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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?"
Adobe underestimates how much it benefits from piracy. If poor college students can't cut their teeth on the full Adobe suite, they're likely to learn how to use something else. When those students go out and get jobs, they're more likely to use what they're used to than drop a bundle on Adobe software they've never used before.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Considering AutoCAD's licensing, if Autodesk created a Photoshop competitor you'd wish they'd let you have it for $50/month!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
GiMP should be looking more and more attractive to professionals as this sort of thing goes.
GIMP isn't even competitive with Photoshop CS2 (you know, the one Adobe has available for free downloading on their website...) It's a joke. Still no support for 16-bit per channel after all these years. (And before someone says that you can't see the difference, that's not the point at all – you need 16 bpc to avoid getting banding and other artifacts after repeated transforms. The final output can be 8 bpc, but editing/processing needs to be done at a higher depth for solid results. And even a $499 DSLR can shoot 14 bpc these days.)
The worst thing about GIMP is that its existence leads the FOSS community into complacency. People need to realize that there really is no good open-source competitor to Photoshop and start working on one, rather than pretending that GIMP fits the bill and then arguing with creative professionals who repeatedly point out why it doesn't.
For professional users a subscription makes a lot of sense
Why?
We're already seeing the usual rip-off pricing for non-US customers: Creative Cloud is currently just shy of £50/month in the UK, which works out at about two years to break even compared to the current advertised price for buying the key applications in CS6 outright (a little under £1,200).
I don't want to have my UI move around arbitrarily. I hate it when browsers do that. I hate it when mobile apps do that. I use Creative Suite to earn a living, and I won't tolerate those kinds of tools doing it.
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.
And most of all, I don't trust Adobe not to screw me. When my boot drive failed, they were the only company whose DRM couldn't figure it out and reinstall cleanly after the replacement was installed. It took weeks (and their tech support people who could barely speak English or understand the problem calling me literally in the middle of the night and then wondering why I wasn't impressed, and ultimately the first step toward formal legal action) to get them to fix the problem. As far as I can tell, that problem turned out to be due to completely fictional records somehow magically becoming linked to the serial number of our legitimate, legal copy of the product in their database, which sounds a lot like either an admin screw-up or someone's key generator coincidentally hitting our number, but certainly no fault of ours either way.
I predict with 100% confidence that none of my companies will be giving any more money to Adobe if they go ahead with this. They aren't trustworthy, their pricing model is predatory, and their track record of improvements/bug fixes -- or rather the unspectacular lack thereof -- doesn't speak well of how much value any of us are going to get out of renting our software. If we need more copies of CS for new people, we'll just source legal but second-hand permanent copies of the same version we've already got, as the courts in Europe seem happy that we are perfectly entitled to do.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
yeah.
why dont the mechanics just drive the racecars, too ?
>>You are now stuck on the current version of PS
So what? I use CS2 and while some of the new toys are cool, they're still just toys. There a some tools that might make my workflow a little faster, but nothing that is revolutionary. Certainly nothing that's worth the cost.
Also, the OP isn't betting his company on luck/hope. The software he purchased works. So where's the bet?