Adobe gives up on web-design product to rival Figma after deal collapse

Don't worry - the conversation in the anecdote does not reflect the true position in the major common law countries at least. The public shareholder model is not doomed or flawed on this account.

If an acquirer wants to acquire shares in a public company (or any company actually) it makes the offer to the shareholders and they are the ones who decide to accept or not. The proposed transaction is between the acquirer (who wants to buy the shares) and the current owner of those shares (the shareholder). The Board manages the company but is not itself an entity (it's a group of people) and cannot therefore own shares (tho individual directors can and usually do).

The Board can make a recommendation to its shareholders about whether it thinks the offer is fair or not (based on their usually greater knowledge of the company and its worth), but it is the shareholder who decides whether to accept.

The underlying suggestion that a Board or CEO is essentially forced to do something bad for the company because of some underlying obligation to make shareholders money etc etc is false. Directors owe fiduciary duties, but they are proscriptive, not prescriptive in this way. One of the most commonly repeated falsehoods is that the Board is under some duty to maximise profits etc - that is proved wrong not least by the existence of non-profits...

The closest analogy is someone owns and investment property being managed by a real estate agent. A buyer approaches and says "I will pay you $x for the land". The agent can say "Hey I rent this out all the time, it can earn $z over t years, so I think it's worth $x + y, or $x - y" but it's up to the owner to say yes or no.

The above ignores eg competition law issues (laws that prevent an acquirer buying companies where there is likely to be a substantial lessening of competition), potential conflicts for share-owning directors, and the myriad statutory considerations etc but is the basic underlying position.

There seem to be two things at play:

1. The current economic situation is causing a lot of investors to tighten screws and demand profitability where they had previously been fine with just seeking growth because it becomes clearer that fewer investors are willing to participate in the next round of hot potato in the hopes of catching a unicorn.

2. Investors generally seek growth and at some point you've hit the physical limits by having caught nearly every customer you can and the only way to drive up those numbers is by upselling to the same people which often means kneecapping user experience to help upselling on the cure (e.g. Amazon Prime Video "channels" as extra subscriptions on top of the Prime Video ad-free subscription on top of the buy/rent for individual movies and shows on top of the Amazon Prime subscription that also includes access to Prime Video itself).

With streaming services specifically there's also the effect where Netflix itself ended up figuring out its niche's business model only to have every IP owning distribution studio try to copy it and become its competition, removing their IP from it (and any additional IP they can get exclusive licenses for) and locking it behind their own subscription model to cut out the middleman even if for the customer this means having to sign up to at least five different platforms if you want to watch every episode of the Pokemon animated series (for some reason). This is obviously enshittification for the customer and would still be so even if the individual streaming services all used the same exact pricing and business model as Netflix did a few years ago (before the price hikes, ads and measures against account sharing) - although it could be described as a monopoly being replaced by a market (which we're normally told should be a good thing).

If there's a single shareholder that wants profit instead of clean air from their share, they have grounds to sue (and win). LLCs aren't dictatorships of the majority, and definitely not of the CEO.

If every single shareholder agrees, then yes.

> If you release new version for 170usd every 18 months it's about 10usd/m subscription - so you are 6times cheaper?.

This would put them under immense pressure to come up with new features (useful or not) to get people to upgrade. At some point for certain users, the current version is going to cover 90% of what they need and they won't see the point in upgrading.

I didn't look into it much, but Sketch moved from a one-off payment for the current version plus 1 year of updates, to subscription-based charging. I wouldn't be surprised if the real reason was most didn't need the latest features.

Aside from this, has any software ever done something like "$170 upfront, or $20/month for 12 months only, then you own this major version"? I'm aware of Adobe's approach where if you cancel the monthly plan they'll surprisingly charge you the rest of the payments to make up 12 months, but you don't own anything after.

Sketch still has 120usd desktop version. Their solution was to add server/collaboration element that is subscription based.

> This would put them under immense pressure to come up with new features (useful or not) to get people to upgrade. At some point for certain users, the current version is going to cover 90% of what they need and they won't see the point in upgrading.

Isn't this backwards? If you don't have anything to add to the software why should you charge for it? The thing with Adobe there is no shortage of enhancements/features people wanted. It's not lack of imagination. Adobe just realized they don't need to do much so why would you pay programmers if you have no competition and very little churn? Especially since what everyone wanted was stability, bugfixes, performance and hard stuff like versioning systems. How are you going to market that your software crashes 20% less?

Also if anything software/hardware compatibility is always going to be reason for upgrading.