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Adobe Creative Suite Going Subscription-Only
First time accepted submitter JDG1980 writes "According to CNET and various other sources, CS6 will be the last version of Adobe's Creative Suite that will be sold in the traditional manner. All future versions will be available by subscription only, through Adobe's so-called 'Creative Cloud' service. This means that before too long, anyone who wants an up-to-date version of Photoshop won't be able to buy it – they will have to pay $50 per month (minimum subscription term: one year). Can Adobe complete the switch to subscription-only, or will the backlash be too great? Will this finally spur the creation of a real competitor to Photoshop?"
Corporate suicide Microsoft style, only they are not nearly as entrenched.
They are doing this already, e.g. Office 365 for $9.99 per month (includes licenses for up to 5 PCs)
My guess is this is a move to combat widespread piracy among home users. The benefit to home user's pirating your software is that people get to know your product, and then want to use it at work. That's one of the big reasons why MS has turned a blind eye to small time home piracy. Those home users aren't going to pay a $200+ license (or a $50/month subscription) so allowing them to pirate doesn't equate to a lost sale, it encourages companies to stick with a product their workforce is familiar with, and it ultimately get the vendor sales through those companies.
Basically I think they may be shooting themselves in the foot, but not in the way the summary implies. The companies who buy adobe products probably aren't going to baulk at the switch (and in fact a subscription makes things easier on start-ups since they don't have the overhead of a much more expensive license). It's going to hurt them because there will likely be less people familiar with their product in/entering the workforce. They can offset that somewhat by giving it away/giving heavy discounts to education sectors, but at the end of the day if the person can't fire it up on their home computer free/cheap it's going to make a difference.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
The main one From Apple itself is Aperture. It's not really a photoshop competitor exactly, but where it does become one is the range of plugins that support it now - pretty much most of the powerful image editing tools have Aperture plugins, so I can do fairly advanced editing in Aperture without ever touching Photoshop.
Aperture is competitive with Adobe's Lightroom, not Photoshop. Neither program supports even basic features like layers, which are necessary for many types of graphical manipulation work. Instead, they're meant as the first step of the workflow for raw image files that have just been taken off the camera.
This pricing seemed off. Sure enough, TFA:
So if you want Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. etc., the suite will be $50/mo. If you only want Photoshop, it's $10/mo. Furthermore, if you really only need software for a month, you can rent the suite for $75.
I can't say I'm a big fan of subscription only (even MS is keeping some purchase options for Office), but pricing like this does create some winners (besides Adobe). Short term projects, for example, may benefit from being able to purchase what was a $2500 package for only a month or two at $75/month. The losers, of course, are those that purchase upgrades infrequently and use their software for years.
Frankly, I'm tempted by $10/mo for Illustrator. The retail box of CS6 is $540, and I have no product from which to upgrade. So for the cost of the boxed version (with its potential resale or upgrade value factored in), I get 4 1/2 years of use of the latest version. One key difference is I can easily drop it after 1 year (and $120), if I don't need it any more. Still, I understand how abandoning box sales will make some people unhappy.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
It seems you don't understand how this model works. I have been operating with Creative Cloud for over a year now and it's nothing like you've described.
I don't want to have my UI move around arbitrarily.
Don't click the update button then... no one is forcing you to take the updates, you're just a luddite if you don't.
I don't want to work more in the cloud. I have invested a considerable amount of money in building a high performance system here, with robust storage, networking, back-ups etc. And my system and devices don't trust anyone outside my company with access to material I'm working on for clients.
I still burden my "high performance system" every day, and even expanded my system to take advantage of the new RayTracing features in After Effects with great results. The software runs locally it's just licensed in the cloud.
Oh theres another huge benefit... the license is platform agnostic. So for the artist who has Windows and Apple they don't have to get screwed by buying two completely different software packages that never stay in sync.
If you can predict anything with 100% confidence it is that you don't know as much as you think you know.
It seems there's a lot of confusion as to what the Adobe Creative Cloud is. I currently subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud at the $50 per month rate. Here's what I get...
Adobe CS6 Master Collection
-- Everything, not just Photoshop
-- Usually around $2600 when purchased as a standalone program
-- At $50 per month, I could only upgrade every 4 1/3 years
-- But I get continuous updates
-- I can install ACC on two computers
-- One can be OSX and the other Windows
-- You can't do this with purchased apps
-- Apps are installed locally
-- Don't have to be online to use apps
-- Unless you're past the current expiration of your subscription
-- Data files are stored locally
-- Don't have to use cloud storage
Subscription options:
-- $20/month - One Application, No Commitment
-- $20/month - All Applications, Annual Commitment, Students and Teachers (K-12 and College)
-- $50/month - All Applications, Annual Commitment (What I have)
-- $75/month - All Applications, No Commitment
So, while you may still have some qualms about a subscription model, remember not to spread FUD or inaccurate information.
I void warranties.
They won because they came to market with a fully-functional new product that had no legacy holdovers, and most importantly ran on OSX. Quark was refusing to build an OSX version of their product, completely alienating their core customer base. Of course it also helps that InDesign could be bundled with and integrated well with Photoshop and Illustrator, which almost every Quark user had running on their desktop as well. Adobe's previous product in the marketplace (PageMaker) had long since died off.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
We feel screwed. Pros use Adobe software, but where the fuck are we going to get the $$$ for that? The administration is saying they want to download the expense to the departments. That would be catastrophic to our already stretched budgets. My guess is we'll bite the bullet for a year while we scramble to find alternatives. Photoshop will be hard to get around...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
1. 16bpc (and 32bpc) (native, pending for GIMP 2.9+)
2. CMYK (Plugin, supporting GIMP 2.4+)
3. Single-window mode for GUI (native, GIMP 2.7.3+)
You only used one out of three, you guys are putting less effort into this as the years go by. Guess Gimp has been winning for a while now :)
Now who's not putting in enough effort? ;-)
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