No personal person (except maybe freelancers) were ever going to buy Adobe for its list price, it was always about getting businesses to buy it, its the exact same scheme that there is for Winzip. Also you are acting like it was some act of kindness when really if it was that case, they would have kept perpetual licenses around with their subscription plan but they did away with it since they knew they can rake in way more money with the scheme. The plan for Photoshop was around $600, their subscription plan is $22 per month. in 2.2 years, you have paid basically the same amount but one you actually keep the product in the other you have to continue to rent it. Apparently the " Creative Suite Master Version" was $3000, today creative suite runs for $60 per month, so that would be around 4.2 years to pay it off. I doubt most people are using every single new feature they add. Hell some companies avoid updating to make sure everything is compatible with their current workload. So having perceptual licenses just make sense in these kind of cases.