Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Uhhh

Have any of y'all ever heard of something called "Adobe Creative Cloud", it's...

It is literally trying to answer most of these questions for a set of titanic applications that predate the entire world wide web, it solves, offhand, at least five of these seven principles - it's (1) built around apps that have been working with local files since the eighties, (2) can sync your work between multiple devices, I just carry my laptop everywhere so I dunno how well it works, haven't played with the iPad apps yet so I dunno about those, (3) works just fine with no net access (though it'll cut you off if you don't hit the authorization servers every few weeks), (4) I am not sure how it solves the conflicting changes problem as I work solo, (5) your data's on your local device and in Adobe's cloud for as long as you subscribe, (6) okay well stuff's probably stored unencrypted, unless "I turned on whole disc encryption" counts (7) it's your own files and your own backup strategy.

That's five checkboxes out of seven, better than the 4/7 that "email shit around" and "github" get.

And it is relentlessly uncool. But it has been here for a good while and none of y'all have noticed it because it's built for artists.

Last I checked, creative cloud isn't truly offline first. How many times have I opened Illustrator on an airplane, only for the creative cloud to completely block opening my local application till I don't sign in onto the cloud (mostly to verify if I paid for my subscription this month). That's not what an offline first software should look like.

I want to own my data and my tools.

I don't want to pay a subscription service to Adobe any more than I want to pay a subscription service for my desk and chair.

> I want to own my data and* my tools.*

More power to you! But this article is specifically about local-first/offline SaaS, which is what Creative Cloud is.

The tough thing is that most software products you use are actively maintained and updated. That costs them money each month, so they pass those costs to you.

It would be great if we could see more software sold as-is, without updates. But, especially in the world of online-capable tools (which not everything is, but most apps can access the internet), ongoing security maintenance is important. I'm not sure we can have it both ways.

Maybe they don't need to be though. One of my greatest regrets is that I couldn't afford to purchase Photoshop and Illustrator back when that was still an option. The Adobe CS6 suite is software that is "done" as far as I'm concerned. I would gladly pay $1000 each for CS6 Photoshop and Illustrator with absolutely no future updates if I could.

Too often, those updates break already working tools. I don't need my essential app insisting that I wait 10 minutes to upgrade when I'm 1 minute away from giving a presentation using it.

> The tough thing is that most software products you use are actively maintained and updated. That costs them money each month, so they pass those costs to you.

Adobe managed to stay in existence and be profitable for a few decades before switching to software rentals.

What changed in the creative space that caused 'traditional' software sales to no longer be able to pay the bills? And why doesn't that also apply to, say, Capture One?

> What changed

Businesses often prefer operational expenses over capital expenses. What changed is that your average business IT (bigcorp or mom's basement) now has reliable access to the internet, which means that an operational expense for software has just recently become possible at all.

And why did that preclude Adobe from also allowing actual purchases of their products instead of just the rental model?

Capture One has subscription and license:

* https://www.captureone.com/en/products-plans/single-user/cap...

If I had a need for, say, cloud/sync features I understand a monthly cost as servers and bandwidth costs money; totally on-board. But for people who do not need/want cloud-y stuff, what re-occurring cost is there?

I was happy to purchase YNAB4 for budgeting, and would have purchased YNAB5—but it's subscription and I have no need for the sync stuff that's part of the 'deal'.

It's a lot easier to develop a single software product continuously by tying continuous development to continuous revenue. It frees the business to devote its resources to development instead of product sales strategies and version differentiation which just distract it from focusing on its core product. This also enables their customers to do the same thing, tying continuous use of a service to continuous production of its own product or service. If a business can completely outsource the problem of providing good tools to their professional digital artists by paying Adobe $Xk/year, it might even be worth it to them financially just to save everyone the time of deciding whether to upgrade or not every other year. OS updated? New file format? Solved. New employee? Employee left? Solved.

This is like IT infrastructure moving to cloud: businesses decide that the problems of maintaining IT infrastructure 100% in house is not worth it when you can outsource a big chunk of the business problem for a known cost. In my opinion all of these are examples of the same trend that also includes the direction that k8s, serverless, even companies like uber, doordash, wework etc are moving towards: a global relaxation of artificially maintained buffers down to solving problems continuously, automatically, and on-demand. (Since it begs the question, my critique of uber, et al. is that they're trying to be too big for their problem.)

I think this is the general trend, but I don't know why. My guess is that it is vastly more efficient; not more efficient in cost, but more efficient in time.

Would it be too reductionist to say then that the main value of a subscription as opposed to just buying the major versions you want is that you don't have to pay the costs for a decision that isn't impactful? If not, could an org not otherwise reap those same benefits by just choosing to upgrade every major version, but then retain the flexibility to not shell out for a new version if a pandemic temporarily hurts finances or something?

I was never a paying user of Adobe products, but my understanding was that they'd release a new (yearly?) version as a paid upgrade. It would presumably have a killer feature that would encourage enough of the users to buy, which (hopefully) retroactively funds the cost of the new version's development.

From the perspective of their business, it's advantageous to have the consistency of $X / month forever instead of "hopefully a huge yearly sales month, followed by mostly nothing until next year". Businesses like predictable revenue.

> Businesses like predictable revenue.

Then make the subscription worth something over and above the software:

* https://www.captureone.com/en/products-plans/single-user/cap...

A lot of apps rarely still introduce compelling-enough new features to justify buying a newer version. We'd all mostly be fine today using CS5 and Office 2007.

Subscription models are about forcing upgrades in a world where users increasingly aren't actually benefitting from them.

I haven't given it much thought, but I like Jetbrain's compromise[0]. You pay a subscription to get all the updates, but you get to keep a perpetual license to any specific version (major+minor, you still receive bugfixes) if it has been covered by your subscription for 12 months or more.

This way you can choose to receive updates indefinitely and support development with your subscription, or buy/stay with a version you are using if you do not need/want the newer ones. (Buying an annual subscription grants you the perpetual licence immediately apparently, I have no experience with this.)

[0] : https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What...

Agreed! I think that's a great model. Panic did the same thing recently: https://nova.app/buy/

> Have any of y'all ever heard of something called "Adobe Creative Cloud", it's...

…something that I have to rent and can no longer own.

See also losing user's data:

* https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/20/21377411/adobe-lightroom-...

Adobe Creative Cloud is probably the worst sync software I ever encountered. On Mac and on Windows. It's probably even way worse than a one week demo with Windows Cloud Sync Engines. Most Adobe products are crap, slow and have tons of bugs. Their specification around pdf is so complex that even adobe reader does things differently than the spec.

But you still don't own the tools. Can't run Photoshop if Adobe decides they can't, or don't want to, serve you anymore.

There are some other comments that highlight why this matters, but I want to add to this: a year ago, the US government decided that they very much don't like Venezuelan government anymore, and issued sanctions. Adobe promptly announced that they'll cancel all subscriptions in Venezuela, no refunds - essentially shutting down the entire creative industry in the country. Now to their benefit, they've managed to get an exemption from the White House just before deadline and eventually did not cancel Venezuelan subscriptions - but was the US government a bit more stubborn, this could have played out in entirely different way.

Point being, a hard dependency on a non-commodity cloud service introduces a new class of problems that locally owned software doesn't have.

You need internet access to use creative cloud.

Cracked creative cloud is a great product, but the creative cloud they sell in stores is really bad. There's nothing worse than being 2,000 miles out to sea with a bunch of footage to edit and no internet to check in with the copyright parole officer.

I completely agree, but I think the days might be numbered.

In Lightroom what you're describing, with the easy to work with plain files, is called Lightroom Classic. It's still supported alongside regular Lightroom, but it wouldn't be a huge surprise if it gets deprecated at some point. It also only works on desktop.

What is now called regular Lightroom requires Adobe cloud to sync between machines instead of letting you manage your own files & syncing, and is the only way to sync between the newer iPad version of Lightroom or Photoshop and the desktop.

Most of these points are also true for Microsoft Office.

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