Adobe Officially Unveils CS6, $49/Month All-Inclusive Subscription Service
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I think the subscription model may be good for businesses, because they could always be on the latest version without having to go through a new approval process etc.
However, for private users the barrier to entry will generally not be lowered I believe. At least not for the occasional amateur photographer/graphic designer/video guy. Many people buy PS once and are on e.g. version 'CS' and stay there for a rather long time. They might try the new thing out, but can always fall back because they "own" a copy and can use it as they please. People do not think as rational about it, the security to always have a fallback is worth a lot apparently.
There is definitely room for someone to compete with Adobe, but whether anyone ever can is what matters, there's a reason Photoshop is so widely used when there are free alternatives.
Ostensibly, the idea of the CS was that you could mix and match just the pieces that suit the work flow of your discipline, whether that's photo finishing, graphic design, interactive design, or what have you.
The reality is that this is one of the reasons Adobe's products are bloated, difficult to learn, and not truly integrated or consistent in their UI.
When I look at the free/open source solutions (gimp, scribus, inkscape), what I see are tools made by engineers. I think if you injected in a good measure of input from designers and usability experts it'd go a long way towards being solid competition.
InDesign was the insurgent and KILLED Quark in short order - primarily because Quark had become such a legacy piece of junk and couldn't keep up with the times or the much more modern InDesign.
Quark committed suicide: they outsourced virtually all of their R&D, leaving none of the people who had built the previous versions employed. They ignored their users, assuming they were captive, for more than a decade.
They also ignored the move to OS X for literally years, leaving (mainly Mac-based) users to choose between staying on OS 9 and moving to Windows and buying all new hardware.
Adobe came along at just the right moment with InDesign -- ran on OS X, best-of-class print tools -- and you could almost hear the stampede.
A real pity, too, as InDesign has a horrorshow UI, while XPress's "make boxes, put things in them" metaphor is exactly how DTP should be done.
e.g. Microsoft, MySpace, etc. etc. I'd argue didn't and couldn't are essentially one-and-the-same.
Not many of the folk I know with CS actually use the vast majority of it. For example I do almost no print work. All the stuff Adobe sweat over for the print folk - doesn't impact me in the slightest. In fact it gets in the way of the stuff I need to do since it adds complexity to the UI.
In the Mac land a bunch of folk are switching to paid tools like Pixelmator and Acorn as alternatives to Photoshop for some work. They don't replace everything that PS dues, but offer what a subset of the PS audience needs for a substantially cheaper price with some arguably better functionality in a few places. I know people who have CS and Pixelmator, and spend most of their time in the latter and just bring up CS when they need something "clever". Both Pixelmator and Acorn seem to be doing very well for themselves - and I think both are still single developer shops.
What nobody apart from Adobe seems to be really doing is the "suite" part - managing the integration well. For example - I would part with $200 in a heartbeat for a micro-suite that handled bitmap and vector work together to the same level that Pixelmator managed bitmap stuff, with some nice glue/plugins to support where I work (web apps, mobile apps, pushing out multiple resolution versions, etc.).
The latest version of OmniGraffle has Bezier curves, but I haven't used them, so I do not know whether they are any good, but I would guess that they may be lacking for the cases where you want to do more artistic drawing. It is more a diagramming tool than a drawing tool.
They will continue to offer a shrink-wrapped version according to the article. Even if this wasn't needed for customers who still want it (perhaps jacking up the price, for offline access, security, privacy), it would be worth keeping just for the reasons you state (for piracy).
The reality is that the work flow of developing an interactive screen kind of still sucks. The process is basically ad hoc, tools are unintuitive and unoptimized.
At one time, Fireworks may have been a step in the right direction, but it's the neglected stepchild of the Adobe line, and I anticipate its continual decline...
I still occasionally use a copy of Corel Draw/PhotoPaint 11 that came out in 2002. You know what? It works great and does 99% of what I'd use Illustrator/Photoshop for, and I don't have to keep forking money on it. In fact, I expect to be able to use it just as well 10 years from now.
I think Adobe is fighting their biggest competitor here: themselves (like Microsoft and other large software providers). There is little they can keep adding to justify the upgrade, so they are instead making sure you can't hang on to that old copy you're used to.
At least they're charging upfront for the same thing and not messing with the toolbars (ahem ribbon ahem) to claim they've added something worthwhile..
If iTunes were to shut down tomorrow all of my music purchased from iTunes would continue to function.
So Photoshop "upgraders" have paid $10/mo in the past, and this is just $5 if you skip versions. $20 is quite a bit more. But I guess it's cheaper for the first year, so maybe new users will like that.
They've also made version skipping uneconomical going forward with the elimination of upgrade pricing for all those except the most recent version owners:
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/faq.html#upgrade...
Creative Cloud gives you many more applications than the CS Master suite - which is $2600. See http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/22/adobe-officially-unveils-cs...
If you just use The Design Standard suite it's a waste... if you use most of the Adobe products and upgrade regularly it's probably a saving.
So the ex-VAT figure would really be about $62. So only about $12 on top - and a chunk of that 12 will disappear dealing with hedging exchange rate nonsense.
I've tried Microsoft's Expression software and feel is a viable alternative for a one-time price of $79 smackers.
If I get an itch to upgrade, it won't be to rent Adobe software.
Dreamweaver sits right next to Sublime Text 2 in my toolbox and is great for visual layouts. (Saves a lot of typing.) I then switch over to Sublime or something else to hook them up.
For me the DW generated code is clean enough that there's really no "re-doing" stuff, just extending and refining.
I'll happily pay $29/mo (and even $49/mo) for the Creative Suite. I think that a lot of people under estimate the power of Photoshop and the other applications -- there is no alternative because nothing robustly imports and exports as .psd files. Photoshop especially is an example of a Microsoft Office esque product in that every designer I know uses Photoshop in a subtly different manner, making it nearly impossible for anyone to create a "Photoshop killer." I also secretly love Fireworks, despite it not being updated for about six years.
I have always thought Adobe did a pretty good job at combatting piracy, especially in the more recent CS versions: it really is a lot of work to pirate the applications now.
The applications are total trash to use though if you're anyone other than someone that is not technically sophisticated save for growing up in the Adobe world. (designers, basically.)
I'm curious to see if/how this catches on. Most creative professionals have already paid for CS so it's more cost effective to upgrade than subscribe, especially if they're doing the skip-every-other-version approach. The only market this works for are enterprise customers who need this kind of payment process.
Perhaps the next generation or two will adopt subscriptions, but I'm skeptical. Like Paul said, if CS becomes subscription only, most new designers will look for something pirateble and/or affordable first.
There is a temporary reprieve for CS 3 & 4 owners until the end of 2012 (they backtracked somewhat after user feedback). After that only the most recent previous version get upgrade pricing going forward - everyone else pays full price.
This effectively kills version skipping as for the suites you'd typically have to skip 3-4 versions to spend less than $50/month overall in the end.
If you've paid for CS5.5 Master Collection, your total upgrade cost is $549.
Even if you've only paid for CS2 Design Standard, the upgrade cost is $1399.
Considering a two-year subscription cycle costs $1200-$1900, it's more cost effective to upgrade.
If you're short term, subscriptions are probably ok. But if you're committed long term they're a HUGE risk.
A little off topic, but one of the architects of Creative Cloud called me a couple of months ago, mainly to talk about Clojure vs. Java development, and that got me interested in Creative Cloud.
I probably won't be a customer though: I have invested a lot of time learning Final Cut Pro 7 and the combination of expense and the getting up to speed time is a deal breaker for me.
There actually was a Photoshop Light: Photoshop LE. I got a free copy of Photoshop 5.5 LE along with a Wacom tablet. It really was a stripped down Photoshop. Imagine someone had sprinkled #ifdef PHOTOSHOP_LE everywhere and then said "Ship it!"
It was nearly the perfect product for me. The only really annoying limitation was working with a single step of undo/redo. I taught me to be very deliberate with my brush strokes. :D
This is a surprisingly common strategy for shrinkwrapped software. I interviewed at Chief Architect once. (http://www.chiefarchitect.com/). They have one codebase. They have about a dozen products overall though, which are all selective builds of the same codebase. Now instead of just selling $2000 software to professionals, they can sell $60-$600 software to hobbyists. Kind of funny thinking about how much money the humble #ifdef has made the software industry, eh?
Pixelmator has a UI that rivals Photoshop in many areas.
They're ok for totally free, but are a pain in the ass to use or missing some fairly obvious things (e.g. being able to set the radius of a rounded corner in Paint.Net).
And I say that as someone who rarely uses them, I can't imagine how annoying they are for proper designers.
It's a pity. I find it far more useful for the work I do than any of the other suite apps.
http://www.adobe.com/content/dotcom/en/products/fireworks/fe...
http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks/buying-guide-version...
[EDIT] 28 months (original post said 28 weeks. apologies for my bad maths and thanks to all those who corrected me.) [/EDIT]
Months, not weeks. You'd have to use the standalone version for 2 years and 4 months before it became more cost effective. And that assumes that a new version doesn't come out in that time.
You'd have to use it continuously for that time. If you use Photoshop less frequently, ownership makes even less sense. For example, I use Photoshop maybe every few months. It would take me a lot of years of $30/mo to get to $578. And I'd be happier with Adobe when I got there, because I'd be on a current version of the software.
I hope they don't mess this up with crappy DRM, like in their standalone CS editions.
No kidding. Adobe is a prime example of a company that doesn't understand DRM. I don't need your application to constantly hog my bandwidth after I already gave you several hundred dollars.
I decided to delay any further spending with Adobe for as long as possible after how sorry their install/DRM process was for legally-licensed CS4.
Looks like it could be a very sensible option then! At least, if you feel like you are going to need all the latest features of the newest version of photoshop and can't just 'make do' with CS5.
I think it's pretty attractive, especially considering updates will likely be automatically included in the subscription.
More importantly, creative suite is now affordable for a huge range of people. Freelancers, students and small businesses can now afford a legal and full version.