Think twice before signing subscription to Adobe products

> Our culture loves the safety of recurring revenue more and more every year. It's not a technical problem, it's a business one.

Both statements absolutely true. But the problem here is shady unsubscribe, not recurring revenue per-se, right?

What Adobe is doing is pretty low and shitty, and I'm as averse to signing up for subscriptions as anyone, but software businesses do have recurring costs. The recurring part is actually simpler and more straightforward these days than the buy version 4.0 for $199 model of yesteryear, so I can see why it's popular from the business perspective. Updates and releases are continuous now, they didn't used to be. Forums, online help, support, upgrades, patches, servers, cloud storage & backup, etc. all things that cost and all things that consumers have much higher expectations for than we used to a decade or two ago. Saas businesses all run on AWS or whatever other cloud provider, and AWS charges monthly for their services.

For a business to make the buy it once for a fixed price model work these days, they have to do the equivalent of an actuarial table, and use statistics to guess how much a customer will cost on average, in order to set the purchase price. Customers that cost the company a lot in terms of support and upgrades are actually being subsidized by customers that cost the company less. It starts to sound a lot like insurance.

Looked at this way, a subscription might appear more fair, because the customer is charged for what they use, as opposed to the average of what everyone uses.

I ran into so possible reason recently. Because Linux is case sensitive. So if you're making server software locally you can easily run into a bug where you reference "SomeFile" in your build/package/website locally but on disk it's named "Somefile". Everything works. Then you push to your server and things break.

I'm not going to switch my laptop to be case sensitive but I did just run into that issue.

What can Scribus or any DTP system can do that LaTeX/TeX can't?

I haven't heard of DTP, QuarkXPress in 20 years. I'm surprised they're still relevant today.

> I should be able to easily unsubscribe from anything without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. I don't want to have to speak with anyone on the phone, nor should I be forced to tell you why I'm unsubscribing.

As a consumer, I usually want the exact same thing, and it annoys me when I get prodded for reasons. Feels like talking to pushy car salesmen sometimes, and makes me tense & clam up.

More recently as a business owner, I'm surprised when people pay me money, and then later cancel and refuse to talk about what they were looking for before they gave me money. I can (and do) help save people money when they ask for things I don't have, and I can recommend other services that do what they're looking for. Sometimes people who cancel reach out to me to vent their anger for paying for something they didn't want, and still won't discuss what they wanted.

It's an absolute mantra of the startup business world to iterate your product based on customer feedback, so you can imagine one has to get creative to gather enough feedback to have statistical meaningfulness in the era where response rates & attention spans are dropping off a cliff and internet noise is through the roof. The majority of meaningful feedback I can get is limited to 'paid and hasn't canceled yet', 'paid and canceled' and 'visited but didn't pay'. I want to fix the problems when people cancel, I want to give them what they're looking for, but it's pretty hard to find that out. (Always has been, btw, and I believe the consumer has 0 responsibility to say anything, just noting my sympathy with both sides.)

I don't want to force anyone to say why, but I do want to offer the chance to give feedback. I do want to have a conversation about what you need, and it really does sometimes happen that people cancel because they think a feature isn't there that actually is there.

Anyway, I don't mean to defend Adobe in any way, their actions here are unreasonable IMO, but for smaller less monopolistic less bullying companies, where there's a reasonable chance the employees will hear & respond to your feedback, maybe even make changes for you, it might actually be to your benefit to use the annoying popups to ask questions before subscribing & after unsubscribing. I wouldn't expect Adobe to do this, but I usually give out coupons & extend trials anytime people ask, I frequently respond to feature requests with new features, and ever since my new perspective on feedback UI has been altered by my own business, and I've started being more willing to ask questions & share feedback, I've found a lot more business with people like me that will respond in ways that help me get what I want.

If you really want to make Adode dance and fix this issue right away, file a complaint with your state attorneys general office and that of state Adobe is incorporated in (appears to be California). They'll immediately address your issue and potentially feel the legal pressure from the state government(s) to actually fix the larger over arching issue or face being sued by an entity with "unlimited" resources (rather than just a little peon consumer like you or me).