> The aging activation servers for those apps had to be retired.
Oh come on. Surely a company with the resources of Adobe can figure out a way to keep an activation server running. In fact I'll bet you could find one competent sysadmin to keep it running indefinitely. I hate when companies spew out obvious utter B.S. like this.
CS3 was in 2007. It's not like we're talking about an IBM 709 here. It's probably a Core 2 Duo or a Clovertown Xeon. Give me a break.
When producing digital goods you never want to be in a position where honest people who want to pay you money will get a better customer experience by going through thepiratebay.
The hardware doesn’t really matter, does it? You clone the setup into a VM and stash it away somewhere on your massive corporate cloud and. I’m sure a very small machine could handle the minuscule amounts of activation traffic for the legacy versions.
But that's almost always the case with these companies. The fundamental problem with DRM is that it inconveniences paying customers: pirates get a better product after solving a fun puzzle game, and the rest of us get shafted.
Even if Adobe were that generous, I'd argue the situation is different. All Adobe product releases are just evolutions of the same fundamental products, meaning making a previous version free diminishes the value of the newest version. For game developers, removing DRM can drive sales for the sequel since most games have a story and players want to see what happens next.
Removing DRM does not make it free. It simply means that customers will have fewer concerns about the product ceasing to function in the future.
I also doubt that piracy of older versions would affect sales. The pricing means it is pretty much only accessible to enthusiasts and professionals, who would be inclined to use more recent versions anyhow.
Knowing that they will stop working in a couple of years also devalues them. Seriously, a patch to remove DRM for those who are unable or unwilling to upgrade.
A company that can be trusted to deliver that patch will have a more valuable product because customers know they will not lose access to it.
Yeah that's a fair point in the other direction. But I guess to some extent when you have a de-facto monopoly on a market it doesn't matter what you do to your customers, most of them will buy your new subscription model anyway out of necessity.
That's probably why there are suddenly a lot of Photoshop competitors. A monopolist abusing their market creates an incentive for competition. Of course some monopolised markets can be very hard to impossible to enter for competitors, but that's apparently not the case here.
But that wouldn't achieve the ultimate goal though. How else will you get the few leftover customers that has resisted switching to a subscription based model to switch ?
Adobe is business, and it's all about revenue. "Dead" products don't make any money, so there's no business case in keeping them around.
What would you think it would cost per year? What $ amount?
What would be the break down?
Legacy software, security and the constant upgrades, a manager, HR, customer support. Training your all your call centres to know about it and who to re-direct issues to.
* security and the constant upgrades - unsupported, $0
* a manager - unsupported, $0
* HR - unsupported, $0
* customer support - unsupported, $0
* Training your all your call centres to know about it and who to re-direct issues to - unsupported, $0
all non-issues. Adobe is intentionally breaking the software.
Those arguments are like saying an Apple ][ shouldn't be able to run "The Print Shop" anymore because someone might haul their IIe and an ImageWriter into the Genius Bar.
People know it's unsupported but they still want to use it for whatever reason.
It has zilch to do with the reasons you listed. Adobe is making being a legitimate customer needlessly difficult by hustling their customers to pay for the software again. They will learn the same lesson the RIAA and the MPAA did.
Early on (15-25 years ago) they didn't really have streaming or digitally deliverable product (pre itunes) and instead hauled people off to court for consuming music in any way that wasn't a pile of $20 plastic discs bought at the local megamall.
Instead of reasonable digital streaming solutions groups like the MPAA made things like the DIVX format which were disposable discs that expired. The commercial DVDs had long unskippable copyright warnings and unskippable ads, an inability to play the content on linux or other open source players, etc.
Then there was the DeCSS fiasco; there was a master encryption key that they called their private IP and used legislation called the DMCA to enforce it. 2600 magazine, a monthly alternative culture computing magazine, published the key and were sued by universal studios, paramount pictures, metro-goldwyn-mayer, tristar pictures, columbia pictures, time warner entertainment company, disney enterprises, and twentieth century fox, for printing a number (https://www.theregister.com/2002/07/04/2600_withdraws_suprem...)
These organizations eventually learned the lessons and won, so you are correct. but it was years of bogus outlandish lawsuits (suing old ladies for millions, sometimes because neighbors used their unprotected WiFi - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_group_efforts_against_...), technology fiascoes and incredulous legislation that made them the laughing stock of the world before they got their act together.
There was a time in the mid 2000s when ignoring copyright was the sensible and reasonable moral action given the outrageous "sue everybody without regrets" strategy of the RIAA.
Lessons
1. Offer products to your customers in ways they want to consume them.
2. Don't criminalize your customers for your lack of doing #1
The real cost is the people who don't go and subscribe to Adobe CC because they still have a totally functional release of CS3. Once their old machines die, they'll be forced to become a renter.
Someone hacks your server and gets into Adobe with ransomware because it's not managed properly, next week you'd be complaining about how stupid Adobe is.
Oh come on. Surely a company with the resources of Adobe can figure out a way to keep an activation server running. In fact I'll bet you could find one competent sysadmin to keep it running indefinitely. I hate when companies spew out obvious utter B.S. like this.