That's been Adobe's business model for a long time, and a very clever one at that. Let Photoshop be pirated all over schools and unis, reap the enterprise benefits when the graphics designers who only learned Photoshop are getting hired.
For all the hate Creative Cloud gets, I love it as a hobbyist. I have a subscription for I think $10 or $20/month and even though sure I could save up and have purchased the software one-time outright, but last time I looked at buying a boxed copy in a university bookstore it was somewhere around $700. That's just not possible for someone who only uses photoshop for some of the stuff that GIMP tends to suck at, and only quite rarely
Also, I, like most teens in the early 2000s, had a pirated copy of Photoshop 7.
Yup! I've chosen to buy several things that I pirated as a kid now just because I was able to pick it up then and now I have an income and these things are accessible!
I always wondered why MS, which benefited from a similar modus operandi, abandoned it so drastically. When the internet got good enough that sharing software became feasible, they introduced online activation, basically pushing people towards alternatives.
They still push Microsoft products pretty heavily in universities. I was very happy when I went off to university to be able to easily get keys for products like Windows, Office and Visual Studio. Our CS department had something set up and the impression I got was that Microsoft was footing a good bit of the bill to make sure that they were the easiest choice for most students to get professional software.
