One day many years ago I had too many drinks and being stupid and naive and I bought adobe cs5. I still use it on the same computer I installed it a decade ago. Activated and installed only once. Today they revoked the access to it. Clicking the link they say "revoked because purchased from an untrustworthy reseller"
Yeah... untrustworthy reseller, look at the invoice and see who sold&shipped that physical copy...
Contacted support, they said that they won't do anything about it because it's EOL.
Moral of the story: don't do like me. If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing. Never give your money to Adobe.
Nothing is going to effectively hurt their bottom line, because they own the market. There are no other viable alternatives to Adobe if you are working in the graphics profession. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in graphic design/visual communication uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat. If you do any work with designers and receive files from them, you'll need to use Adobe products in order to access the files and all the information in the files.
This is the sector I work in. There is absolutely no getting away from it, and until someone comes up with a product suite that is better right out of the gate, and is completely compatible with Adobe, no one is going to switch.
Even then, it'd take a lot more than just equal quality and compatibility. Folks are too used to Adobe slop to switch.
I've recently started using Affinity instead and ngl, it's getting there. No AI stuff (which is a plus for me), runs better, and is capable of doing damn near the same things.
You really need a critical mass to break Adobe's stranglehold. I hope that someone can, because I hate their software-as-a-service model. But for now, I have to suck it up and deal with it.
Their refusal to pay to integrate PANTONE colors has really fucked up my workflow. :(