Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1474752
54 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Fall 2022 did a better job of offering legacy support for Apple's product than Apple did. This was a crucial opportunity for them as a company and their bid was successful. Premiere quickly became a major player in the low- budget, independent, and web video editing worlds, replacing Final Cut Pro as the number two player in the race. Though not as widely used on major Hollywood blockbusters, it is currently estimated that Premiere has the largest market share of all three editing applications as of this article's writing. They've inspired a passionate fanbase, myself among them, who argue their merits over other applications until we're blue in the face. But alas, I fear those days might be numbered as well. You see, in 2012, Adobe made the controversial decision to switch from a purchase business model to a subscription one. The justi cation at the time was that this would give customers the ultimate user experience. Rather than waiting eighteen to twenty- four months to access new features via paid upgrades, Adobe could now churn out bug xes, new features, and software updates all year long by distributing them online. A single $600 a year subscription (this was the price in 2012) that included Premiere and all of Adobe's other creative design apps was cheaper than spending $2500 every two years on the Master Collection of the newest version of Adobe's Creative Suite. And, in response to Final Cut Pro's misstep, Adobe was quick to assure users that they'd never lose access to their software because older versions of the programs would be hosted on the new Adobe Creative Cloud server. Well, it has been ten years since that decision was made and those marketing promises have aged like ne milk. In recent years, the company has been accused of feature stagnation between releases. Depending on how you look at it, their "cost-saving" perpetual subscription model can be far more costly while offering less value to users. For example, if I paid $2500 in 2011, I'd still own my license for Adobe Creative Suite today. But having now paid $6000 for Adobe products since 2012, if I miss a month's payments, I am left with nothing. This is to say nothing of service outages, which have on occasion left users unable to utilize the software for which they've paid. Worst of all, in contrast to the company's promise to maintain legacy versions of their software, Adobe is no longer hosting all previous entries of their applications on their server, meaning discontinued features can simply be lost to time. In fact, in 2019, I was among many Adobe users who received an alert from Adobe that my licenses to previous versions of their software had been terminated and that if I did not upgrade to the latest version, I could face civil action from third parties. That's not a good look. Why did this happen? Well, when a company sells someone a perpetual license to their software, like Adobe did before 2012, that user has permanent access to that software. It doesn't matter if the company loses the intellectual property rights to the software and can no longer sell it. The new software owners can't invalidate your previous perpetual purchases. That isn't the case with a subscription model though. A company can only license you subscription software for as long as they have the rights to do so and Adobe Premiere, a program that has been compiled over the course of thirty years, has a lot of third-party code that Adobe doesn't own in its programming. That third-party code costs money for Adobe to include in each version of their software and, in order to avoid raising subscription costs, they have started to remove third-party code that supports older and no longer commonly used features. But since they're no longer paying for that code, they can no longer legally distribute older versions of their software that utilized it, meaning that users have lost access to features for which they have already paid. When I called Adobe's customer service center in 2019 to express outrage for a lost feature (support for .mkv les in case you're curious), the service rep simply said, "Sir, it's Adobe's prerogative to add or remove features as they see t." Touché. I suppose that it is. However, removing features has caused another problem and this is where I see Premiere's downfall in the coming years. As I said, this program has been compiled over the course of thirty years. New code has been dropped on top of old code for three decades. And by constantly adding and removing modules, "load bearing" code has been impacted. In recent years, Premiere Pro has garnered a reputation for being very unstable. Projects are prone to crashing even on the most expensive hardware, especially on the Windows port of the application. Adobe users, particularly power users, are beginning to spend a lot more time troubleshooting their software than using it and I say that from experience. This is the outcome of the software as a Service Model.