Creative Cloud outage leaves Adobe users unable to work

Most likely just the crack...sometimes they come with additional crap and people (who are none the wiser) click on it and get something bad installed.

Everyone who seriously considers moving mission-critical software or infrastructure to the cloud should (if they don't already) have a contingency plan at the forefront of their evaluation of any platform/service. Evaluations of solutions like that take away much of the risk that you're proposing. It's also just smart business.

The problem here was that they added DRM to it to make sure you can't use it if you don't have an active subscription and those 'call home' servers failed.

It is more of a DRM problem than a 'cloud' problem.

http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/pubs/Barnes_2009_PAR/patchmatch....

Does anyone know if Pixelmator is using the same technology, or is it something new?

Pixelmator is good, but Mac/OSX only. It also doesn't have adjustment layers, meaning that if I want a layer to be black and white, I'd have to open it up separately, desaturate, then import it back in as a new layer, delete the old one and rearrange.

They finally have a 16bit color, and apparently the content aware fill is coming.

But it's not Photoshop, and I've seen first hand how designers decry Sketch as inferior, not on its merits, but on the bad habits and false friends that Photoshop offers.

I've personally been on a path to rid myself of Adohe Products for years, and that means trying new things, learning new software and celebrating things that are different to what Adobe offers.

Also, Pixelmator does a great job of picking up the slack. I'm comfortable with the idea that i need two apps to design UIs. Sketch feels so much more focused because it's not dealing with image manipulation, and Pixelmator is so much more performant than Photoshop that I'm constantly reminded just how powerful my Mac actually.

For anyone up there looking for replacements to Adobe software, you won't find anything worthwhile. But if you're willing to consider alternatives, there's a lot of choice.

in the event of a theft, I can walk into an apple store, purchase an in stock macbook, let time machine recover for ~30 minutes, and get back to work

edit: just to be clear, I bet the vast majority of users will, even after this 24+ hours, experience less net downtime. Nonetheless, when I need to hit a deadline, with installed software, I have a viable plan b. The viable plan b here appears to be to grovel before clients whose deadlines you've blown...

Err.. what? I confess I've not looked into Adobe too closely, but why would you keep your data (only) on their servers? You'd need backup -- just as you'd have to have backup in place for your personal machines.

A typical scenario is a photographer that edits images -- you have maybe a terabyte of data you need access to, and have backed up, in the day-to-day -- and you need access to editing software.

Also, you seem to misunderstand -- I'm not saying I won't use or pay for SaaS (be that Software or Storage as-a-service) -- I'm saying I want a viable self-host alternative -- where self-host might mean that I can pay someone -- anyone -- to get things up and running quickly if I need it, and not be limited to whatever support any one vendor is willing/able to provide.

Now, personally, I'd probably take self-hostable to mean there's a tested ansible recipe that I can plug into a fresh vps, and be up and running. But not everyone wants to, or knows how to, be their own sysadmin -- but having someone guarantee that, yes, if you need it, this and that company can get you up and running in an hour for $amount.

> Here people can't work, but imagine the amount of work if there was a data failure on your machine? Your example (laptop being stolen) means you probably don't even have access to your data.

Ok, so lets say we're a small team of 5 non-technical designers, and I've lost my laptop. I have yesterdays backup, and my team mates can work. I'll have to spend an hour installing Photoshop on a new macbook pro I went to the store and got. Maybe an hour restoring backups or whatever. Lets say I loose 4 hours of work, and make up 2 in the evening. So we've lost one quarter of a total of 5 work-days today, due to catastrophic failure.

Now consider this outage: the whole team is down, and we've lost (more than) 5 work-days. If there was a viable self-host option, maybe we could've all squeezed in 6 hours of work after throwing dollars at Whomever Inc to set up a fallback solution for us. Also much better than all eggs in one basket.

I think this is the fundamental fallacy that SaaS companies are promoting.

Objectively, the answer is quite obvious in my experience: self-hosted systems are much more reliable than external ones, as soon as you have a reasonably competent person to run them and a second person with basic competence who can take over in an emergency if the first person is not around.

For a start, one of the most consistently unreliable things in many business environments I've worked in was the Internet connection. Workmen cut through underground cables while they're building the new office block down the road. Someone at your ISP accidentally disconnects you while they're in the cabinet hooking up their new customer. Someone moves in across the street with a badly configured wireless router and screws up the wireless frequency for everyone until the regulatory agency gets someone on-site to track down the problem and make them fix their router a week later. Relying on any Internet-based service for something you need full-time adds one more potential point of failure with a demonstrable risk that it will actually fail from time to time.

That is quite separate to the unfavourable track record of many large cloud/SaaS/PaaS companies, including almost all of the big names, compared to running systems in-house. I was genuinely surprised by some of the comments when GitHub was down the other day, where some people were complaining about not even being able to push changes to production because they were so entangled in dependencies on GH and related on-line services like CI systems that they couldn't extricate themselves.

And I don't need banking 24/7 to do my job. I don't need water 24/7 to live, especially if an outage is made public in advance. I am (too) dependent on electricity -- but there are alternatives if I need them (eg: rent/buy a generator and gasoline -- probably not viable in a massive blackout, though. At any rate it is certainly easy to plan for (and not too expensive)).

So most of these fall squarely in the "viable alternative" or not-essential (24/7) category.

I get that cloud storage people think of themselves as the utility providers of the future, after all it makes instinctive sense to want to own something which consumers will spend their whole lives on. I've been in meetings where SaaS people gave presentations saying stuff like "...and in the near future the average person will spend 60% of their total income on cloud services; let's make that future happen!"

The difference is of course that after a power outage or after changing your utility providers, everything is back to normal - but after a little "cloud accident", all your stuff is simply gone. Worse, suppose in that glorious cloud future a person might end up in a situation where they can't make those substantial payments to their cloud providers for a time. All their stuff will be gone, as well. It turns out, we're being re-educated to accept a world where everything is just rented, not only including the stuff we "bought", but also the right to keep our very own creative output. Let the severity of that sink in for a minute.

We're drifting into a setting where basic properties of our digital lives are taken and then rented back to us at a horrendous markup.

1. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#SaaS

Not necessarily true. I'd argue that banking is much less centralized (clearing behind the various banks you might choose from is, of course, but in the meanwhile I can get most of what I need done if their independent system is up), and I grew up on a property at the edge of my town of ~50K with only electricity and phone as centralized services. We were on our own for everything else, water from a well, sewage treatment with a septic tank, heating from a big propane tank, which can be filled by various vendors, although the systems behind them are centralized, but there's plenty of reserves so that short term outages aren't an issue, we even burned our trash....

A lot of us believe in having a greater degree of self-reliance, e.g. I do backups to disk and LTO tape (some tapes of which live in a safe deposit box), and use rsync.net, a very low level SaaS provider for further redundancy.

I'd never allow my livelihood to depend on 24x7 external services except for electricity (no electricity == no modern civilization, which would eventually kill me for medical reasons).

As a user I hope they fail. As a traditional desktop software vendor I hope they succeed.

Having worked with designers I'm going to disagree. For most designers Photoshop or Illustrator are the only tools they'll even consider using because they're so much more powerful than the competition. That's changing a little with things like Pixelmator, but even then people have to learn a new workflow after decades of using Photoshop.

In the sense that "trust in a single entity as a single point of failure" - sure. Adobe can cut you off for any number of reasons, an outage being just one.

> When S3 is down, I don't remember seeing more than a few comments in the 'you should have self hosted your data' line .

One of those comments might have been mine. Still, I'm not saying that you should self-host, I'm saying you should use solutions that you could realistically self-host should the need arise.

So if you use s3 for your (non-web-related) data, maybe have riak-cs ready to go as a backup (it's a bit of a contrived example, because you probably either need a "cloud fs" of some sort, or mercurial/git or whatnot, not "s3" to be able to keep working).

I absolutely think one should have an alternative ready if one is heavily based on amazon -- at least have the option to spin up a minimal set of equivalent services as an openstack/nebula solution.

There are many reasons why you might get into trouble with any one provider, not just that their infrastructure goes down. If they hold all your data (and your backups) -- you pretty much have no leverage at all.

[1]: http://bohemiancoding.com/sketch

It's like Apple's Numbers compared to Microsoft's Excel - there are things that the most sophisticated couple of percent of users will miss, but for most people it's a great alternative.

Adobe can't die quick enough to make me happy.

True, Quark was unable to "change their stripes" and crashed and burned. Contempt for customers (and also contempt for their own US-based developers) came from the top.

However, programs like Photoshop are the result of thousands of man-hours of development. Perhaps even thousands of man-years! It's difficult to compete with that.

What does a startup's business plan look like? Perhaps:

   Adobe is led by a bunch of dickheads who are
   alienating their customers. We think there's an
   opportunity for a more enlightened competitor
   to take market share.

Adobe gained market share from Quark during a time of transition in the industry. Quark was slow to transition their software to OS X. But now? OS X is stable and Apple isn't making any major changes. The only new thing is "the cloud". Which, ironically, is where Adobe just stumbled. But Adobe could trivially fix that, literally overnight!

Adobe software is ingrained in every business, I personally know people who would have lost thousands or tens of thousands of dollars due to this if they had upgraded from their CS6 versions to CC. There's no option for them to change to anything else even if they had.

...

why would you do that to yourself!?

http://www.slideshare.net/alekbr/cap-theorem

There is a guy, David Revoy, that uses only free software to do it's job, and it seems successful at it. http://davidrevoy.com/

99% of the time, I just need to crop an image to a certain size. GIMP is actually much better than photoshop for this particular exact task. Nice UI for resizing the selection box in place. Other simple tweaks - brightness/contrast etc - are handled perfectly competently.

It certainly isn't a drop-in replacement for the sort of magic 'proper' photoshoppers do. But for a semi-competent web-monkey like me, it suffices perfectly well on those occasions when imagemagick is too blunt an instrument.

Vector to bitmap conversion sucks, though. Seriously, if IM can do this without pixellating everything to buggery, why not GIMP?

http://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/cs6._sl_id-contentfilt...