Simon's referring to this - bit of a puff piece though! Did you also see this Forbes article, Simon?
No I hadn't seen the Forbes piece, thanks for the link John.
I think it nicely analyses the problem. Perhaps I've placed too much weight on the Economist view.
As the Forbes article points out, many photographic users of CS/CC were seeing less and less innovation (of the sort they wanted) with each new release, and were becoming less inclined to shell out for the upgrades. And, of course, the market for photographic software is changing fast as photography changes. Have we reached a plateau with Photoshop, requiring a step change - of the sort newcomers are much better at than incumbents?
The intial CC single-app price of $19.99 was out of the question for me. But $9.99 seemed, well, OK. Upgrading LR every time and Photoshop every 2 or 3 (when one could) averaged out at about the same in UK price as the CC offer. I took the view that the $9.99 offer is time-limited, and that LR will eventually go CC anyway (or be left to attrophy as enhancements occur only in new products, as with Lightroom Mobile), so I signed-up.
Time will tell, I guess, but I think it might be another year or more before we see whether Adobe were "right" (from a shareholder point of view, that is).