I was with Adobe during their change (as a tech evangelist meeting a lot of users), and watched it play out from both directions. And setting aside questions of pricing, one thing people overlook is that a subscription plan is a <i>much, much</i> better way to <i>make</i> software than selling annual or biannual updates.<p>The problem is that for a mature product, yearly sales cycles create a toxic incentive to focus engineering time on flashy demo-friendly features, at the cost of spending cycles on performance, stability, workflow improvements that benefit power users but don&#x27;t impress salespeople, and so on. It&#x27;s a recipe for bloat - cutting out a flashy feature never helps sales, so they stick around even when they&#x27;re not useful.<p>I don&#x27;t know anything about JetBrains or their software, or whether the above is an issue for them, but FWIW I think most of the Adobe teams are making better tools since the change, and it&#x27;s due to having the feature priorities in the right place.