Well, I guess I'm coming at it from a different perspective. We have a home-based company and we use a lot of software. Until Macromedia was bought out by Adobe, we were paying for upgrades for both Macromedia Studio and Adobe Photoshop. Now with CS3, we just pay one upgrade price. We don't get every upgrade, but certainly every second one, because if we leave it any longer than that, we don't qualify for the upgrade price. With CS3, we heavily use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, and Acrobat. To us, $499 is well worth it.
We also use Captivate, but seeing as it's not included in the CS3 package, it costs us as much to upgrade that as it does the entire CS3 package - so that's very irritating.
We use other software for our business too, and yearly maintenance costs are a norm. The main product we use (OutStart Trainer) costs nearly $4,000, but the yearly maintenance cost is $500. That entitles us to support and free upgrades/new releases. Again - well worth it to us.
