The Assumption of Perpetual Dominance

“It costs more to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one."

“Customer loyalty drives the majority of additional business.”

“The cost of losing a customer outstrips the cost of gaining many.”

It is now August 2020. Faculty at my institution report in two weeks. Classes begin a week after that. Every single course that depends on consistent lab access to professional software tools (namely Adobe Creative Cloud) is still in limbo.

There is still no news as to how students working from off-campus without pandemic lab access are to use software they have already partially paid for through tuition and lab fees, and there is still no response from Adobe for calls to revise student pricing to allow for month-to-month rental at student rates, or extended demos.

It is hard to get a new customer, it’s nearly impossible to regain a customer. What is the rationale of Adobe’s calm confidence in torching their relationship with every media and design professor in the country? 

Affinity, Blackmagic, garage developers—take notice and prepare to ascend as the mammals among dinosaurs. Adobe’s attitude resembles Microsoft in the 1990s, that classic triumvirate: assumed perpetual dominance, overestimation of the loyalty of current customers, underestimation of the ingenuity of competitors. Pride goes before the fall.