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Often you don't need more than you have, and its nice to have fixed costs. An example - you buy Photoshop or Lightroom, and they cover 100% of your needs. As long as you can run it, you are happy with what they provide. Well apparently that didn't generate enough cash for Adobe but that's a long story.

Tons of businesses uses commercial software with little need of support in form of some patches. Usually toolsuites are mature and they don't try to hack every last bit of it.



That's right.

Now let say you make photoshop, it's great, people loves it. And most of your customers got it for a fixed price, and they are happy with it.

Now, You want to improve the software and add features that some professionals need.

But most of your customers are happy with previous version. you no longer have a lot of money coming in.

Repeat that a couple times, and now most of your market is happy, and you don't have any money coming in.

And then you close shop. And people wonder why.


People give adobe a lot of grief for moving to subscription model, but I think they managed it the best they could. I used to pay ~$100/year for just the LR software. Now I pay ~$120/year for the software + 1TB of storage + the mobile apps. They at least attempted to add value for the subscription fee, and I love having my 500gb+ of photos always available/editable on all my devices.




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