Are Capture One in trouble?

Compared to a lot of professional software, photographic software is inexpensive. My C1 subscription cost me €109 a year, pretty good value compared to what I pay for FEA and Autocad software.

Arguably, C1 and Adobe see themselves at the top of the tree as professional software (in the genuine sense of the word) intended for professionals and others in the creative/graphics industries. As has been pointed out, companies often prefer the predictability of a subscription model. Amateurs can of course use them, but probably shouldn’t expect their business model to be friendly towards them. For many amateurs, appropriate software might be something like Affinity Photo, which is only available for outright purchase, is reasonably priced and has a quite generous approach to upgrades and support (I just wish I could learn to like it!). Amateurs who choose to own and use top grade professional equipment and want to obtain the best from it should be willing to pay the price for professional software - as has also been pointed out, its cost is still negligible compared with the investment in equipment .

Well, yes and no to that...
Ai might change all that down the road. Who knows how damaging Ai could be to both camera/software industries.

Many of the updates have to do with security, fixing bugs etc. That is important.

Version upgrades are a different matter. And I agree that the constant upgrading is an annoyance, especially when MS decides Win11 will look completely different compared to Win10 and move the settings from one place to another, not to mention the ever increasing size of the Skype window. Or how Apple is reducing the lifespan of their hardware by removing supporting with OS security updates, plus the software bloat that makes a 5 year old Mac run horribly slow when it is upgraded to the latest version of MacOS.

But at the same time, advances in tech require new platforms to run on, so new hardware is required. Plus there is no money to be made supporting old hardware (unless you are an IT technician working for a company that is still running a 20 year old version of Windows in their factory)

In terms of instruments, Gibson tried to do this back in 2011 with the Firebird X guitar, robot tuners etc.

I have worked in marketing for several software companies over the years, both big and small, and I can remember when subscription licences first started (with antivirus companies). But I understand why they did it. There are a finite number of customers in any given market, if you have a perpetual license model, once you reach the market saturation level, your revenue disappears unless you get people to upgrade to the next version (which is hard to do if the product they currently have is working just fine for their needs). Usually you can force an upgrade by making the next version of the software compatible with the latest OS version (not the old one) or newer technology / hardware, or new/better features. But hardware changes usually do not happen often, so the software company is stuck, and even worse if the market for their software is shrinking. Hence the move to subscriptions.

I can't say I blame them.

That depends if it is actually the company that prevents bugs is the very one creating them to further their business.

Most S/W and heavily S/W dependent companies have had large layoffs. Even Adobe had a massive layoff in Dec of 2022 and is trying to
restructure so as not to have more large layoffs. Why is the tech sector drawing down when other areas - at least in the US growing?
Probably a cycle. Some point to over hiring during the pandemic.

Capture One has been involved in a major upgrade starting in 2021. When Apple released the M-chip, Capture One took the opportunity
to do what really needs to be done - reorganize and rewrite the S/W. Once that is done, the need for manpower goes down to evolving the product and fixing bugs. That is S/W engineers and coders hit the bricks.

The direction they are going is to integrate more AI, object recognition to support things like AI driven masking to make drawing a mask easier and more efficient. Those require very specific skills. Clearly their subscription roll out could have been better and the architects of it should probably have been fired and management overhauled which it sounds like what happened.

Most companies staff up for major development efforts and then draw down when the effort is reached conclusion. There is nothing unusual in that. Management shoots itself in the foot are usually shown the door.

I have been considering transitioning to the subscription mode las since my wife has starting to use C1. The subscription model terms and conditions covers such cases. The single user perpetual license T&C didn't. I have 52 patents and several license agreements for algorithms coming from those patents, I am very sensitive in not abusing a licensing agreement not to mention it is actually illegal. After all no one owns the S/W. They own a license to use it under the Terms and Conditions to which they agree. Then C1 came out with a good price to make the transition smooth and I did. At least for the first year when I transitioned back in Oct 2023, the cost was actually less than I had been paying for a yearly upgrade.

I'm invested in Capture One since I have been using it since Aperture crashed and burned. I tried DxO Optics at the time and it was not ready for prime time. They also had the nasty business model of "nickel and dimming." If you wanted "keystone correction" then you had to bad a separate package. If you wanted any ability to produce film - then you had to buy film pack. No generic B&W conversion. When Fuji came out with the XTrans sensors for the X mount system, DxO refused to support it. It has only provided support for XTrans in the last year and 1/2 to two years. So I settled on Capture One. Of course there was a learning curve to any tools. But I would now miss many of the features of C1 - like the two types of catalogs and the sessions to give flexibility, the extensive masking tools, and now the AI driven "magic brushes" and masking tools and the sophisticated export/import capability to use other tools and editors from within C1 to expand it.

Hopefully, C1 has it act together now. I expect it does and am not too worried about it disappearing. Face it for every 10 uses C1 has, Adobe products have 100,000 and DxO has 6 and the rest of them have less than one. But at the end of the day, I tired Photoshop and didn't like it. I don't want to have to go through a learning curve to use a different product.

The one thing i have noticed with the subscription is there is about one update a month now instead of a couple a year (under the perpetual license I had in the past) and along with bug fixes, new features are released as they are ready. All in all, I prefer the subscription. From a business viewpoint it is hard to see how a pure S/W company can be profitable and have the resources to improve and maintain their product without a subscription based license. That's why the evolution we see is underway. So I would not be too concerned about C1. DXO Labs went through some interesting bumps and bruises to get where they are. Spun off of Vision IQ, a company specializing in computer vision, it released DxO Optics Pro. I tried it - it was pretty good but very limited. Then they formed DxO Mark that focused on as optics engineering support company. DxO developed some imaging H/W and when DxO didn't want to pour money into it to turn it into a produce the developers left, got money and that technology is now GoPro. DxO Mark was spun off as an independent company. It was at that point that DxO seemed to take off. There were times where DxO seemed to be on the verge of disappearing. Now they seem to be on pretty sound footing. However, I would say DxO is still has to little of the professional market share to transition to a subscription model yet.