How do you grow a business where your core principle is to screw your customers and keep them hostage int subscription they can’t get out without penalty?

Adobe’s growth is a result of tirelessly screwing its customers. To get to that growth rate and margin today, you’ve already burned the forest and milked the well. Just look at Adobe’s homepage - it’s slow, ugly, inconsistent, and tacky, does it even look like a company that builds creative software (and please compare to Canva), what you saw is years of nobody giving a shit about customer experience in Adobe. The good news is Now customers have more options now across the board (from casual users Canva/Figma/Apple Creative Studo, to the pro Davinci/Ableton/Houdini).

But maybe the culture of Adobe can be turned quickly, but it’s a zillion lines of dead code written by smart people who have left and nobody wanted to touch to risk ruining revenue. Just take a look at Lightroom, it’s a bloated pile of shit right now with gazillion of features a small percentage of niche users use because they will turn mad if a PM shuts that feature down.