Same goes for the decision to drop CS and continue with only their cloud-based services: they should've done that about 10 years ago. I can't remember for how long I've been saying I'd be willing to pay monthly for their programs if there only was such a subscription.
And I'm not trying to brag there. I'm meaning to say that it's ridiculous how slow they have moved. I've never met a person who didn't agree with the above.
I wonder how many students would've shelled out 20 bucks a month instead of downloading Adobe's software illegally if they'd done this sooner.
For an educational license, I'd gladly pay $10 for Photoshop. For a commercial license, I'd pay $20, but only if I could cancel at any time.
Or to put it the way Adobe should've thought of it:
Assuming $50 a month (I pay more atm) over the 10 years since I quit school, Adobe could've made 6000 dollars on me.
Instead, they made 0.
(up until they launched creative cloud, that is)
The subscription fees are much more reasonable, but I'd be astonished if the rate of piracy has changed more than a few percentage points.
I wonder if lowering the price to something around $9.99 or $14.99 and dropping the annual contract would grow the user base enough to increase overall revenue.
How is that a substantiated argument?
Tons of people say otherwise -- that they won't go with this new model.
And 10 years ago (when nobody was doing it, so it was even more alien, and internet speeds were lower) a lot more people would have hated it too.
It always had a passionate user base, which was always very small. It, like a font editor, a sound editor, and several other products that were canceled just didn't belong in a big company, but it always just barely survived the "product layoffs"--but just barely. My guess is that the CTO, Kevin Lynch (now at Apple) was personally fond of it and wouldn't let it die but couldn't afford to feed it or pay any attention to it, either. It should have been given to a small, lifestyle software company that would have loved it, cared for it, and lived well off its meager sales.
The big problem was that the Web devs who paid for software always had Photoshop, and most assumed that anything that Fireworks could do, Photoshop could, too, so why buy and learn another photo editor? Before they acquired Macromedia, Adobe always used to spread this FUD, and after the acquisition, they couldn't afford to say anything different about such a small product.
Oh, well. This is now an opportunity for someone much smaller than Adobe to create Fireworks II for that small, passionate market.
Freehand was awesome and Fireworks will be missed, it's too bad Macromedia did get bought by Adobe really, things would be so different. It was great for competition and Flash would have gone native and hardware accelerated much earlier.