I think everyone is missing something important here.
One of the primary reasons was that there was tremendous loss of revenue for Adobe because illegal copies were available made by some hackers releasing keys and allowing folks to copy the programs like Photoshop for free.

Adobe was losing millions of dollars via these tricks. )I understand - I used to work for a small software company and this was a huge problem for us too.)

Now that copying has stopped because Adobe can check if you are a real subscriber.

It also makes it easy for them to upgrade the clients with changes and improvements to the program instead of having to create a whole package which is expensive and also expensive for clients to purchase.

Some of the changes may seem minor to one user but may be extremely important to others e.g. support for RAW for a new camera that one just purchased and needed Photoshop to support this new version of the RAW files..

There has been a long discussion on why to go with the Adobe LR/PS subscription plan or why not to.

I'd like to offer a different view on this matter... on why I really don't like the Adobe subscription and why I do not recommend to anyone to follow this path.

No, it is not for the money... $10/month for the LR/PS subsciption, or $69 por ON1, or $50 for Affinity are always pennies next to the cost of photographic gear or the cost of the time we invest in this hobby or profession.

It is because the real reason because Adobe choose to *force* their customers to go to a subscription plan. The subscription is NOT an option (as for Capture One), but is MUST.

Adobe was facing a very severe competition, not only from other players, but specially from themselves. Photoshop has become such an amazing and extremely powerful piece of software that there is no real need to purchase an upgrade each year, at least for the majority of it's users.

If someone invested $700 in Photoshop, he or she would think twice (or trice) before throwing $300 for an upgrade. And this was the key problem: when a piece of software gets so enormous like Photoshop (or MS Word, or Autocad), it is increasingly difficult and expensive to add more features and improvements *that can be sold for a high price*. The problem is: how do you improve something that is already perceived as almost perfect?

Would you really pay $300 for some bugfixes and some new features you do not readily use?

The other problem is that Photoshop started in 1987... yes it is that old. Many of it concepts are hardcoded in the oldest lines of code, and the original programmers have left Adobe long since. I've already faced this problem in my line of work: you have a some huge program, and you reach a point where you have to start from scratch, because it is so complex that touching somethings makes fall the rest apart like a house of cards. And if the original developers are gone, you are dead in the water. You only option is to fix, fix, add, fix, add, wrap, fix, add ... it gets harder and harder. There is a theoretical curve for that... just google it.The cost goes up, the improvements go down.

Adobe has already a more modern product which is not nearly as powerful as Photoshop: Lightroom. Other players have chosen the newer path of adding non destructive photo retouch features to the RAW developing workflow (Capture One, ON1, DXO labs, etc.), but if Adobe went that path, it would necessary stop selling Photoshop. Why pay $700 for PS if LR already had 90% of the features an average photografer would need. THEY HAD TO THROTTLE the addition of new additions to LR, like masks, layers, and so on.

So they decided to go the subscription plan... now all the risk is on the customer!! The customer purchases the subscription and forgets about it (... its just 10 bucks a month ...) and Adobe is free to push the updates THEY want. They no longer need to convince the public to buy an expensive upgrade. And if you choose to cancel the subscription, you lose the ability to re-edit all your past photos, it's almost blackmail.

If you look at Adobe's changelog, most of the upgrades are rather minor (new camera compatibility, bugfixes, some menu regrouping some minor new features). Honestly, would you pay $300 a year for them?

The real reason behind the seemingly low price of the subscription is not they they are nice and cute people... it is simply because in a free market, *the price is set by the market itself *and it happens that LR+PS is not more worth than those $10 per month. This is the ugly truth. Capture One charges $20 per month for the OPTIONAL subscription... just because they can. Adobe cannot.

The other software vendors are forced to make great leaps between versions, or else their customers will not pay the upgrade fee. And it shows: look at the differences between ON1 2018 and 2019, or Capture One 11 and 12.

The same happened to MS Office: I have the subscription plan (it makes sense to my business... $99/year for 5 PCs), since 2017... and I really don't find any significant improvements (besides new fancy icons) between the 2017 and the 2019 software. It's just incremental.

This is the reason because I don't like subscription plans: because it is the last resource of a company to reduce their development costs at the expense of innovation. That is exactly was Adobe did.

I just don't want to play their game.

There has been a long discussion on why to go with the Adobe LR/PS subscription plan or why not to.

I'd like to offer a different view on this matter... on why I really don't like the Adobe subscription and why I do not recommend to anyone to follow this path.

No, it is not for the money... $10/month for the LR/PS subsciption, or $69 por ON1, or $50 for Affinity are always pennies next to the cost of photographic gear or the cost of the time we invest in this hobby or profession.

It is because the real reason because Adobe choose to *force* their customers to go to a subscription plan. The subscription is NOT an option (as for Capture One), but is MUST.

Adobe was facing a very severe competition, not only from other players, but specially from themselves. Photoshop has become such an amazing and extremely powerful piece of software that there is no real need to purchase an upgrade each year, at least for the majority of it's users.

If someone invested $700 in Photoshop, he or she would think twice (or trice) before throwing $300 for an upgrade. And this was the key problem: when a piece of software gets so enormous like Photoshop (or MS Word, or Autocad), it is increasingly difficult and expensive to add more features and improvements *that can be sold for a high price*. The problem is: how do you improve something that is already perceived as almost perfect?

Would you really pay $300 for some bugfixes and some new features you do not readily use?

The other problem is that Photoshop started in 1987... yes it is that old. Many of it concepts are hardcoded in the oldest lines of code, and the original programmers have left Adobe long since. I've already faced this problem in my line of work: you have a some huge program, and you reach a point where you have to start from scratch, because it is so complex that touching somethings makes fall the rest apart like a house of cards. And if the original developers are gone, you are dead in the water. You only option is to fix, fix, add, fix, add, wrap, fix, add ... it gets harder and harder. There is a theoretical curve for that... just google it.The cost goes up, the improvements go down.

Adobe has already a more modern product which is not nearly as powerful as Photoshop: Lightroom. Other players have chosen the newer path of adding non destructive photo retouch features to the RAW developing workflow (Capture One, ON1, DXO labs, etc.), but if Adobe went that path, it would necessary stop selling Photoshop. Why pay $700 for PS if LR already had 90% of the features an average photografer would need. THEY HAD TO THROTTLE the addition of new additions to LR, like masks, layers, and so on.

So they decided to go the subscription plan... now all the risk is on the customer!! The customer purchases the subscription and forgets about it (... its just 10 bucks a month ...) and Adobe is free to push the updates THEY want. They no longer need to convince the public to buy an expensive upgrade. And if you choose to cancel the subscription, you lose the ability to re-edit all your past photos, it's almost blackmail.

If you look at Adobe's changelog, most of the upgrades are rather minor (new camera compatibility, bugfixes, some menu regrouping some minor new features). Honestly, would you pay $300 a year for them?

The real reason behind the seemingly low price of the subscription is not they they are nice and cute people... it is simply because in a free market, *the price is set by the market itself *and it happens that LR+PS is not more worth than those $10 per month. This is the ugly truth. Capture One charges $20 per month for the OPTIONAL subscription... just because they can. Adobe cannot.

The other software vendors are forced to make great leaps between versions, or else their customers will not pay the upgrade fee. And it shows: look at the differences between ON1 2018 and 2019, or Capture One 11 and 12.

The same happened to MS Office: I have the subscription plan (it makes sense to my business... $99/year for 5 PCs), since 2017... and I really don't find any significant improvements (besides new fancy icons) between the 2017 and the 2019 software. It's just incremental.

This is the reason because I don't like subscription plans: because it is the last resource of a company to reduce their development costs at the expense of innovation. That is exactly was Adobe did.

I just don't want to play their game.

There has been a long discussion on why to go with the Adobe LR/PS subscription plan or why not to.

I'd like to offer a different view on this matter... on why I really don't like the Adobe subscription and why I do not recommend to anyone to follow this path.

No, it is not for the money... $10/month for the LR/PS subsciption, or $69 por ON1, or $50 for Affinity are always pennies next to the cost of photographic gear or the cost of the time we invest in this hobby or profession.

It is because the real reason because Adobe choose to *force* their customers to go to a subscription plan. The subscription is NOT an option (as for Capture One), but is MUST.

Adobe was facing a very severe competition, not only from other players, but specially from themselves. Photoshop has become such an amazing and extremely powerful piece of software that there is no real need to purchase an upgrade each year, at least for the majority of it's users.

If someone invested $700 in Photoshop, he or she would think twice (or trice) before throwing $300 for an upgrade. And this was the key problem: when a piece of software gets so enormous like Photoshop (or MS Word, or Autocad), it is increasingly difficult and expensive to add more features and improvements *that can be sold for a high price*. The problem is: how do you improve something that is already perceived as almost perfect?

Would you really pay $300 for some bugfixes and some new features you do not readily use?

The other problem is that Photoshop started in 1987... yes it is that old. Many of it concepts are hardcoded in the oldest lines of code, and the original programmers have left Adobe long since. I've already faced this problem in my line of work: you have a some huge program, and you reach a point where you have to start from scratch, because it is so complex that touching somethings makes fall the rest apart like a house of cards. And if the original developers are gone, you are dead in the water. You only option is to fix, fix, add, fix, add, wrap, fix, add ... it gets harder and harder. There is a theoretical curve for that... just google it.The cost goes up, the improvements go down.

Adobe has already a more modern product which is not nearly as powerful as Photoshop: Lightroom. Other players have chosen the newer path of adding non destructive photo retouch features to the RAW developing workflow (Capture One, ON1, DXO labs, etc.), but if Adobe went that path, it would necessary stop selling Photoshop. Why pay $700 for PS if LR already had 90% of the features an average photografer would need. THEY HAD TO THROTTLE the addition of new additions to LR, like masks, layers, and so on.

So they decided to go the subscription plan... now all the risk is on the customer!! The customer purchases the subscription and forgets about it (... its just 10 bucks a month ...) and Adobe is free to push the updates THEY want. They no longer need to convince the public to buy an expensive upgrade. And if you choose to cancel the subscription, you lose the ability to re-edit all your past photos, it's almost blackmail.

If you look at Adobe's changelog, most of the upgrades are rather minor (new camera compatibility, bugfixes, some menu regrouping some minor new features). Honestly, would you pay $300 a year for them?

The real reason behind the seemingly low price of the subscription is not they they are nice and cute people... it is simply because in a free market, *the price is set by the market itself *and it happens that LR+PS is not more worth than those $10 per month. This is the ugly truth. Capture One charges $20 per month for the OPTIONAL subscription... just because they can. Adobe cannot.

The other software vendors are forced to make great leaps between versions, or else their customers will not pay the upgrade fee. And it shows: look at the differences between ON1 2018 and 2019, or Capture One 11 and 12.

The same happened to MS Office: I have the subscription plan (it makes sense to my business... $99/year for 5 PCs), since 2017... and I really don't find any significant improvements (besides new fancy icons) between the 2017 and the 2019 software. It's just incremental.

This is the reason because I don't like subscription plans: because it is the last resource of a company to reduce their development costs at the expense of innovation. That is exactly was Adobe did.

I just don't want to play their game.

Actually, I believe you have it wrong.

Software companies like adobe and Microsoft have moved to the subscription model in order to be able to better predict their revenue streams. BTW, Microsoft not only did that with Office; it has moved to the subscription model with the enterprise business software package that used to be called Dynamics AX (and Axapta before that) - if a Fortune 100 company decides to replace their old ERP system (SAP or Oracle, say) with Microsoft's offering, as of a couple of years ago they no longer have the option to pay the multi-million dollar software license fees that were the norm. Now they pay something like $1200/seat/month (with variations depending on specifics).

The bean counters at these companies can predict that they have one million customers each paying $10 a month and thus will expect a monthly revenue of 10 million dollars each month. This knowledge is much easier to make plans around than it was to wonder if next month (or quarter or year) lots of customers would choose to upgrade versus not.

The entire software industry is headed this way - remember, historically you never "bought" Photoshop or ANY software package for that matter. In the past, when you paid that $650 or $15 or whatever for an application (or an operating system), you paid for the license that gave you the right to use the software (go ahead, read the license - if you can...that's part of the reason software companies make them so obfuscating).

So all this subscription hubbub is more about accounting measures and has zero to do with "ripping you off".

In a way it's not much different than what Hulu or Netflix et al do. You're just pissy because you're not used to it.

Get used to it. More software companies will very likely go the subscription route.

There has been a long discussion on why to go with the Adobe LR/PS subscription plan or why not to.

I'd like to offer a different view on this matter... on why I really don't like the Adobe subscription and why I do not recommend to anyone to follow this path.

No, it is not for the money... $10/month for the LR/PS subsciption, or $69 por ON1, or $50 for Affinity are always pennies next to the cost of photographic gear or the cost of the time we invest in this hobby or profession.

It is because the real reason because Adobe choose to *force* their customers to go to a subscription plan. The subscription is NOT an option (as for Capture One), but is MUST.

Adobe was facing a very severe competition, not only from other players, but specially from themselves. Photoshop has become such an amazing and extremely powerful piece of software that there is no real need to purchase an upgrade each year, at least for the majority of it's users.

If someone invested $700 in Photoshop, he or she would think twice (or trice) before throwing $300 for an upgrade. And this was the key problem: when a piece of software gets so enormous like Photoshop (or MS Word, or Autocad), it is increasingly difficult and expensive to add more features and improvements *that can be sold for a high price*. The problem is: how do you improve something that is already perceived as almost perfect?

Would you really pay $300 for some bugfixes and some new features you do not readily use?

The other problem is that Photoshop started in 1987... yes it is that old. Many of it concepts are hardcoded in the oldest lines of code, and the original programmers have left Adobe long since. I've already faced this problem in my line of work: you have a some huge program, and you reach a point where you have to start from scratch, because it is so complex that touching somethings makes fall the rest apart like a house of cards. And if the original developers are gone, you are dead in the water. You only option is to fix, fix, add, fix, add, wrap, fix, add ... it gets harder and harder. There is a theoretical curve for that... just google it.The cost goes up, the improvements go down.

Adobe has already a more modern product which is not nearly as powerful as Photoshop: Lightroom. Other players have chosen the newer path of adding non destructive photo retouch features to the RAW developing workflow (Capture One, ON1, DXO labs, etc.), but if Adobe went that path, it would necessary stop selling Photoshop. Why pay $700 for PS if LR already had 90% of the features an average photografer would need. THEY HAD TO THROTTLE the addition of new additions to LR, like masks, layers, and so on.

So they decided to go the subscription plan... now all the risk is on the customer!! The customer purchases the subscription and forgets about it (... its just 10 bucks a month ...) and Adobe is free to push the updates THEY want. They no longer need to convince the public to buy an expensive upgrade. And if you choose to cancel the subscription, you lose the ability to re-edit all your past photos, it's almost blackmail.

If you look at Adobe's changelog, most of the upgrades are rather minor (new camera compatibility, bugfixes, some menu regrouping some minor new features). Honestly, would you pay $300 a year for them?

The real reason behind the seemingly low price of the subscription is not they they are nice and cute people... it is simply because in a free market, *the price is set by the market itself *and it happens that LR+PS is not more worth than those $10 per month. This is the ugly truth. Capture One charges $20 per month for the OPTIONAL subscription... just because they can. Adobe cannot.

The other software vendors are forced to make great leaps between versions, or else their customers will not pay the upgrade fee. And it shows: look at the differences between ON1 2018 and 2019, or Capture One 11 and 12.

The same happened to MS Office: I have the subscription plan (it makes sense to my business... $99/year for 5 PCs), since 2017... and I really don't find any significant improvements (besides new fancy icons) between the 2017 and the 2019 software. It's just incremental.

This is the reason because I don't like subscription plans: because it is the last resource of a company to reduce their development costs at the expense of innovation. That is exactly was Adobe did.

I just don't want to play their game.

I'm not fond of the subscription plan either. Let's say, you use it for 10 years. At $10 a month, that adds up to a total of $1,200. Quite a hefty amount to pay for software. And this is under the assumption that the price doesn't go up anytime during that period, for which there is absolutely no guarantee that it won't. Actually, I'd be surprised if it didn't. And if you stop paying at any point because of economic hardship, or because the monthly price increased beyond what you are comfortable with paying, you're left with no software at all.

There has been a long discussion on why to go with the Adobe LR/PS subscription plan or why not to.

I'd like to offer a different view on this matter... on why I really don't like the Adobe subscription and why I do not recommend to anyone to follow this path.

No, it is not for the money... $10/month for the LR/PS subsciption, or $69 por ON1, or $50 for Affinity are always pennies next to the cost of photographic gear or the cost of the time we invest in this hobby or profession.

It is because the real reason because Adobe choose to *force* their customers to go to a subscription plan. The subscription is NOT an option (as for Capture One), but is MUST.

Adobe was facing a very severe competition, not only from other players, but specially from themselves. Photoshop has become such an amazing and extremely powerful piece of software that there is no real need to purchase an upgrade each year, at least for the majority of it's users.

If someone invested $700 in Photoshop, he or she would think twice (or trice) before throwing $300 for an upgrade. And this was the key problem: when a piece of software gets so enormous like Photoshop (or MS Word, or Autocad), it is increasingly difficult and expensive to add more features and improvements *that can be sold for a high price*. The problem is: how do you improve something that is already perceived as almost perfect?

Would you really pay $300 for some bugfixes and some new features you do not readily use?

The other problem is that Photoshop started in 1987... yes it is that old. Many of it concepts are hardcoded in the oldest lines of code, and the original programmers have left Adobe long since. I've already faced this problem in my line of work: you have a some huge program, and you reach a point where you have to start from scratch, because it is so complex that touching somethings makes fall the rest apart like a house of cards. And if the original developers are gone, you are dead in the water. You only option is to fix, fix, add, fix, add, wrap, fix, add ... it gets harder and harder. There is a theoretical curve for that... just google it.The cost goes up, the improvements go down.

Adobe has already a more modern product which is not nearly as powerful as Photoshop: Lightroom. Other players have chosen the newer path of adding non destructive photo retouch features to the RAW developing workflow (Capture One, ON1, DXO labs, etc.), but if Adobe went that path, it would necessary stop selling Photoshop. Why pay $700 for PS if LR already had 90% of the features an average photografer would need. THEY HAD TO THROTTLE the addition of new additions to LR, like masks, layers, and so on.

So they decided to go the subscription plan... now all the risk is on the customer!! The customer purchases the subscription and forgets about it (... its just 10 bucks a month ...) and Adobe is free to push the updates THEY want. They no longer need to convince the public to buy an expensive upgrade. And if you choose to cancel the subscription, you lose the ability to re-edit all your past photos, it's almost blackmail.

If you look at Adobe's changelog, most of the upgrades are rather minor (new camera compatibility, bugfixes, some menu regrouping some minor new features). Honestly, would you pay $300 a year for them?

The real reason behind the seemingly low price of the subscription is not they they are nice and cute people... it is simply because in a free market, *the price is set by the market itself *and it happens that LR+PS is not more worth than those $10 per month. This is the ugly truth. Capture One charges $20 per month for the OPTIONAL subscription... just because they can. Adobe cannot.

The other software vendors are forced to make great leaps between versions, or else their customers will not pay the upgrade fee. And it shows: look at the differences between ON1 2018 and 2019, or Capture One 11 and 12.

The same happened to MS Office: I have the subscription plan (it makes sense to my business... $99/year for 5 PCs), since 2017... and I really don't find any significant improvements (besides new fancy icons) between the 2017 and the 2019 software. It's just incremental.

This is the reason because I don't like subscription plans: because it is the last resource of a company to reduce their development costs at the expense of innovation. That is exactly was Adobe did.

I just don't want to play their game.