Candidate for Removal

“You will own nothing and be happy.” Is the phrase most people are using to express their outrage at the slow and sudden disappearance of owning products? Nowadays, most services have been replaced by subscriptions to continuously have money rolling into companies’ pockets. However, some subscription services don’t even last, especially following the greedy actions of a company or negative feedback.

Tesla has been known to make controversial decisions. The company has since been seen in a negative light, with Elon Musk in charge, and his actions have damaged the brand. From poor workplaces and business practices. Most notoriously, the CyberTruck. Already known from the infamous 2019 reveal. Where the “unbreakable glass windows” instantly shattered on display. Years followed, and more issues continued, such as unreliable software that it runs on, suing those who attempt to resell it at roughly $50,000, it remains banned in the European Union for being a severe safety hazard, and overall doesn’t do anything that a manual car couldn’t do otherwise if you would get rid of the problems with it.

The CyberTruck and all of the other cars Tesla has made full self-driving a subscription instead of full price. With Elon Musk announcing that “Tesla will stop selling FSD after February 14th. FSD will only be available as a monthly subscription thereafter.” Musk attempts to give his reasoning in the following post, claiming that “$99/month for supervised FSD will rise as FSD capabilities improve.” In comparison, there were many requests to Tesla begging the company to optimize full-self driving and the dangers. Musk instead doubled down on the customers in favor of money. However, despite Tesla’s mistakes, they still attempt to keep these products up and running despite their flaws. In-contrast to Meta’s six-year project on their collaboration with Horizon Worlds and Workspaces.

Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is a company. They had made highly controversial decisions ever since the release of their project “The Metaverse.” Following their highly underdeveloped technology, an active user number of under 1,000, and over $70 billion on the project as a whole. With very little to show for anything, especially to the investors. So little, in fact, that they demonstrated a showcase on people’s avatars. They will now finally have legs. More embarrassing is the fact that it was found to be pre-rendered the entire time. Further diminishing what Meta had to show for this project.

This had the Metaverse’s project slowly and painfully fail for another few more years until recently. In January of this year, Meta announced that its Horizon Workrooms would be shut down on February 16th, and any progress or work made on the application would cease to exist. Although this application wasn’t a subscription. It shows how little companies have to show for things, even with billions of dollars spent on it. While Meta was known to spend billions of dollars on a failed free-priced application. Adobe had planned to have a beloved product run on a subscription shutdown for good.

Adobe was known in its early days as a beloved company with respectable offers within the 2000’s. Now, of course, that’s been long gone ever since they announced Creative Suite 6 as their last lifetime license. Everything has since been turned into a subscription with a heavy price tag. Combined with their obsession over implementing A.I. in their programs, despite most people being against A.I. Now, implementing a new policy to force Adobe to access, view, and listen to any of your content also shunned many users away from the program.

Recently, on February 2nd, Adobe announced the discontinuation of Adobe Animate on March 1st, following years of the company’s neglect of the application and shadowbanning it. They followed up by announcing that it will shut down on March 1, 2027, for Creative Cloud users and March 1, 2029, for Enterprise users.

Whilst Adobe claimed that it was in favor of emerging new platforms “to better serve the users,” they were actually doing this in favor of implementing A.I. tools. It was most likely found that they couldn’t do this for Adobe Animate, as well as the growing A.I. bubble going on around big companies, and how cheap it is. This would send shockwaves through the animation industry, causing deep outrage. Many shows from the past and the present have been made with Adobe Animate despite the company’s greed. The backlash was so immense that within 24 hours, Adobe reverted the shutdown and instead put Animate under ‘maintenance mode,’ where it will only receive bug fixes and patches as updates from now on.

I interviewed Mr. Wieman, who refers to his thoughts about Adobe and the events surrounding it. He claims that “It’s not good. It’s always been too expensive for the product. When I had to buy it in college, Adobe Suite was $600 in 2004-05. It’s more now that you have to pay monthly.” When I continued to cover Mr. Wieman’s thoughts on Adobe removing Animate, he believes that “There are a lot of programs that are third-party. People aren’t using Photoshop or Illustrator for the specific tools, and I can see why they’re moving tools and whatnot.” When I asked Mr. Wieman about his thoughts on Adobe reversing the discontinuation of Animate, he claims that “It’s a nice concession. Especially when the users go, “Hey we use this program please don’t get rid of it but if something’s wrong we’ll fix it.” I’ve seen that happen with Wizards of the Coast with their new DnD contracts. Any time you’re gonna create stuff with new DnD projects. They opened an OGL saying “whether you use the rules or structures of the game, we own it!”

In the end, “You will own nothing and be happy” seems to be the new motto for big companies. Maybe one day things can change to how they used to be in the past, where people wished to own products. There is one big way in which I do believe. Boycott these greedy companies if you can. The fewer people who buy, the less money, which could mean a lower potential chance of companies making these dumb decisions.