They aren’t evil, it’s just when companies move to subscription they turn into mini insurance companies focused on the spreadsheets. They model out your lifetime value and know that every $1 they chisel out of you is worth $1.40 in 5 years.
They are brutal in the enterprise space, looking for 10-15% price escalations. They also turn over sales leadership so if you are big enough you can pull stunts for concessions. Just do some recon and figure out what they get paid the most on. Last time, we hired a few interns specifically to do a public PoC of how we were getting rid a key product in the portfolio. Made sure they heard about it and got significant confessions. Basically 10x the intern and PoC investment. We ended up hiring the interns as well for an extra bonus.
As a consumer, you need to be really aware of the motivations of your suppliers business model and model your business accordingly. Understand your costs and use OSS strategically, or understand where you just need to take what they offer (ie AWS). Things in the middle, like Adobe in my case, you need to be ready to walk away or play chicken and make a deal at the 11th hour.
"it’s just when companies move to subscription they turn into mini insurance companies focused on the spreadsheets. They model out your lifetime value and know that every $1 they chisel out of you is worth $1.40 in 5 years."
Nah, evil is fine. It's a low grade evil, sure, but it's still evil. To cite a lovely paragraph from Carpe Jugulum that feels appropriate -
“There’s no greys, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.’
‘It’s a lot more complicated than that -’
‘No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
The CEO can also claim credit for the stock price increase and get his bonus. Fixing it would reverse the effect and put the bonus at risk. So not only will such ‘small evils’ become intrenched there is also a powerful insensitive to find even more of them.
It's an adjective. Adobe is bad. ISIS is bad. That doesn't equate the two (or imply that it's the same degree) any more than calling them evil is. Evil is just an adjective that means "deliberately very morally wrong".
You could easily make the argument of ISIS being less evil than Adobe, given that many of them have conviction that they're doing the right thing, but Adobe couldn't possibly believe that this is anything but duplicitous, misleading, and scummy. Killing for religious beliefs is much more complex than simple "evil". Scamming your paying customers by intentionally misleading them with dark patterns is a very simple and obvious evil.
It's not black and white thinking, it's a threshold, as stated.
For an average income person
- A Porsche is expensive
- A Ferrari is expensive
The fact that a Ferrari costs a lot more than a Porsche does not make a Porsche "not expensive", because there is a line (for the buyer) beyond which they consider a car expensive. There's problem a grey are below that line in which a car may cost more than they are comfortable spending, but have enough useful features that they will consider sacrificing for it. And there is a large area to the right of the expensive threshold where a lot of such cars lie.
The fact that lots of cars are past the "expensive" threshold for someone doesn't mean they're thinking in black and white.
This is true. It’s a threshold. So sometimes when I think to myself “Should I be spending time fighting to ensure people are not dying at the hands of a fundamentalist religious organization or should I be spending my time lowering prices for a high end graphics editor?” I always try to remember that these are equivalent tasks. It doesn’t matter which I do. I am bringing the same amount of good to the world.
Were I to crack Photoshop and provide it to 10s to 100s of business in my local city, should Adobe stay quiet and not complain, because there are people doing the same and uploading it to pirate bay where it's available to millions?
I think the answer is clearly not. There is no reason why it should be invalid to criticise any act, just because it is not the worst act.
Communications have context. To apply a word to Adobe (as a loose refernce to "Don't be evil.") and then say ISIS is evil, doesn't mean or even imply Adobe === ISIS.
ISIS' actions are far far worse, but most Daesh are motivated by the desperation of being a religious minority associated with a deposed dictator in a resource-constrained desert infected with religious fanaticism.
Daesh's actions require a more drastic response, but I'm more confident that the average Adobe CSR, rather than the average drafted Sunni kid from Al Qaim, is going to hell.
> most Daesh are motivated by the desperation of being a religious minority associated with a deposed dictator in a resource-constrained desert infected with religious fanaticism.
Eh, not really. They are pretty much all a religious majority in the regions they controlled and moreover Syria is pretty predominately Sunni.
Sorry if I misunderstand you but you could just say that it's ridiculous if you think it's ridiculous. I personally don't like there is comments with "isis" and "nazi" inside in a discussion about Adobe (and I don't specially like Adobe at all).
I love living in a time moral absolutism and self righteousness. Nothing better than having conversations with people that have zero doubts about the correctness of every single one of their many, many ethical positions and that anyone who disagrees is evil.
Good times. If only I could have witnessed the Spanish Inquisition.
Yes. It’s all rooted in narcissism. Calling something “evil”, makes you a hero when you fight it, whether that means going on patrols in the streets of Raqqa or calling out a shitty SaaS pricing scheme on an internet bulletin board.
Bad take. Calling something evil is a moral judgement and that’s it.
I do t need to fight it, be a part of it, or hell, I could be evil myself.
It’s a judgement call and nothing more.
You may disagree with my moral standards, and that’s cool.
Back in the early days they were really good, I remember phoning about some PostScript problems I was having and whoever I spoke to clearly knew it inside out. Now I can't even get a response about obvious bugs in their software.
It's not just Adobe though, this is an industry wide problem.
They are not even good at software engineering and UX.