![]() It has spawned an entire ecosystem around it. The Gimp is good, but it’s not Photoshop. You’ll see more interest in open source because ot this, but you won’t see any sort of mass migration to open source alternatives to Adobe, for the same reason things like Open Office and Libre Office have not displaced MS Office. And as with Adobe, so with all other proprietary software. ![]() This may be happening to Adobe now, or it could take a few more turns of the screw. Eventually you’ll have to squeeze your customers so hard that they bolt. Thus, in a near-saturated market, the amount of rent you extract per customer has to perpetually increase.īut what can’t go on forever won’t. This stops working when your markets near saturation you have to somehow move customers to a subscription model to survive.īut doing that doesn’t solve an even more fundamental problem, which is that the stock market doesn’t actually reward constant returns any more it wants an expectation of rising ones in order to beat the net-present-value discount curve. They can only even appear sufficient when your market is expanding rapidly and you can always use today’s new revenue to cover support costs from last year’s sales. The problem is fundamental one-time purchase payments can’t cover unbounded downstream support and development costs. But the underlying trend curves are obvious even if Adobe wins this time, sooner or later the continuing increases in the rent Adobe needs to claw out of its customers are going to exceed the customers’ transition costs to get out of Adobe’s jail. It’s not clear which side will back down in this particular confrontation. Adobe’s customers aren’t being shy about pointing this out, and the company is going to feel heat that it wouldn’t have before 1998. Adobe’s move illustrates this dynamic perfectly.īut the response from its customer base highlights something else that has happened in those 15 years open-source applications like the GIMP, and the open-source operating systems they run on, actually offer users a practical way out of these increasingly abusive relationships. And that this relationship will almost always evolve in the direction of more control by the vendor, more rent extraction from your wallet, and harder lock-in. Well, except for the part where your customers are in open revolt, 5000 of them signing a petition and many others threatening to bail out to open-source competitors such as GIMP.įifteen years ago I pointed out in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and it sequels that buying proprietary software puts you at the wrong end of a power relationship with its vendor. This bold move to extract more revenue from customers in exchange for new ‘services’ that they neither want nor need puts you at the forefront of strategic thinking by proprietary software companies in the 21st century! Congratulations, Adobe, on your impending move from selling Photoshop and other boring old standalone applications that people only had to pay for once to a ‘Creative Cloud’ subscription service that will charge users by the month and hold their critical data hostage against those bills.
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