Technology

While I was studying 25 years ago every student had bought an education version of Microsoft Visual Studio 6.0 at the local shop, which was less than a 100$. In the meanwhile everybody was sharing a cracked copy of Adobe Photoshop since the only license available was upwards of 600$. They absolutely did that to themselves.

Adobe wanted to be pirated, they priced their product out of reach of everyone except professionals. The only way they got new users was people who grew up using cracked copies.

If they wanted to sell to everyone they would have lowered the prices decades ago. For the longest time it was cheaper to fly half across the world to the US, buy Photoshop and fly back to Australia than it was to buy the software here.

Adobe's '90s pricing made the definition of "usury" insufficient. Things did not improve.

I still run CS6. I've little reason to use it these days, but I don't have to pay monthly to open an old file. What they did by switching to a subscription model in my case was lose a customer for life.

With all the ATS bullshit, I ended up having to go back to Word because neither LinkedIn nor Indeed could parse my InDesign resume. Both would tie incorrect roles with dates and job descriptions because "PDFs are hard" essentially.

Eh, they were making millions, it just wasn't enough. No sad story about being pirated too much to find here. They were making money on professionals who need all their software legal for audits.

They never cared about individuals pirating it, because people pirating means that people will use them in an official manner as well when they work with the software in a company.

Until they got too greedy and decided to milk everyone out of their money.