I don't think it works the same way a movie works. If a movie costs $15 million, and tickets cost $7.50, then you have to sell 2 million tickets to break even, that's the film industry. Adobe is probably in a position where selling Photoshop by itself for $3000 wouldn't allow them to break even. But bulk licensing, plugin fees, and becoming more of an industry standard with every sale kinda make up for it. It's kinda like the Xbox business model - a CS4 suite is a bit of a loss leader. But not so much on a 10-year development fee scale, like at Sony and Microsoft - it's more like a 6 month balancing act between student prices and business prices and their own stock prices. Eventually, they'll make it up.
