There's a quite-serious problem with the shift we've seen in software over the last decade or so.
In short: You can't buy it anymore, only get a subscription.
The "buy it" system typically worked like this: You paid for each "seat" you wished to use at once. One butt, pair of eyeballs and pair of hands, one license. Most companies let you install the software on a limited number of devices (e.g. two -- since you might have a laptop and a desktop, or one computer at the office and another in your home office) but you could only use one at a time and this was enforced by having the system "check in" with some online location when in use. Over time if you tried to cheat (e.g. give your activation code to 10 people) you'd get caught and the system would lock people out.
Here's the rub -- the companies had to innovate in this model because if they didn't you stop paying for upgrades and kept using what you had. Innovation was real and significant -- Word Perfect was, well, not-so-perfect and integration between Word and Excel really did matter (never mind Powerpoint) and the rather rapid innovation that happened with Adobe products.
Who remembers "Pagemaker "from the 1990s? It sucked, to be blunt, including crashing on a regular basis but it was the only tool that could reasonably do color seps and we needed that for print ads, so we put up with it at MCSNet. I didn't like it but the other alternatives were worse.
Through the 1990s and into the 2000s Adobe's creative software got better. The original Dreamweaver, as an example, blew big ones, but as time went on it got better. Flash eventually got killed because it couldn't be extricated from the security problems it created holes for, but there's no doubt that Photoshop, up to about CS6, really did improve with each release and not a little either. I bought several of those Creative Suite upgrades over the years and every one of them was worth the spend.
But then came "Creative Cloud." I refused to buy that for one simple reason: If you ever stop paying all your existing work becomes inaccessible. This is a ratcheting contract of adhesion and what's worse, it deliberately addictive in truth because you continue to create and thus the amount of material that you lose goes up each and every year.
Now Adobe doesn't have to innovate -- at all. You either pay for equal capability at best on a continuing basis or all of your former work becomes instantly inaccessible. Yes, you might able to plan for that and migrate off over time but you'll still be forced to buy.
This has to be stopped -- among other things it has destroyed the incentive for firms to innovate in their offerings, and in addition its actually regressive and operates as a coercive force on consumers and businesses. This sort of business model is the very definition of an unfair and deceptive business practice and thus under state consumer protection laws is illegal.
Locking up someone's creative work by effectively "tying" it to a continuing revenue stream is the very definition of an unfair and deceptive practice no matter what they claim you "agreed" to.
How do we address this?
Change the law. Specifically:
APIs, file formats and similar cannot be protected under either copyright or trade secret (irrespective of private agreement by adhesion or even negotiation) as that is deemed contrary to public policy unless the software that uses them is sold as a fully-licensed per-user product. You can restrict the number of concurrent users but not "marry" the software to hardware nor can you prevent a reinstall if someone buys a new machine, even if the old one can't be "de-registered" (because its broken, for example.)
Abandoned versions, where the licensing check engine or any part of its authentication or other online resource necessary for its ordinary use are shut down lose copyright and reverse-engineering protection as a matter of statute and the firm is further required to publish a patch file that disables said checks. Adobe can choose to shut off re-installs of CS6 or the "boxed" Lightroom version, for example (and they have; even if you deactivate one of your old licenses to reinstall it will tell you that you still have all of them outstanding, which is not true, and in addition a "new" install attempt fails as it apparently relies on breakage in the former "Internet Explorer" which Microsoft has retired and as such you can't even sign in to validate it on a clean install anyway) but if they do shut down verification or refuse to address breakage that then it is legal for anyone to patch out the checks entirely and distribute the file(s) required to do so. In short if a firm abandons a piece of software, whether by subscription or not and by doing so effectively destroys the value of all the existing copies they previously sold the old version becomes freely available whether the firm likes it or not.
This prevents not only orphaning and in fact locking up people's work which the software company does not own, has no rights to and never did, that is the common practice of effectively forcing you to pay them for access to your own work that you own all rights to but in addition it prevents firms (like Quicken, who has moved to a "software as a subscription" model as well) from forcing you through a one-way door. They can shut down support for the old boxed versions of their software but they can't perform an "upgrade" of your data file that renders it unreadable by anything else except their subscription version. With a fully-public API and file format that capacity is foreclosed so if they refuse to sell a boxed version today (which they can) you can take the data to some other vendor because they must have the format published and available to use at no cost or use it on the older, boxed version you already own even if your existing computer breaks and you buy a new one. The firm's choice in that situation is to either continue on a perpetual basis the infrastructure required to validate that you're not stealing it (e.g. you actually bought it and are using it within the original agreed terms) or the firm is deemed to have constructively abandoned all rights including copyright, trade secret and any "private" licensing agreement.
Restoring the imperative for firms to actually provide value on an ongoing basis, rather than abusing customers through what amount to forced lock-ins and continuing expenditures to obtain access to their own information is not just good policy -- its a hard, Constitutional requirement as intellectual property is in fact property and the Constitution protects your right to not have it stolen from you, whether by government or otherwise (if not there wouldn't be an explicit Patent and Copyright clause in the Constitution, and there is in Article 1, Section 1, Clause 8.) Denying you access to your creative work is in fact theft of your rights in said work. You paid for that software and you have a right to use it to access and exploit your creative content that you created with same.
Those firms that argue against this change, which must take place immediately, should be destroyed.