Premium: The Hater’s Guide To Adobe

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2026-03-20 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/hatersguide-adobe/

Summary

Adobe extracts value through deceptive subscriptions, aggressive price increases, and 50% early termination fees while its products deteriorate — and business journalists blame AI competition instead of examining how Adobe systematically abuses its trapped customer base. Zitron uses Adobe as a case study in software monopoly rot: dominance maintained through switching costs and predatory contract terms, not product quality.

Implications

The Adobe piece is less directly about AI, but the “enshittification via monopoly” frame applies across the software stack and has direct AI implications.

• Vendor BS detection. Adobe’s playbook — raise prices, degrade product, blame external threats — is a template visible in other platform companies. “AI disruption” becomes the excuse that insulates executives from accountability for their own decisions.
• Generative-AI ROI doubt. Adobe is aggressively bundling AI features into subscriptions users didn’t ask for as justification for price hikes. That’s a pattern worth tracking: AI features as cover for extraction, not genuine value delivery.
• Watch: whether Adobe’s AI-feature bundling drives churn or retention, and whether other creative-tool vendors adopt similar price-hike-via-AI-bundling tactics.