Cautionary tale:
Think about Adobe. Once upon a time, they were thought of as an upstanding company. Beloved, even. Photoshop was as clean a program as you could get. It was considered a professional tool, stable and reliable. Now their good will is gone. They're widely
thought of as a monopolistic pariah. And Photoshop is derided as a bug farm. Many of the bugs being self-inflicted wounds, I would add.
When did it all change for them? Sure looks to me like it was when they adopted a rental model.
Look, on paper the subscription model is great. 20% a year. Steady income for the developer. Enterprises can plan expenses. Sounds grand. (Except that it hasn't been 20% of a new license for a long time. Most developers nowadays are somehow extracting 60% or so of the cost of a new
license every year.)
Consumers are indeed willing to sign up. I can't argue with that. (If I were to guess, I'd say mostly because they don't trust a product and don't want to commit the purchase price. Because most software nowadays doesn't actually work as promised. But hey, that's just me being cynical.)
Under a subscription model, developers are expected to release whiz-bang new features on a yearly cycle. When software is immature, that's easy enough. Well, not easy, but there's a legitimate appetite for improvements.
Back in the day, Adobe released a new Photoshop about every 18 months. Digital imaging was evolving fast. I bought the upgrade every version or every other version. (At 40% to 60% of a full license price, IIRC) Because there was a point to it. But still, if a version didn't represent a real improvement in utility, I wasn't forced to buy it.
Now, the industry has matured. There is less need for new features.
But Adobe needs new features every year to justify outrageous subscription rates ($250 a year for Photoshop? Really?) So, every year we get a new batch of breakage. Tools don't work. Interface defaults change and it takes many hours spread over many weeks to make them work again. Stability goes in the dumper, is almost fixed in dot releases, then breaks a different way next year. Most, no, virtually all, enterprise users that I know of keep their sanity by using Photoshop CC that's two or three versions old. But the bill comes every year regardless. Is it any wonder why every graphics professional in the world resents Adobe at this point?
The hostages, er, customers, feel exploited. They bad mouth the developer. They migrate to whatever AI-fueled gimmick machine with a pretty interface comes along next. Rinse and repeat
I would hate to see that for Photo Mechanic.
Tread carefully, my friends.
-Carl
