Among the most significant changes with this year’s Elements releases has little to do with new features but instead concerns the ways users purchase and own the software. While prior versions of Photoshop and Premiere Elements have been lifetime licenses — the user buys the software and then owns it indefinitely — this year’s release has moved to a three-year license term.
Ecosystems and collaboration. If you’re already using Adobe for X and Y in your teams, it’s cheaper to get a CC license; and as for collaboration Adobe files are proprietary (and tbh so are Affinity files) so it’s harder to transition off of them. You can open .psd files in affinity, but wanting to export one will rasterize your text. And you can’t even export a .ai file, sure you can do pdfs and that preserves vector information and layers, but that’s just friction that businesses wouldn’t want to deal with.
oh that makes sense, VENDOR LOCK IN.
At this point it’s the only assed Adobe has. No one who uses Adobe software actually likes it.