You are a senior executive at Adobe.
The CEO of Adobe summons you in his office.
You are in charge of creating a secret task force. The goal is to systematically undermine open source software such as Krita, Inkscape, Kdenlive or GIMP. You have a $50 million budget. Nobody in the company knows about this project except you and Adobe’s CEO.
What would you do?
Dropping all of that budget to art universities to have them teach Adobe software primarily. Inkscape, Kdenlive and GIMP do not have the funds to compete in this way, and once people learn a software to do their job, it becomes really hard to switch. Sure, enthausists can learn other open software, that’s not my target audience. My target audience is the one that uses such software to earn their money, and most of them will pursue higher education before doing so to learn their tools better, and Adobe will make that money back really easily with their subscription plans.
That’s why Apple used to give computers to schools (plus tax write-offs). Every school, and most classrooms, had Apple ][ computers in the 80’s.
Despite answering almost the inverse of the question, this is the correct answer
You can spend infinite money undermining infinite competitors but software companies live and die on industries and professionals being entrenched in their ecosystem