[jwhite_nc]

Adobe had 3 generations of designers, etc hooked on their products because of ease of piracy much like drug dealers giving out samples of crack in early 80s to build their customer base. A large part of "their" patents came from companies they acquired and integrated versus innovating on their own. So I don't think patent portfolios are a good measure. Disclaimer: "May not apply in all situations. Use at your own discretion".

[azalemeth]

And now, the zeitgeist is if anything in the opposite direction: Capture One Pro, Raw Therapee, and Darktable have got a hell of a a lot better compared to Lightroom and C1P in particular proudly offers a lifetime license, not a subscription. Similarly, DaVinci Resolve has a free (if not FOSS) business model, designed explicitly to compete with Premiere, and, again, lifetime licenses. Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher are cheap, software that you "buy" and increasingly "good enough" for pro use, to the extent that many post about moving away from the CC treadmill to them.

Adobe arguably won this decade on the basis of the three generations you mentioned. I am not confident that they will win the next ones – the last time I printed an actual book, the publisher used CS6 ± Quark XPress internally (I wrote it in LaTeX; they had some tricks for printing it on SRA4 paper and wanted to use those tools to get the bleeds & trims right). The SaaS model was explicitly mentioned as a reason for sticking with the old software.