May 8th, 2013, 16:27
Larry, I think you hit the nail on the head. If I can play a slight devil's advocate, Adobe is in a way a victim of it's own success. Each iteration would provide something novel and but probably a little less accessible/relevant and thus to a shrinking audience. At some point either the company has to shrink or they have to invent ways to generate cash to compensate for those less and less willing to spend the bucks for the new version. With that said, will I be upgrading to any new version of PS in the foreseeable future? Definitely not.
The universal nature of image formats at least makes it difficult to force upgrades through incompatibility, and thus necessitates some level of novelty with each new version. Nothing makes me balk like the Boeing standard CAD software package, CATIA. It's dragged on for years and years as one of the worst functioning software packages, and this has propagated because the aerospace giant insists that it and all it's vendors have a current license, to the tune of ~$30,000/year per engineer and semi-annual updates prevent any older version from talking with a newer build. :blind: