Adobe Lightroom v6 is Falling Apart
I can offer some perspective on this because I was a senior employee at Adobe before, during and after the entire transition to Creative Cloud. I was involved in much of the management discussions and decision-making related to the CC transition and business model change.<p>First, a few &quot;full disclosure&quot; bullets:<p>* I left Adobe on good terms and still have several current or former employees as acquaintances and friends.<p>* Based on what I observed during my tenure, Adobe is a quality and ethical company that broadly tries to do right by customers, employees, shareholders, partners, and so on. Obviously, I&#x27;m speaking to overall ethos here. Adobe is a big, multi-national, publicly-traded, for-profit company and I&#x27;m certainly aware of a few notable exceptions over the years but such ethical lapses have been, to my knowledge, limited to specific individuals, groups or time-periods and not systemic or condoned at the senior management level.<p>* I still use some Adobe creative tools including Lightroom for my personal needs and pay for them out of my own pocket. I don&#x27;t make my living or earn income with creative tools. I also personally use some competitor&#x27;s alternatives as well as open source tools if they suit my needs or preferences.<p>* While an Adobe employee I earned salary, bonuses, benefits and RSU grants. I worked hard, did well and have personally profited from the increase in Adobe&#x27;s stock price. I still hold a sizable-for-me stash of fully-vested Adobe shares which I&#x27;m in no hurry to sell. I think Adobe is one of the better large tech companies in the valley and I&#x27;m happy I accepted their job offer.<p>With that out of the way... let&#x27;s get to the meat. Note - I don&#x27;t intend to share anything I learned while bound by confidentiality per my employment contract. I do intend to speak more frankly than I could while an employee.<p>* The Creative Cloud value proposition is quite good for creative professionals who earn all or most of their income using two or more of the major applications. Do the math and the subscription pricing works out lower than the old perpetual pricing for the full Creative Suite + bi-yearly upgrades.<p>* For single application users (except PS+LR), it&#x27;s not quite as good. It is about equal if you were upgrading every cycle. If you opted to skip perpetual version upgrades sometimes then the subscription pricing is more expensive.<p>* PS+LR is different because it is offered at a lower bundle price to accommodate the sizable base of hobbyist or aspiring photographers.<p>* I plan to transition from using Photoshop and Lightroom to alternative tools for my personal needs by the end of next year. (No, I&#x27;m not sure which ones yet, there are several pretty good options ranging from open source to for-profit competitors)<p>* PS and LR are still good products getting good upgrades and Adobe is still a good company. The only thing changing is Adobe&#x27;s business interests are growing less aligned with my interests as an occasional hobby user. This trend seems unlikely to reverse. Adobe&#x27;s professional users want powerful professional tools with pro service options. Many of them are willing and able to pay for that. It makes economic sense for them and Adobe. It just doesn&#x27;t make as much sense for me. I&#x27;m an individual retail user buying one year (or month) at a time of Adobe&#x27;s lowest margin flagship SKU. Most of Adobe&#x27;s Creative Cloud profit comes from enterprise and agency site licenses sold in multi-year deals by the hundreds and thousands.<p>* From support costs to sales costs to transaction costs (credit card bill backs and other PITA.) I&#x27;m just not as valuable of a customer by weight. Yes, there are companies that choose to cater to retail individual customers. This isn&#x27;t easy but it can be done profitably if done at large enough scale and built as a core competency.<p>* It can be argued that Adobe should cut the subscription price to attract much larger scale and make it up in volume. The problem is that this level of powerful tooling isn&#x27;t needed by casual or occasional users. As an individual home user I don&#x27;t need the scripting features in PS, SSO, enterprise remote automated installers, and so on. But Adobe&#x27;s most profitable customers do. Even the neat AI automation features they are spending big R&amp;D on aren&#x27;t very valuable for me. I don&#x27;t even do enough to make learning the time-saving AI features worth the effort. But someone who needs to process hundreds of photos could find those capabilities an essential part of their usage.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is anyone&#x27;s fault. If we must place blame, I guess we should pin it on how the stock market values quarterly and yearly progress over 5 or 10 year progress. I hope the Long-Term Stock Market will become a thing but the reality is it won&#x27;t be soon enough to change this situation. Making a big change now would be seen by Adobe investors as not worth the risk. Adobe&#x27;s stock is up because they took a steep risk in making the leap to the cloud model. Back before committing to the leap, Adobe management knew it was going to be hard and perilous. Frankly, it was the least bad of the remaining options once it was clear the perpetual + upgrades treadmill was likely to turn into a downward spiral of ever-diminishing returns. Arguably, Adobe is one of the most successful examples of a legacy firm executing that difficult transition in a legacy market and doing so very, very well. They did the work, they are delivering value to a large and profitable segment of customers and monetizing it profitably. That customer just isn&#x27;t me.