Adobe's Shift to Subscriptions Reveals the Hidden Mechanics of Vendor Lock-in

Adobe's 2013 transition from perpetual licenses to Creative Cloud subscriptions wasn't merely a business model change—it systematically embedded vendor lock-in through proprietary file formats and architectural constraints. This case study exposes how a once-honest promise can coexist with deliberate mechanisms that make customer exit prohibitively expensive, fundamentally reshaping the economics of professional creative software.