Adobe abandons its Creative Suite to focus on Creative Cloud
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However, this totally kills my hobbyist usage at home about three to five years from now. I only ever use Photoshop, Illustrator, and occasionally After Effects for my independent design projects, and was finally able to justify upgrading from CS4 to CS6 a few months ago. A few hundred dollars every few years is worth it to pursue my own experimental work.
But I'm not going to justify $50 per month for that, and I have a hard time imagining others justifying it. I think Adobe just priced themselves solidly out of the prosumer market.
(Just to add a little math to this: A $700 upgrade every three years comes to $20/month. If Adobe can offer an a-la-carte Creative Cloud where I can get three or so apps when CS6 finally no longer cuts it, I suppose this will ultimately be a non-issue.)
Comparing 10 hours use of Photoshop per month vs hiring somebody for minimum wage for a month?
That's not even Apple's to Oranges, it's Apples to Universes.
Now I'm a nearly-40 year old software engineer with enough disposable income to flatter myself by upgrading Creative Suite on the trailing edge, but hell will freeze over before I pay for Creative Cloud at those prices.
Adobe have also screwed over Audition in the later versions to the point where I'll just use Cubase in preference; so much for the fast, elegant, simple workflow they inherited from CoolEdit.
Is the market big enough for people who aren't willing to spill $50 for the full suite? Will those of us who just drop using the apps because of price balance out to those who have now picked it up for the exact same reason?
Every kid who had some desire to edit images pirated Photoshop, and thus they get used to using that particular tool.
If they actually end up working in a real business doing this for a job then they will demand the use of Photoshop because it's what they already know and few businesses pirate their software.
Photoshop has always been way too expensive for hobbyists or people just dipping their toes in the water. The people who pirated it and got serious about it eventually bought a copy, but the people who said "that's nice" and uninstalled it never would have paid for a copy anyway.
This will make their numbers look good in the near future, but I'd stake cash money that it's going to screw with their long-term user base.
Except the entire industry claims that the number of people that would have bought it if they could not have pirated it is GREATER than the number of people that pirated it, used it as some kind of month or year long trial-ware, and eventually paid for it.
My own experience - the day a warez copy came out on Google's front page results for my software, was the day sales got cut in half, and stayed cut.
People pirate because it's easy to do, and fewer people will buy it if it's being given away for free by some site that generates its revenue from stealing other peoples work and showing you ads in the process.
For students they have heavily discounted licenses and I know a few low-quality(I don't know anyone worth their salt who pirates it), professional graphic designers who use pirated copies. It is lost revenue and if they wanted to provide demos that should be up to them not the pirates.
As Marc Andreessen has noted:
"The behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed from the outside. I always laugh when someone says, "Microsoft is going to do X", or "Google is going to do Y", or "Yahoo is going to do Z". Odds are, nobody inside Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo knows what Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo is going to do in any given circumstance on any given issue.
...
"The inside of any big company is a very, very complex system consisting of many thousands of people, of whom at least hundreds and probably thousands are executives who think they have some level of decision-making authority. On any given issue, many people inside the company are going to get some kind of vote on what happens -- maybe 8 people, maybe 10, 15, 20, sometimes many more.
...
"You can count on there being a whole host of impinging forces that will affect the dynamic of decision-making on any issue at a big company.
...
"You can't possibly even identify all the factors that will come to bear on a big company's decision, much less try to understand them, much less try to influence them very much at all."
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:4jwZiwL...
My point still stands that it is their product and it should be their choice even if they piss it away.
I've been using Illustrator for about ten years. It's my main artistic medium; I'm currently engaged in drawing a comic book entirely in it. I'm at the point where I can pretty confidently say I've mastered it.
I've been paying for Illustrator for about five or six years. When I started using it, I was not a student, and there was no way I could afford a full-price legal copy.
If I hadn't pirated it, I would have not learnt it to the point where I could make enough money using it to buy it and keep it up to date. I would have used some other program, or gone with physical media. And I would not have been buying the thing for the past several years.
You'd be surprised.
I suppose it depends on your definition of 'professional' but I know a few. Maybe not in the AE realm but among web designers and graphic artists, and especially freelancers and small business owners...
As I said, what is good is that the lower end of the market may have been opened up.
For my benefit, please explain what is wrong with his rationale.
I welcome the day I don't have to use photoshop just because that's what the designer used.
I don't see how this accomplishes that. The programs still get downloaded to people's desktops where they'll be able to be cracked in a way that allows for unauthorized installations. The whole "cloud" terminology with their Creative Suite doesn't require any sort of always-connected status to use their apps. You literally just download and install like any other application.
If anyone thinks that when whatever CS7 equivalent comes out that there won't be cracks in the usual places just like CS6, they're sorely mistaken.
“upgrading from CS4 to CS6 [...] A few hundred dollars every few years”
As you use Photoshop, Illustrator, and AfterEffects, that means you probably have the Production Premium or Master Collection bundle. Upgrades for those bundles did not come cheap.
Adobe releases a new major version of CS every year, and has done so since CS3. CS4 is 5 years old. If Adobe kept its perpetual upgrade plans, you would have to first upgrade to CS6 to be able to upgrade to this year’s version (‘CS7’) – having to buy two upgrades would’ve cost way more than $700. Instead, Adobe gives users of CS3 or newer a discount to Creative Cloud, all Adobe apps for $30 a month.
If GP were to upgrade now from CS4 to CS6, he would also have to upgrade to CS8 next year (if Adobe still offered perpetual upgrades). That would be more expensive than Creative Cloud, he would get less apps, and fewer updates.
I started using Photoshop at version 2.5 and Illustrator at version 5, but I had forgotten that the upgrade policy used to be more liberal and that Adobe’s installers weren’t atrocious. It’s all coming back to me now. On the flipside: stupid ATM and screen fonts, buggy QuarkXpress, monitors with thousands of colors, and having to do preflight – ugh.
Some things really have improved. The Creative Cloud application installer is a delight. Updates are released often and the updating process is painless. No more hassle dealing with DVDs and serial numbers. Also, international pricing used to be way out of whack with US prices, the difference is a lot smaller now.
For folks like me, who bought the Master Collection once, and then upgraded every year, the Creative Cloud is way, way cheaper.
At $600/year, it's roughly competitive with upgrading to a new version of one of the Premium collections every 18 months. It's more expensive than upgrading to the latest Design Standard has been on that timeframe.
I'm a professional animated filmmaker, and I've spent most of my career using versions of Adobe products that were two or three versions behind the cutting edge. Aside from the DeBlur tool, for example, I don't even know what's in CS6.
There are many casual Adobe CS users within companies, and it's cheap and effective to virtualize the app and provide it to employees for limited periods.
Creative Cloud basically delivers this functionality to everyone, with a licensing model that makes it more challenging to cheat.
Pixelmator[1] (replaced Photoshop) Currently $15
Artboard[2] (replaces Illustrator) $29
Scribus[3] (Cross platform - replaces InDesign) $Free
These apps serve me well for basic Web/App Art, my resume, and the occasional flier. The only thing I do miss is the Illustrator XAML export plugin for when I work on WPF/Silverlight stuff.
If you're going to throw away all your muscle memory anyway, I'd suggest looking at Acorn. http://www.flyingmeat.com/acorn/
http://www.bohemiancoding.com/sketch/
It's not a look alike of photoshop, it's entirely redesigned and is fabulous and worth it.
It's my go-to app for fast tasks while still being powerful enough to do more serious things. Not to mention it has rock solid scripting support too.
Gimp - Raster Graphics - http://www.gimp.org/ Inkscape - Vector Graphics - http://inkscape.org/
But, it's primary advantages (open source, powerful) are what have led to its limited use. Like many open source projects, the interface is designed pragmatically, like emacs or vi, but this is a problem -- no professional has the time or the money to learn a complex UI.
The same goes for LibreOffice. Extremely powerful with a ton of untapped potential, but untapped nevertheless due to a dated and unintuitive UI. Inkscape and Scribus are better in this regard, and I've seen many professionals use them with outstanding results.
I've been able to create vectors with Inkscape without much difficulty. I can't say the same about Gimp. If someone really had the time and the dedication, they could re-engineer the entire frontend of Gimp from scratch for each platform, while leaving the excellent backend in place, but I doubt any sane individual would be able to do so without the help of the original developers due to the lack of full documentation available.
Still, it's worth trying. It's got 90% of the features of Ps but with 100% fewer dollars paid for it.
The education system (at least here in Australia) heavily focuses on Adobe and Microsoft products, so high school kids are familiar with them from a youngish age. If they were taught general principles of word processing or photo editing, perhaps with a few different programs, then I feel that everybody would be better able to cope with different UI's much more easily.
Incidentally, (as a non-professional) I found Gimp much easier to grok than Inkscape or Scribus (coming from a Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign education/background).
One might be able to say the same thing of PS, but it has the weight of history and industry acceptance behind it.
Also, the name is not liable to cause embarrassment in some circles. At least PS is a marketable name.
But mostly it's that UI.
Honestly, I've used both for about as long as each other, I find both to be equally annoying to use. Much prefer to use Inkscape or Fireworks, but fireworks doesn't come installable as a Deb and doesn't work natively on a Linux based Operating System so I don't care for it.
They even have a PSD plugin: http://psdplugin.codeplex.com/
http://blog.getpaint.net/2013/03/30/paint-net-4-0-brushes-an...
This is an absolutely essential feature for any serious graphics work. GIMP is far better at the same price (free) and also supports PSD.
A year's subscription is less than what I bill per day and I have access to every app that they produce. I can run it on my laptop, my other laptop, as well as my desktop machine that just gathers dust these days.
As someone who has used Photoshop since Version 3.0, I can say, with some authority I guess, that the current version is really, really good. Except for the crop tool. The crop tool sucks. It sucks so bad I had to write a replacement stand alone app. All they need to do to fix it is put the image resizing step back in, instead of having to do that separately.
Their other apps are also improving in quality from a low point of a few years ago. Premiere is solid, After Effects is way faster than the previous version, Prelude and SpeedGrade are a little inaccessible but once you learn the non-standard UIs are useful tools. Illustrator is still a bit of a drag though. I don't touch InDesign unless I'm designing a photo book for Blurb.
And then there is the whole extensibility of the suite that most people don't get too involved in, but I do. We started out writing some pretty heavy javascript extendscript stuff to do asset prep but have since moved on to Flex + Adobe Creative Suite Extension SDK. Was kind of gnarly to get going, but once going has allowed us to extend Photoshop into a full blown authoring tool for the kind of retail iPad apps we build for clients. What once took us about 2-3 weeks to build, now takes about a day thanks to that.
So, +1 Adobe.
> I can run it on my laptop, my other laptop, as well
> as my desktop machine that just gathers dust these days.
I get weary of software that I have to bind to an active account indefinitely.
There are use-cases that are no longer possible.
1) What if I wanted to get my 14 yo artistic niece Photoshop/Illustrator for her birthday? Now I would have to either pay $50 a month (for her), in the assumption she would get value out of it. At what point would I then transfer the subscription over to her should she want to become professional in it?
2) Let's say I bought After Effects with a retina mac and then in a year decide to sell it all on craigslist? Maybe I had a dream of becoming a movie director only to be put on hold because my father went into the hospital and I needed to be there for my mother?
3) A high school with older macs from 5 or 6 years ago has a small lab with Adobe Photoshop that was donated to them through an art grant. It's meant to be used to teach kids about photo retouching and color blending (things that have been in Photoshop for a decade if not more).
I never minded when Adobe adopted strict licensing DRM because it didn't remove use-cases. Maybe someone from Adobe can shed light on how switching to a subscription only model will benefit anyone other than them? Is that not taking a step backwards?
For just one app, it's $20/month. So you would pay $240 per year. You'd have to pay triple that and more to buy it -- and the "artistic niece" might not even use it that much at all. At least this way you can cancel.
The main difference is instead of getting him a box, you get him a one or two year subscription. And also that it's cheaper.
>2) Let's say I bought After Effects with a retina mac and then in a year decide to sell it all on craigslist? Maybe I had a dream of becoming a movie director only to be put on hold because my father went into the hospital and I needed to be there for my mother?
Then CC is great! You only pay for as long as you use it. No need to pay a fortune beforehand and then have to put it up on Craigslist.
>Maybe someone from Adobe can shed light on how switching to a subscription only model will benefit anyone other than them? Is that not taking a step backwards?
Me for example. I can now get all those apps for $50 per month AND be constantly updated. No need to fork $2500 now (which is how much the Ultimate version costs), and like $1000 every 18 months to get the newer version.
People pay $20 or $100 dollars for their VPS per month, $20 for Basecamp, $10 for Dropbox and such. How is $50 that much more?
Photoshop is the only Adobe product I use as a web developer, and I've been using it less and less as I do more backend and client architecture and less design implementation. For my needs, Creative Cloud is a really bad deal.
Creative Cloud might be a great value to people who use lots of Adobe products, and good for them. But even if this were a good value to me, I still wouldn't buy it. I do not trust software as a service, at least for software that runs solely on my own workstation. Unless Adobe wants to subsidize the cost of my own hardware, I don't believe that their subscription model benefits me as a consumer.
I think Creative Cloud will present an interesting challenge to the Open Source community. Open Source alternatives to Photoshop have kind of languished in recent years, and I wonder if Adobe abandoning traditional software licensing will spur new free software development.
$20 a month it's all that much money for a business product. You may be paying close to that for reliable hosting with all the perks or for some virtual servers for testing.
Yeah, like having to make useful features that customers would actually want to pay for.
Fuck capitalism, eh? Just pay your taxes and we'll give you what we think you want.
So, maybe, just maybe, they convinced me to upgrade. In a way.
I always used to pirate Adobe software, but the monthly pricing is very reasonable and you get all the Adobe software for the price, rather than web/print/video bundles like they used to. They've really turned around and made this pirate into a customer.
I might shell out $50, though, and if I find I'm using it often, great. If not, I'll cancel and I'll have only spent $50 for a legitimate use case.
But you are correct that if someone only wants Photoshop, they only pay $19.99/month with no annual commitment.
The $19.99 for photoshop is with an annual commitment, it's $30 without it.
A one-time $1200 fee is a non-starter. There's no way I'm paying that much money for a product that I'm not even sure I'll use next month.
$50 (or, as I've been corrected by others -- thanks) $20 to try it out? That's a much easier decision.
Its $30 without the annual commitment.
It's a better deal than paying $1000 all at once and you can stop paying at any time. From an accounting perspective, nothing really changes because the subscriptions are basically equivalent to depreciating a boxed copy of CS.
Where this model doesn't make sense is for businesses that don't upgrade CS every 2 years. In that case, the subscription model is more expensive.
The cost of Creative Suite bundled in losses from piracy. A Creative Cloud subscription costs pretty much exactly what Creative Suite does--without having to compensate for losses to piracy.
Adobe should have provided incentive to switch by dropping the price. If they can truly eliminate piracy then their profits wouldn't be hurt by dropping the price substantially. Doing so would also generate a lot of good will among users.
Keeping prices high with no other option will just encourage new forms of piracy that much sooner. Until now, pirates could just ignore Creative Cloud. No more. I expect we'll see cracked activation proxies within a few months.
The moment adobe started requiring 'activation' for their software was the moment that I decided not to buy it anymore.
I think this is going to put a big dent in piracy of adobe products going forward, provide a large window for competitors to provide products to people that don't want a subscription, and give the users some really great benefits of using cloud products.
It's one example of a company moving forward and doing good because it has a mostly captive audience and it's a win,win,win.
So if their account is being using for wide spread piracy it will be shut down quickly and that individual will personally be out money and not have access to the service. This still allows for small scale sharing --onsies twosies kind of stuff.
However this won't stop piracy of old software only the software going forward.
This makes a lot of assumptions, but I think it's basically correct.
I'd argue that's not as simple a change to turn around - not without doing a lot of fundamental plumbing into a very heterogenous set of grody old codebases - even if they do successfully end up booting out the cobwebs in PS and AI, what about replicating that effort in the ever-so-slightly different ID? And then for the Macromedia products? So I don't suspect they'll do anything radically different with this implementation of cloud software - they'll just push the Adobe Updater to the fore. (Although I shouldn't be expecting it: if they do something else that's more invasive then I'll have brought it on myself...)
The more interesting question is whether the pirates'll bother to keep up with the updates at all - and if they can't, what that could possibly mean for Adobe.
At best, I'm assuming it will be an auto updating login, and the cracks will revolve around jumping the login screen.
That's not how it works. You have the binaries on your machine and then it phones home periodically to auth (at minimum once per month or six months, the FAQ is confusing).
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/faq.html#how-wor...
> You will need to be online when you install and license your software. If you have an annual membership, you'll be asked to connect to the web to validate your software licenses every 30 days. However, you'll be able to use products for 180 days even if you're offline.
Then I love this definition of "in the cloud". Even desktop apps are now "cloud" apps!
http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud/tools-and-servic...
Yes they are. Obviously online storage/sharing features require network access to function, but otherwise all features are available without network access.
> Downloading the binaries that are installed locally is not zero-cost/zero-time; anyone whose primary access is, say, 3G is going to waste the better part of a month's allotment on installation and upgrades.
I agree they should have a physical purchase option for people without appropriate internet access (Apple had to do the same thing with their last update that was download only at first). Updates would be the same in either case, no matter what version you have currently you don't get mailed DVDs containing new camera profiles when they are released...
> And >180 days disconnected (or only having hyper-expensive satellite access) is not as far-fetched as you might think; many of the fine-art landscape photographers I know pretty much make their livings on that kind of a schedule.
I completely agree and apparently Adobe is willing to work with you if you are off network for long periods of time (by calling customer service). It seems like a pain, but this is the future of software so if this is your work schedule you should prepare for lots of headaches.
The pricing seems off to me for a suite where most people only use a few of the apps (personally a 2-app package would be ideal, I could care less about 90% of Adobe's apps). Despite the name, Adobe doesn't get the "cloud" and I am hoping a competitor who does pops up.
Artistic careers usually aren't extremely stable, revenue-wise.
Before Creative Cloud, it was possible for an artist to buy all the tools they needed in a boom period, and then keep using them no matter how pear-shaped their income situation got. (Bear in mind that in the film world, for example, clients simply not paying at all is close to routine.)
Now, if your revenue stream dries up, your tools go away, and you're completely fucked.
It's also cheaper, so just keep the cash in the bank and pay per month.
That artists will keep their tools at the latest version at all times - they don't. Often, they're still using a version of Photoshop three upgrades old. At that point, Creative Cloud is a lot more expensive.
That they get paid in advance. They don't, always. Particularly if you're creating something for consumers, you get paid after creation. However, if your tools have gone away, you can't create, which means you can't get paid, which means you can't buy the tools, which means... Yep, you're screwed.
That all artists are really good with money and financial planning. They aren't. I know you'll probably say "well then, they deserve to have no tools". Sadly, I've never seen that artistic ability directly correlates to business sense, and I'd rather that brilliant artists don't end up stopping producing work I enjoy, regardless.
On that note, that dry periods never go on for longer than the old purchase price of Photoshop / duration of dry spell * monthly cost of Creative Cloud. If a dry spell does go on for that long, even if you saved up the purchase price of Photoshop and dilligently pay it month after month, you're screwed.
Not true:
Amazon list price for CS6 Photoshop today: £631. CC price for 3 years: £632. With no upfront outlay.
> That they get paid in advance.
Surely if they have a problem with cash flow, it is advantageous to not have to outlay capital? So "pay as you go" makes much more sense. This is why start-ups use the cloud.
> That all artists are really good with money and financial planning.
This is true - but part of making a living by being an artist is also having a decent head for business.
I think it's a great move and will benefit independent designers and creators hugely.
First: the price keeps coming down. Now you can get Photoshop or Premiere for $10/month. That is much cheaper than buying a copy every two years.
Next: I know indie film-makers who have pirated Premiere. They simply don't have any money to pay for it, but have sworn to buy a copy if they ever make any money from it. This complete ends this argument - even those working short bar shifts can afford a copy. So they contribute in the short-term, and we all get a fuzzy warm feeling knowing that programmers at Adobe are getting some of our cash.
The educational discounts are huge. I've always wanted to use Premiere and Photoshop, but have never been able to afford the capital outlay (being a lowly post-doc), and am not a big fan of pirating things. I'm going to sign up today for CC.
I think this business model is a lot more sustainable. It gives Adobe a solid stream of revenue and we all get to use the latest versions.
The only improvement I'd like to see now is perhaps one more drop in price, and then a condition whereby those who have been subscribed for a certain amount of time (say, 18 months or 2 years) and cancel their subscription can keep the suite - perhaps with some limitations, e.g. they're limited to the version that was available when they first subscribed, or only a subset of tools are available...
Curious to see what kind of lag issues will occur on a cloud based solution. As mentioned above, it seems more like an anti-piracy issue solution.
While Photoshop is the standard, several other applications exist that do a good job as well. They might lose market share over this move.
Maybe this would be a good time to ask, does anyone know of a 100% compatible way to do PSD -> any open layered format, without Photoshop? Maybe this is a business opportunity, to run a web service whose sole purpose is to open PSD files in photoshop with a custom export script, and then export the layers.
It may help with piracy, but I suspect that's a two-edged sword as well.
Personally, I was an "upgrade every two or three versions" user, which let me use CS for significantly less money, so this will probably just cause me to wait Adobe out.
The cost for the tools I'd previously been using ranged from hundreds to several thousand dollars. Annually. In addition to the expense, additional and advanced features were only available at a significant additional annual cost.
The vendor was also increasingly focusing its efforts on systems I had little interest in using. Despite a multi-platform legacy, much present use is on Windows systems (I've not used these as my principle environment for over a decade now).
I understand why Adobe would do this, and to a certain extent, subscription-based software models offer benefits: upgrades are already paid-in, and you can move users to the current level with fewer constraints (or with no alternative in the case of web-hosted software).
Operating in multiple markets, with multiple propensities to pay, and freely-available competing products suitable to at least some users, this sets up Adobe for a difficult situation.
Not entirely unlike book publishers: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/business/supreme-court-eas...
So, CS5 will be the last version of Photoshop I purchase. I will not subscribe. I will keep using CS5 until I can't and then I'll start looking for alternatives.
If the price comes down so it matches what I was spending before I'll consider the subscription. Or, if the subscription is on a per use basis so if I don't use it for a month or 2 I'm not charged I might consider it but otherwise no thank you.
I'm also leery of subscriptions in that Adobe can basically kill me anytime they want (or anytime they screw up). In other words, I don't like the idea that if their servers go down, if they are hacked, if I'm travelling abroad with a bad internet connection, if they make a mistake, if they just don't like me, whatever, they can stop me from getting work done.
The subscription probably makes sense for pros that use it every day and always upgrade and stay put in one place. It doesn't make sense for me with my usage patterns. (No, PS Elements is not a substitute, nor is gIMP unfortunately).
Edit: here's a blog post too: http://blogs.adobe.com/fireworks/2013/05/the-future-of-adobe...
The big issue was whether Adobe was ever going to be really genuinely willing to address a fundamental tension:
* on one hand, Photoshop has always been a fundamentally flawed tool for screen design (I'd even go so far as to speculate that by now it's cost as much in designer and developer productivity as IE6 ever did).
* on the other hand, it's one of the biggest brands ever and its status as a verb is gives a lot to its owner
I guess today is the day they've announced the other hand wins permanently.
The sad thing is if Fireworks ever had a chance, the creative cloud setup where professionals could play with it extensively at no additional cost might have been the best setup.
Also, does this make it much harder to pirate Adobe products since they require constant activation? If so, I'm not sure if that is a good idea. Photoshop has had a strangle hold on image editing because so many amateurs pirate it at home and then force their boss to buy it at work. It was rumored that Adobe recognized this and actually had no problem with the piracy, realizing that they could make up for it with the high sticker price that legit customers paid. Now that a 14 year old can't pirate PS to muck around with, he might find that other image editors fit his needs and never become a paying Adobe customer.
I paid $700 for Photoshop CS3 on Windows back in 2007, and in 2010 I paid $200 to upgrade to CS5 and switch my license over to Mac. I'll have been using it for 6 years at a total cost of $900, or $12.50/mo. Assuming I don't upgrade for another 2 years, that's $9.38/mo.
With this new system, I'd be paying nearly twice as much without getting all that much more value. Of course I can keep using CS5 for several more years, but my next upgrade becomes a $240/yr decision instead of a $200/3yr decision. It's unlikely that I would pay for it unless no other software can read new PSDs.
Now, Photoshop with rolling updates for $10/mo? I would heavily consider it, although it seems awkward that if I cancel, I'd have to go re-install CS5.
What sucks is them killing apps individually, I thought the creative cloud would allow more obscure apps to be tried without the need to have it supported by it's own sales right away, or some overlap. Fireworks losing out in this does suck. It didn't make sense for Adobe with Photoshop but too bad a competitor doesn't have it.
I think the price is still high for CC, the upgrade price for a year is $30/month but the full price is $50/month after that year, definitely premium pricing. They have to come down or I will bail after this year.
What they did is:
- rename the suite from "Creative Suite" to "Creative Cloud" - dropped one-time purchases of their software - added monthly subscription to the software
Except the payment change of their products they didnt really change anything...
For raw images, it wraps around DCRaw.
Lightzone was formally a commercial product, but was open sourced recently. The original author is currently an Apple employee.
It'd be interesting to see if Google do something in this space, especially after their acquisition of the image editor - Snapseed, and its' creator, Nik Software. Nik from what I'm aware, developed/maintained Nikon's raw editor - Capture NX 2.
I think there is definitely room for something disruptive in this space. Looking over some photography forums, people there are certainly looking and talking about what alternatives to Photoshop are out there.
Oh well, New Coke was a big hit so why not Creative Cloud.
In practice: There is just something I can't deal with when it comes to moving these kinds of tools to the cloud. What happens if Adobe decides to cut the cord 4-5 years down the line? What if they go bust? With CS6, it wouldn't bother me that much. I still have the tool I purchased but I know it just won't be updated. But with this model, I'm suddenly stripped of all my tools and unable to do work until Adobe sorts out the situation or an open-source alternative comes along. Uh-oh
Why is it that financial difficulty makes us feel obligated to give up small, frequent purchases rather than sell large items, even when the cost is the same? Like why is it irresponsible to buy Starbucks coffee while in debt but perfectly okay to continue driving a modern car?
On that note, what if Starbucks sold a year's worth of coffee all at once? Would people's consumption be less subject to the economy?
Emm, how about not telling them?
There's a part of me that's saying that I don't need to continue to pirate Photoshop/Fireworks (I'm not a designer, but I do handle some graphic content for our company), and the other part of me is saying I should still go pirate Photoshop 7 (super lightweight compared to any other PS version.) And, what I mean by that is, not everyone needs to upgrade every version. What happens when shit hits the fan with a version of Photoshop and all the CC customers are forced to upgrade?
The whole Creative Cloud nonsense is just a way to get people paying subscriptions. None of the "cloud" features are at all usable or useful in any design workflow that I've seen. I attempted to use them on the release of CS6, and there's just nothing there. I would love to see even one person using their 20GB of "cloud storage".
Grow up.
I always thought that part of Adobes dominance in this market was to allow some piracy of their product because that's how teenagers learned how to use it.
Adobe then made their money from actual business users who MAKE money from the tools and therefor must have legit licenses. And those businesses use Adobe because their workforce learned it already, and it became the defacto-standard because of that.
Unless GIMP somehow covers all his use cases and can read his PSD files without problems? Unless it's changed since I used it last week, that's false.
Basically, there are scenarios where legit customers are stuck pirating. I own licenses for multiple pieces of software that I can now only acquire through torrents because the original vendor doesn't offer the installers anymore (or wants to force you to paid upgrade to a newer version).
You're not stuck pirating, you're stuck unable to use the software.
The choices are pay for software or use FOSS, you're doing both communities a disservice by pirating.
Morals and ethics aside, your piracy exposes your company to legal threats, which could be costly and painful to your colleagues.
However, it's too bad the updates are still incredibly slow. I joined when CC started and it's taken almost an entire year just to get Retina Macbook support, and there are still a number of apps that don't have it, like Bridge.
I'm glad to see them focusing on the service even more.
Well, it's not like updates come out of thin air, or that shoving more engineers and money at them makes them come out faster. Especially more so for complex software.
All they did was simply update the interface to support it...
PS: I am not arguing that Microsoft is right on all their offerings, only using them as an example.
1. Does this apply only to the Creative Suite, or all of the suites (e.g. E-Learning Suite)?
2. Where does that leave current customers who are on the 2-year upgrade plans? Are we shit out of luck, or can the cost of that plan be applied as credit toward Creative Cloud?
I know this isn't the Adobe Support forum, but just thought I'd throw this out there in case anyone here knows.
I am pretty annoyed that this option is going away. I guess it's more of a perception thing than anything.
Yes, I think this must just be a backlash against the renting model. But people renting cloud servers don't seem too bothered that they don't own the physical machines... perhaps just a cultural shift is required? We fear change.
If anything this makes plugin development easier in the same way developing an iOS app is easier with nearly forced updates. When interviewing design shops, many of them stuck to an 'every other year' upgrade path, so many of them still used CS5 - which meant I also have to buy multiple revisions of CS to support/test everyone.
I'm a bit concerned personally though since this also kills the used market for Adobe products going forward (CS6 sells for only $700 if you look for just used licenses), although I'm hoping the reduced support costs of going cloud will make their products maybe cheaper in the long run.
My only possible concern would be the cloud-based plugins like layervault competing with Creative Cloud's features, but they could serve support for the non-Adobe crowd and support pixelmator/acorn users.
Suffice to say I won't ever be using the "cloud save" crap.
Personally I want streaming documents and live changes. At least some kind of collaboration features to go with my "cloud" ;-)
Look at Business Catalyst. That's hardly a coder or creative friendly platform. There (seems to be - it may have changed) no way to reliably archive your sites unless you spend a grand to become partner, and the templating system is so arbitrary and chaotic as to make it almost impossible (at the very least, impractical) to move a site from BC to another platform (I tried to make a general purpose PHP framework to run a basic site, stitch together the templates, mock up the 'webapps' which are not at all webapps and gave up in frustration.) And look at Muse, the WYSIWYG editor they want people to use with Business Catalyst -- it 'compiles' the html into a proprietary format.
The last thing Adobe are likely to do is something that looks like open source. At the very least, it won't be free.