellation fee is
| not only banned but heftily fined.
| duk wrote:
| "Subscription services are convenient, flexible and cost
| effective to allow users to choose the plan that best fits their
| needs, timeline and budget. Our priority is to always ensure our
| customers have a positive experience. We are transparent with the
| terms and conditions of our subscription agreements and have a
| simple cancellation process. We will refute the FTC's claims in
| court." - Dana Rao, General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer
|
| https://news.adobe.com/news/news-details/2024/Adobes-Stateme...
| jaimex2 wrote:
| Glad I resisted SaaS all these years.
|
| I use older versions of owned Adobe and Macromedia products
| still, I got them for almost nothing and best of all they work
| really well through Wine on Linux.
|
| I can't really see any must have features in the newer releases.
| If anything some of their products deteriorated.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| I have photoshopLE from at least 92...still using it.
| inquist wrote:
| An obvious example of platform enshittification
|
| https://americandialect.org/2023-word-of-the-year-is-enshitt...
| sarimkx wrote:
| Figma dodged a bullet.
|
| Dylan Field was initially very anti-Adobe, I don't know why he
| even agreed to sell to them.
|
| Its completely okay to sell your company and cash out but I still
| don't understand, why Adobe?
| xutopia wrote:
| Hopefully they can sue Amazon next.
| baby wrote:
| I thought America loved hidden fees
| j45 wrote:
| I had this experience with Adobe as well. Cancelled inside my
| account, but credit card charges continuned.
|
| Adobe and others use services that provide them with your new
| credit card expiry dates so they keep billing.
|
| Adobe can be messaged on twitter to document them not fixing
| things. Companies can actually reverse 18-24 months of charges.
| gradientsrneat wrote:
| Sometimes, all it takes is one large bad actor in the space to
| poison the well for consumer trust in that industry for years.
| Doesn't even have to be something very unethical or illegal,
| although Adobe certainly qualifies.
|
| There are good reasons for subscription-based business models.
| But fear of rug pulls has personally damaged my trust in
| subscription software, and even "pay once" software.
|
| See also "Killed by Google."
| nowandlater wrote:
| Just FYI, Adobe's website will port scan you on 16494, 35693, and
| 57923 after you login.
| lacoolj wrote:
| Awesome! Next, let's take on Geico for the cancellation thing.
| tshubbard wrote:
| I spent 2 hours on Adobe customer support chat just this morning
| trying to decrease my company license count.
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