The article is wrong. Adobe charged rent to create profit to send to shareholders. Paying engineers was not the major cost center other than that it needed to _seem_ like it was, to justify the subscription price.

Ultimately Photoshop as an idea stopped creatively evolving and Adobe created a tenuous pricing scheme that disincentivized competition, locked in users, and made most customers resentful. What this taught many of us is that this is a cautionary tale.

Mind you Adobe could have made CC free, built a healthy ecosystem around it, and created a lot of value in network effects, standards, plugins, etc. But they chose the dark path and they deserve to pay for it.