The article is wrong. Adobe charged rent to create profit to send to shareholders. Paying engineers was not the major cost center other than that it needed to _seem_ like it was, to justify the subscription price.
Ultimately Photoshop as an idea stopped creatively evolving and Adobe created a tenuous pricing scheme that disincentivized competition, locked in users, and made most customers resentful. What this taught many of us is that this is a cautionary tale.
Mind you Adobe could have made CC free, built a healthy ecosystem around it, and created a lot of value in network effects, standards, plugins, etc. But they chose the dark path and they deserve to pay for it.
Ultimately Photoshop as an idea stopped creatively evolving and Adobe created a tenuous pricing scheme that disincentivized competition, locked in users, and made most customers resentful. What this taught many of us is that this is a cautionary tale.
Mind you Adobe could have made CC free, built a healthy ecosystem around it, and created a lot of value in network effects, standards, plugins, etc. But they chose the dark path and they deserve to pay for it.