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mgg@mac.com hit on the head in the next post down, it's about valuing and respecting your customers. One of my first full time IT jobs was rep'ing Adobe as a tech support agent from 1992 to 1996. Allow me to put this into perspective, I've used:
- Photoshop since version 3.05
- Illustrator 4.1
- Premier 3
- Acrobat 1.0
- Framemaker 5 with SGML
- Webmill 1.0 until it died and Dreamweaver when Macromedia owned it and after Adobe bought them.
- Aldus Pagemaker 1.2 on a 286 Compaq luggable with an argon gas monitor, back when you had to look up the font code because you couldn't see fonts on the screen! Adobe bought Aldus, and later turned Pagemaker into InDesign to which I upgraded the entire time! I have a 30 plus year relationship with Aldus Pagemaker to Adobe InDesign!
For decades I have invested my money, time, and education into Adobe products, that is a relationship which any wise company would respect and value because people like me are the best testimonial advertisement they can have. This is something you get taught in a business 101 class. Adobe violated that relationship with most of it's old school customers, it told us thanks for making us successful but now that we are; we no longer need or value your input, we'll just find a new market. A good company never tells it's customers get on the boat or go somewhere else.
The problem could have been avoided easily by Adobe, all they had to do is offer perpetual licensing for those who want it, and let those who want the cloud buy the cloud just like Microsoft does today. Adobe however shot themselves in the foot, they under priced the cloud so much to attract new customers that they made it impossible to sell perpetual licences without a backlash of anger which you seeing here on this thread. Myself I upgraded my Master Collection from CS5 to CS6 and paid $1080.00 for it, a couple months later I discover perpetual licenses are dead and the entire Master Collection is available for $50.00 a month or $600.00 year! Oh fantastic I had just paid the equivalent of almost 2 damn years of the cloud only a few months earlier, what was my consolation prize for this? I was offered a paltry 3 month membership to the CC I was not interested in or I could have $109.00 copy of Lr 5, I took Lr, and then about a month later it they dropped the price to $69.00 adding insult to my financial injury. Overnight Adobe turned me from one of it's largest fans praising it's acolytes into one of it's most angry and dissatisfied customers.
Then people like you walk into conversations like this without any appreciation of the aforementioned and tell the old customers to get over it as if the issue was somehow as trite as dropping my ice-cream on the sidewalk. 
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