It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, …

The number of graphic artists working from home well before COVID definitely put a kibosh to that theory.

new executives coming in, while the well connected ones leave completely to chase unicorns? maryhodderetc

> It seems their attitudes changed soon after, perhaps due to their almost total market dominance, and they became aggressive towards their users in the pursuit of profits It was probably just the advent of new technology that allowed them to rent instead of sell their product, and they can do it at different prices to different customers (price discrimination).

I have a full paid license of acrobat pro. I want to pay for the 2020 version as that's the last one before it became rental software crap. I refuse to pay monthly for this software. That and office, give me the full one time license. Im not paying for cloud crap.

> It meant people learnt their software at home and then insisted on using it at work, where it would be a paid for license. That's also why so many companies practically give their software away through educational licenses.

VMware and Citrix had a gentleman's agreement: they pirated each-other's stuff, and agreed not to break users' stuff in production and keep licensing issues to warnings.

They drove me off Lightroom, I was just a causal user. The upsell spam and ads in Adobe Reader has also driven me away from that too. I would have considered buying an upgrade for both, but the price was never right for casual home use. Now I don't use any Adobe products at all.

What have you replaced lightroom with? That's the one thing Adobe makes that I haven't found a good replacement for.