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Adobe's Creative Cloud Illustrates How the Cloud Costs You More
Nerval's Lobster writes "As we discussed yesterday, Adobe plans on focusing the bulk of its software-development efforts on its Creative Cloud offering, with no plans to further update its 'boxed' Creative Suite products. The move isn't surprising, considering the tech industry's general movement toward the cloud over the past few years. Creative Cloud will cost $19.99 per month for a 'single app' version that features the full version of 'selected apps,' 20GB of cloud storage, and limited access to services. Those who opt for the 'complete' version will pay $49.99 per month for every Creative Cloud app, 20GB of cloud storage, and full access to services; it also requires an annual commitment. At that price, it would take a little over two years for a customer spending $49.99 per month to exceed the full retail cost of box-based Adobe Creative Suite 6, which currently retails for $1299.99 at Staples and $1100-1200 on Amazon. In a recent interview with Mashable, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen insisted that the Creative Cloud's cost to customers is lower, especially since they won't have to pay for cloud storage and other services — never mind that 20GB doesn't carry anyone far when it comes to visual design. However much customers stand to benefit from the cloud, it's easy to see that, over a long enough timeline, and with the right financial model in place, the companies providing those services stand to benefit even more than they did with boxed software. That's liable to make just as many people angry as happy, no?"
Update: 05/08 03:29 GMT by S :Changed prices involved to reflect standard versions of Creative Suite, rather than the discounted Student & Teacher editions.
"Cloud" storage. And I'm not going to pay for it.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
So you're saying if I want to use Photoshop for a couple months via the cloud (at a cost of $20/month) that's more expensive than buying a shrinkwrapware copy (at $600)?
Please explain.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
De Cloud, de cloud!
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
creativity is to be shared but also protected because usually the artist wants credit for it. now if you are keeping things in "the cloud" (independend who is providing it to you, be it apple, google, adobe, ...) and you intend do work on them, you have to ultimately trust the owner of the clouds servers on your data staying your data. making a small website with holidays pictures is one thing but working with real data for high payed contracts i would never just put the data anywhere in a cloud... after all winds can carry clouds anywhere.
I don't know where they got those numbers from. Photoshop CS6 alone is $627 on Amazon and Design Standard is $1127.98. That makes the $49.99 take more than 2 years to be more than the cost of outright purchasing it.
If they are using Student/Teacher editions or something to make an unfair price comparison, how could you trust anything else in the article?
I say fuck the cloud.
This is what cloud computing is all about. It's not about providing a service to customers that's better than what they can get at their own desktops. It's about returning us to the mainframe days when computing was a service and time on the machine was rented out to users. By refusing to publish popular consumer software and moving it onto the cloud where it can be accessed for a fee, software makers can collect rents from their users forever without even having to improve their software. They can also strictly control what users do with the program, what kinds of files they make and how often, and even monitor what they do, all such activities having their own business case.
The push toward cloud computing, more accurately called centralized computing, is about taking as much control away from the user as possible and selling their computing experience back to them piecemeal at a greatly elevated price. Very few enterprises will actually benefit from this model and most of them are the ones selling, not buying, the software.
Hell, I can buy a 32 GB flash drive for less than twenty bucks and carry it around in my pocket. 20 GB in the cloud isn't even a joke, it's an insult.
The comparison should be made to Adobe CS6 Master Collection which is going for $2,100 on Amazon right now, not the smaller package of CS6 goes for $403.99. Adobe also announced the monthly cost for a single app will be $10/mo. for the first year, not the current $19.99/mo. Similarly, if you are an existing CS3 or higher owner, you can get the first year of everything for $39.99/mo. for the first year. Now I'm not saying whether this is a good or bad change, just pointing out that the summary's numbers aren't accurate.
What F/OSS alternatives are there that are at least functionally equivalent?
Maybe the summary is talking about an academic license. From what I can see, CS6 Master Collection costs about $2100 on Amazon.com. That's a substantial difference, and it changes the proposition considerably. In fact, it reveals the writers entire point to be bogus, at least for typical business users.
We have our full time employees and thus we know we need X seats of Microsoft Office split between Windows & Mac users. Well we're coming up on summer where we will have 3 - 5 interns working for us and bringing their own computers. Office365 gives us the ability to add an extra 3 seats for 4 months costing ~ $150 vs. $1500 to go buy extra seats. Actually one of the interns is a graphics arts major and instead of spending nearly $2k for software to be used by one person for a couple months it's going to cost us around $200 for Adobe Cloud. Usually we sub the graphics design stuff out, but we have a project the students will be working on over the summer. So for us, it gives us great flexibility being able to price things per project as opposed to having to sink large sums of money into software that we may only need for one project.
Now to those like the graphics artist we hire to do most of our graphics work, yeah I can see where they'd be pissed. Many of them I know generally spend $2k and get about 4 years out of the software before upgrading. I still know a lot of professionals still using CS2 because it does all they need and see no reason to upgrade until they absolutely have to.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Worst is the potential for disruption of work. With the non-cloud model, users can upgrade on their schedule. If they're in the middle of a big project, they can postpone upgrading until they've got a few weeks of slack time. With the Cloud version it'll be very easy for Adobe to force upgrades when Adobe, not the user, wants. You can imagine the headaches that could create.
Adobe Photoshop CS6 retails for $599 all by itself.
Creative Cloud @ $50/mo includes:
I begin to suspect that Nerval's Lobster and the slashdot editor Soulskill lack appropriate knowledge to be commenting on this subject.
Everyone is comparing the costs to a NEW full license of the suites or programs, but that's only a small half of the story. Those of us that have already made the investment of a full copy and can upgrade, these changes are a complete RIP OFF.
The cost of upgrading CS5.5 Premium Design suite to CS6 is $375. Cost of Creative Cloud? $50 a month, $600 a year.
We use to only upgrade Adobe suites every 2-3 years, at $375 a pop. Now for the same thing, we must pay $1200-1800 over those two to three years?
That's an increase of 200-250% depending on your suite.
Why is no one bringing this up?
Assuming the executable is on the vendor's computer:
The software only has to be compiled for one architecture - no more Windows/Mac/Linux versions
The user has no installation problems - conflicts with drivers, antivirus, &c
The code can be optimized to the execution machine
The code cannot be pirated
You always have the most up-to-date version of the software
The execution machine is probably better/faster than your personal machine
If the company goes out of business or closes the server, you lose your work
The company can lock you in with proprietary formats that you can't read (ie - you can have the results, but not the intermediate form used by the software)
You're forced to pay for access during months when you don't use the software - or you lose your data
You need to be internet connected to the internet for it to work
You need a reasonably fast internet connection for it to work
You need a reasonably reliable internet connection for it to work
The company gets your real personal info with the subscription (as opposed to purchasing and not registering, or registering with false information)
The company gets to mine your activities for targeted advertizing
These are just off the top of my head - I'm sure others can think of other creative ways the company will use this technology.
All in all it's a great deal for the vendor. For the user, not so much...
Before anybody here recommends the Gimp as an alternative...yes, it's a well-done project, and yes, it admirably suits many people's needs.
But suggesting that the Gimp is a suitable alternative to Photoshop for a creative professional makes you sound as insanely stupid as that accountant who wonders why the company spends all that money on a huge financials package with a massive SQL backend when he could whip up something that works just as well in Excel with a few macros in an afternoon.
There is a serious lack of alternatives in this space; the monopoly Adobe enjoys is akin to AT&T before the breakup. Adobe clearly knows this, and this cloud bullshit is obviously an attempt to (continue to) cash in on said monopoly.
Most people I know are planning on camping out indefinitely on CS6 and hope something shakes free sooner rather than later. Long-shot dreams, such as Google buying Corel and turning PaintShop Pro into a Photoshop competitor, are being desperately wished for.
It's not pretty.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
I want cloud storage! My boss says it's going to be the next big thing to contextualize our value process, so I have to have it! Hmm, let's see:
13 months of Creative Cloud with 20 GB of cloud storage: $650
Infinity months of Creative Suite 6 plus 13 months of 25 GB Google Drive storage: $635
Being able to put non-Adobe files in my cloud storage: priceless.
I wonder how corporations will feel about this. Most companies aren't to thrilled about having cloud services for apps they depend on. And 20GB Cloud, big deal, my corporation has 100s of terabytes for me to use. I don't need the cloud. We have 200+ seats of CS6. Guess we won't be upgrading any time soon.
Company gets greedy, company raises prices, opportunities become more enticing for competitors. Sure it will take the market a little while to react, but if the vacuum at the reasonable end of the price spectrum creates more competition from paid or FOSS alternatives, I'm cool with that.
This is the worst case of anecdotal reasoning I've seen in quite some time.
That someone sticks the term "Cloud" to the name of their product does not make it definitionally indicative of the nature of "the cloud". Insofar as one can even define precisely what "the cloud" is, it is vastly larger in scope than this marketing model and this product. If the comparison was between traditional "boxed" software and SaaS, or for that matter renting the boxed software, then you'd still have the same problems with anecdotal reasoning, but at least your comparison sets would be meaningful.
In this case of Adobe's product, it may perhaps end up being net more expensive, in vastly more cases it is less expensive than the equivalent "boxed" alternative, where such even exists--witness all the "free" services "on the cloud" that require/request only that you view some ads.
Companies will charge the most that buyer perceptions enable them to charge for any given item, always, and although this summary seems to suffer from the perception that they do otherwise (such as "cutting costs to lower your prices", and therefore surmising prices seriously are a function of costs rather than a marketing meme), if anything "the cloud" wins in both respects--downloading efficiency versus shipping boxes of bits, and from offsetting the losses due to piracy of said boxes' contents.
Ech... a general pox on all the layers of slipshod reasoning here, and I'm off.
CS6 will run pretty much for ever unless an OS change makes it not compatible. You stop paying after two years and you got NOTHING. Wanna resumer after a year or two, dig out the Cs6 install and off you go for free.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Can someone enlighten me why you'd want to store or access potentially giant images on their happy shiny 'creative cloud' considering it could take minutes or even hours to load or save a picture/project? It's not like we live in the future where everyone gets a consistent 1GB/second upload/download.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I was wondering how long it would take Adobe to adopt The Steve's model of attaching your industry as a leech to gullible consumers. The Adobe PR machine and its shills will spin this a dozen different ways to make it sound like you're getting a great bargain, but the reality is that if you use this software on a daily basis, you're going to be paying for it on a daily basis from now until the end of time. This is undoubtedly a response to sagging overall sales of what are now rather stale and grossly overpriced products, much as Microsoft has discovered with Office. When was the last time Photoshop got a real upgrade? And don't you love how they keep crippling Lightroom to make sure you have to own Photoshop if you want to do any real image processing? Lightroom arguably has the better UI, but they're not about to port that to Photoshop and cut out the chance of yet another subscription. I honestly don't see a lot of innovation going on at Adobe. Let's hope the Gimp gets to be a little more user-friendly and then we can all ditch Photoshop forever. What a good riddance that would be.
Creative Suite 6 comes in all sorts of different versions. Based on the comparison chart (which Adobe replaced with a link forwarder to Creative Cloud), it looks like the equivalent CS6 version is Master Collection, which is $2100 on Amazon retail, $900 upgrade. So at $50/mo that'd be equivalent to 3.5 years for the initial purchase, and 1.5 years between upgrades (granted $50/mo is their introductory pricing).
Don't get me wrong, I think this is a terrible idea, and am thanking my lucky stars the only Adobe software I use extensively anymore is Lightroom, which for the time being can still be purchased as a standalone version. But for people/companies who actively use the different CS products and upgrade them with each release, it doesn't sound like that bad a deal. It will suck for casual users though. I keep an old copy of Photoshop CS2 around for the stuff I can't do in Lightroom. I feel sorry for the kids graduating now - if they need to touch up one photo in PS, they'll have to pay $20/mo for a year = $240 for that casual use.
Students and Teachers pay less for the cloud offering, just like they get a huge discount on the boxed software.
$29.99/month for the full suite, and you don't even need to be a Master Suite owner to get the upgrade pricing.
Suppose I want to be able to open my documents 10 years from now. I'll just buy a subscription, and how their servers still work? Not a problem really though, since you don't need to open your docs if they vanish with the cloud anyway right?
Assuming that the software exists on the vendor's server, suppose the following:
1) I purchase a subscription to Creative Suite
2) I setup my computer to allow others [that I choose] to remotely use the internet as if from my computer
3) I sell time on my computer to allow others to use Creative Suite from my computer when I'm not using it
4) Profit!
This will clearly be a violation of their terms of service, but isn't it protected under the first sale doctrine? Is there any way that they can enforce a ban on this activity?
A website similar to Craigslist could let people register their computers, the software they have registrations for, and the hours when it will be available. The website would manage time, passwords, and payment. Sounds like a potential business opportunity.
Note that Windows already has most of the features you need for this (keeping the remote user out of your personal files, for example).
While the concept of freedom which lies at the base of the term 'free software' still continues to be misunderstood by many, these nebulous moves by all those entrenched purveyors of proprietary software should make it clear to even the most bone-headed sub-species of manager. Free software means you get to run it the way you want, when you want, however often you want, without any risk of the software suddenly disappearing because you missed a payment or the vendor went out of business or or or...
In short, if the cloud gets so nebulous you can't even see your wallet in your hands any more, just follow the beacon to dot.org which has been shining for years now without you even noticing.
--frank[at]unternet.org
20 GB of storage, with 20GB of bandwidth in each direction is roughly: $2.03 (USD) per month on amazon. So the real added value of this service is a gigantic ~ $24 of savings and connivence... minus the additional $600 you'll spend the next year in monthly licensing.
After a lifetime of pirating Adobe products (young and poor), I was getting ready to buy a CS Suite (I'm gainfully now employed, and can afford it/profit off it)-- but now I think I'll just keep my pirated copy. At least then I'll never have to worry about activation servers going down....
Oh well, at least Photoshop CS 6 is mature enough we can use it for a few more years until people either revolt or some bigger firms start sponsoring more Gimp development.
Adobe will not make more nor less off the "cloud" model vs. the "boxed" model. They will make as much as their software is worth via the laws of supply and demand. I'd their software is great, and the is little alternative, they'll extort a high price. If they try to go too high - people will seek alternatives, even if it is painful. It doesn't matter if they do this via the higher cloud pricing model, or merely by jacking-up their boxed rate.
Cloud/Software-As-A-Service/Web Apps are obvious wins for the Googles/Microsofts/Adobes of the world. They
Adobe's move is not just about locking-in customers, it's about ensuring that they don't have to give Apple and Microsoft a cut of all their sales. Gatekeeper on the Mac and Windows RT are harbingers of Apple's and Microsoft's long-term strategies: force everything through the App store and skim off the top. All the major software vendors are fighting a war and the consumers caught in the crossfire.
wow that's 3 in one day. Adobe, Microsoft, and Faceobok, all going into the deadpool.
Huh? $403.99 is for the Design and Web Premium Student and Teacher Edition while the $49.99/month cloud service gets you the Master Collection for commercial use (currently ~$2100). While it certainly isn't a better deal for everyone (students, those that rarely upgrade or only want a few of the apps), it looks like a great deal for current non-academic master collection users. That said, it seems backwards to substantially lower the price for the customers that can most afford it (commercial master collection users) and jack up the price on students and casual users. I don't blame them for trying the cell phone model though. It's amazing how much people will throw away if the cost is amortized over a long period.
Spending $2k and getting four years of usage isn't a very good deal compared to this new offer.
CS6 Master Collection retails for $2,600, though it's on sale for $2,100 on Amazon. $50/month x 48 = $2,400 so $300 more over those four years. Spreading out the cost of the purchase and getting all updated versions seems like the better deal.
As Bill Gates was just quoted, 90% of MS software in use in the Chinese government offices and in large companies (mostly government owned) is pirated.
If Adobe is doing this to stop piracy in foreign countries that is their choice. That doesn't mean Adobe will be my choice.
I think I will do my light duty image editing in other applications from now on. No way am I going to store images of patent pending proprietary products on Adobe's servers or my own equipment that Adobe can deny me access to whenever I don't come up with their monthly fee, for whatever reason (ever heard of credit card theft and a card is cancelled: been there already).
The graphics artists would simply just extract that difference in the increase in their cost from you the customer. So look for your costs to go up.
Your $400 price quote is disingenuous. That is for student/teacher only. The real price is closer to $1200 so it almost 3 years in reality to make up for that and at that point you are going to upgrade anyway. So come on...lets be a little more real here.
God I hate slashdot...why do I keep coming back
Software subscriptions have been the Holy Grail for decades now. Consumers have generally - so far - been wise enough to reject it in general, but like IP legislation the potential gains are so enormous that corporations will never stop trying to reinvent it in a palatable fashion. Here we go again....
How THEIR cloud costs your more. Not THE cloud.
So they claim that their cloud offering will save money because you won't need to spend money on a separate cloud storage service? Ok, let's suppose you were going to pay for a cloud storage service. I'll pick the one I use: Google Drive. (I'm guessing other providers will be competitive in pricing.) I use their free offering, but let's say I wanted 20GB. 25GB of Google Drive storage costs $2.49 a month. (Source.) Their $49.99 monthly fee could buy you 20 months of 25GB Google Drive.
Suppose you had an extra $49.99 that you were going to spend anyway. How much Google Drive could you get (instead of renting Adobe's software+20GB)? 1TB.
So, depending on how you look at it, Adobe's offering is either 20 times more expensive or 50 times more expensive than Google Drive. How is this saving the customer money again, Adobe??!!!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
"it's easy to see that, over a long enough timeline, and with the right financial model in place, the companies providing those services stand to benefit even more than they did with boxed software."
Not really. Adobe stands to lose a lot of customers. There are alternatives to all of their software. Adobe's move just makes look more closely to the competition.
Adobe Cloud requires an annual commitment. You can't just buy it for the summer.
Unless Adobe actually creates a worthwhile reason to upgrade to newer versions I don't think the majority of people will bother. I would guess that most people wouldn't use a lot of the new functionality offered in even the latest couple of releases let alone whatever half-arsed 'feature' they can dream up for the next few.
I'm a CG professional and I could easily get by using CS4, CS3, CS2, hell even Version 6 for the toolset I use on a daily basis.
Merkin
If you want to use if for a couple of months at $20/month you'll have to steal it.
Or else just use the GIMP, which does pretty nearly everything that Photoshop does. And it's free.
[And before the Photoshop shills burst into flames over this, I'll just quickly mention that yes, GIMP does indeed do CMYK, and if you don't like the default UI, you can easily change it to look like the other one if you want.]
Quark, Corel, anyone else?
I've spent a lot of money, and a lot of time learning Adobe products--and this is how that corporation treats me.
I've got to run the numbers, but I think that I am done with Adobe. Microsoft is Jesus compared to them.
Having control of access to your tools is worth as much as their capabilities..
This isn't about remote storage or connectivity to run software. It's about hammering your pocketbook on a monthly basis. I've run the numbers and this subscription model will more than double the flow of my cash to Adobe. Not.Gonna.Happen.
Bye Adobe. I'll find another way.
I foresee even more rampant piracy than already present in Adobe's future.
Yay! More Adobe scams. Yay scammers! Ship the idiots to Nigeria.
While the subscription model may suit business and professionals, it is the hobbyist who is going to feel it the most.
The GIMP has problems, but it's user interface isn't one of them. Stuff like paths and shapes are a pain to do in the GIMP, but I actually love the muli window layout. I find that on a 30" monitor the best way to use the gimp is to make your image take up the full screen space, then set your tools to always on top so they always float above what I'm working on. I can then access my tools whenever I need to and nothing disappears when I don't want it to. It's a brilliant system, very easy to work with.
My spouse is a graphic artist who depends on this product. He says his employer has no intention of switching to this product nor will they support it. This is a major event as he works for a packaging design company that serves most of the Napa valley wine industry and Apple. He has heard similar talk from other creative companies. No one is buying into this model. He theorizes that Quark will offer a boxed product to counter their move. I suspect that Adobe's development will slow and its patents will being to expire. At some point a third party will most likely be able to fully implement the majority of their special features. Unlike before when Adobe could simply lower its prices or innovate their way out of this, they will be trapped in a Cloud based infrastructure and their best and brightest developers will have long left.
Any software developer can see a company on a dead end road. The cloud is the latest gimmick to cloak the subscription pricing model but it is not fooling anyone. Products reach maturity that is a simple fact, trying to get blood out of turnip is a sign a company lacks forward thinking and is trying to rest on its laurels. Adobe should move into new territory and different products, their suite should be well maintained with the occasional new feature sold as an add-on. Its merit should be used as a marketing tool to generate interest in new products under the Adobe brand. I would imagine easier 3D design tools, 3D scan to object applications, and possibly public exchange and sale of such designs as a possibility that would fit the company's genre. They should not try to depend on old products forever that is as sure a sign of senescence as any other.
If the boxed versions of CS weren't DRM'd to hell and didn't require periodic calls back to the mothership you might have a point.
OK so if you are a design professional, if you work 40 hours a week, that's 160 hours a monthly. $50/ 160 = 31 cents per billable hour per month. I expect this is where they justify it. Its hard to say you are going to kill design professionals if they have to charge 31 cents more an hour. Its a known cost, that is always updated, anyone that does design that maintains older software that doesn't run into version problems is lying, because eventually a printer or someone else will require an updated version of a file, or a client will have a new version of a file with features that you need that someone else worked on. This eliminates those problems completely.
"Creative clouds" is not an oxymoron: clouds up here in Canada are extremely creative with their unique individual snowflake designs. In fact any good snow job clearly needs a creative cloud.
Sim city 5 all over again
Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
As a "how to make sure your business fails" case study.
No, the problem isn't the Cloud per se. You download local copes of the software and nothing is stopping you from saving your files locally as you always have. The real problem is Adobe's proprietary file formats. InDesign is notoriously backwards-incompatible. An InDesign 5.5 file won't even open in InDesign 5.0. Some aspects of newer Photoshop documents can't be read by older versions, and so they open as flattened images, which makes them far less valuable. So how do you think it will be before all usable Adobe files will only be readable to current Adobe subscribers? And if that happens, you may as well not own your own work, because you can't see it without paying your rent to Adobe - on an annual lease, no less. If Autodesk is any indication, it will likely be a rapidly increasing rent as well. As a 20-year veteran Photoshop user, I'm looking for options. The open source alternatives are in progress but still lacking. I'm an avid Blender user so that's not a dig on FOSS, but the assessment of someone who uses these tools for a living. GIMP still, after many, many years, doesn't allow CMYK or Lab color space, for example. My advice to anyone who values their work: unless Adobe opens up their file formats or reverses course on the Creative Cloud - STAY AWAY.
So... There is that.
I never liked adobe, anyway.
With a guaranteed income from locked-in design professionals, Adobe can finally stop worrying about innovating with each new release. They can continue to sell the same version for years to come, month by month, with no expectation of adding new features, capabilities, etc.
Sadly, Adobe also owns a boatload of patents when it comes to computer-based graphic design, so the threat of serious competition from new upstarts is almost nil, too.
Don't speak ill of your new owners.
...is that Creative Cloud is only $50/month in the United States.
Pricing in Europe is almost fifty percent more expensive. Check it if you don't believe me.
I'd love to know how the bean counters in Adobe justify that...
http://www.themeparks.ie
I had an old version of Photoshop that was pretty unstable on Win 7. Got me to move to Gimp. CS 6 may not be happy on Windows 10. And I'm not sure CS's annual feature churn is a model GIMP should be emulating.
This is the most asinine and inappropriate choice I have ever seen. I'm just shocked. Seriously, they are committing corporate suicide.
Let's - for the sake of argument - assume, that I will pirate Photoshop CC.
Now let's also assume that BSA will raid my house and put me in jail pending trial.
And then.. how much do I owe Adobe? How much damage have I caused using pirated software? Surely not $700 (price of Photoshop CS6)?
Now all Photoshop/Fireworks users can whine all they can but they probably had the greatest opportunity to overcome this if they helped/funded projects like The Gimp and Inkscape instead of crap over them as they've been doing for the past 10 years. Now f*** you and pay for the pleasure of being buttfu***d every month.
But you still can overturn this and instead of agreeing to this non-sense (a design app over the wire, come on!) contribute those $240 you'll be spending on a year subscription to those OSS projects. I can imagine that if The Gimp contributors had $100.000 they would probably add proper CMYK support and other stuff that might make the transition easier.
Just did a quick calculation for the EU price (61,49€) for the full suite.
Based on the current currency rate, that is $80.64, more than $30 over the already high US price.
No comment ...
Maybe Adobe is just doing some long-range financial planning here... Like, driving off all their less-affluent customers, before they finally sell themselves to Apple?
:>| )
(GIMP is way better than nothing and it has improved a lot in the last couple years--but it is still way behind PS. I have a 15-year-old copy of Paint Shop Pro that has a better UI than the current version of GIMP....
Will Adobe 'own', or claim to 'own', the copyright on all data put onto their cloud system?
this is the obvious canary in the coal mine. no one is buying software anymore, and it's not just the little guys feeling it anymore.
that's why adobe, microsoft (office 365), and others are going this route. it's rather obvious if you think about it.
just the other day we were looking at cloud-based video game "services" that needed always-on connections
this sort of architecture is the last resort of software engineering before paid software disappears altogether from the mass market, relegated to corners where obscure niches requiring service contracts as well hedge the bet...
it's pretty obvious, in a way... why the gnashing of teeth...
I know some people won't agree but I forced myself to create a few things in Scribus and it was an OK experience. It's got a few good points and some annoying points as well. It generated nice PDFs that viewed perfectly on multiple readers On Windows, you also have Xara Design Pro which is fantastic, but a lot of these alternatives depend on how strict your requirements of file sharing and print output formats and specifics too many to mention.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
A new CS major version is (was?) released about every 1.5 years. Design houses that upgrade regularly are going to save money with a subscription.
I think the concept is OK, it's just the pricing that's wrong.
The old boxed software model forced companies like Adobe and Microsoft to bring out upgrades every year to 18 months. That meant coming up with enough new features to convince people to upgrade, leading to bloat. The subscription model could work, if it meant vendors could concentrate instead on patching, bug fixes, quality support and adding relevant features rather than unnecessary bells and whistles.
OK, it probably won't work like that in practice, but the potential is there.
It's the pricing that seems a bit off. I think it does need to come down, and be more flexible in terms of mixing and matching products. I did sign up when it was discounted in the UK, and it's led me to play with indesign and illustrator, but I can't see me using them much. They could break it down into categories:
Allow users to pick any package for, say £10/month, any 2 for £20 or all of them for £25. I've deliberately picked a top price point about half the current level as well - it should be a price point that is no more than the old total cost (initial licence + upgrades) over a minimum of four years.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
My guess is Adobe is targeting those legitimate customers who buy their software and use the same version, without paying for upgrades, for 4+ years. With the Cloud model, you are forcing them to (re)pay full price every year.
BINGO! It's my understanding that most Photoshop users surveyed a few years ago said they skip 1 or 2 upgrades. Their upgrade income is dictated by the addition of new features. The cloud removes that pressure.
Notice Adobe compares the cost of the cloud with full retail price. But in the real world, skipping 1 or 2 upgrades save a lot of money. Based on $699 initial price, and $199 upgrades, a 12-year cost is:
$3087 - Upgrade every year
$1893 - Upgrade every 2 years
$1495 - Upgrade every 3 years
$2879 - Cloud @$19.99/month
So the Cloud looks OK if you already upgrade every year. But if a new version is bad, you don't have the previous disks to downgrade. But for those of us who skip upgrades, it can double our cost. And anytime Adobe needs a boost in income, they just raise the price. If we don't pay, we have no software to use.
This is an opening for Adobe competitors. This makes Microsoft look like really nice people - quite a feat!
Place nail here >+
a) I am one of those casual users you mentioned. So, I'm not going to defend GIMP
b) Before I even knew what GIMP was I took a class in Photoshop. We had student demo licenses, and the dang-blasted license ran out before the class was over! Frankly, I was lucky just to get my assignments done (in a spare classroom), and then I had a dead program sitting on my home computer.
Adobe didn't beg me to spend a hojillion dollars on their software: they begged me to pirate it or use GIMP instead!
While I am a pirate (at least, according to my friend the one time we swigged rum on the train tracks), I try not to go out of my way to engage in yo-ho-ho. I am a satisfied, casual, GIMP user.
IMHO the GIMP developers needed to get version 2.10 out ASAP so high bit-depth is fully supported - never mind the other new features. Then they also need to get 3.0 done not ASAP but reasonably quick for the GTK 3 port. These are the kind of infrastructure changes that are best done sooner rather than later. Everything else is just features that can be prioritized and added as time permits. Single window mode (2.8) full GEGL (2.10) and GTK 3 (3.0) will be great, but it looks like that's a long way out.
for the first part of your opening sentence.
Learn to internet, please.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
Now sky, there is a network I can get behind. I bet it is so stable that it would be perfect for the juicy military contracts....
it real fun is all of the addon charges (and support charges and..)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Agreed, mostly. Combing through several storms of clouds to find a specific drop of information is prohibitive to productivity.
Price? .0005 GB book in your Kindle storage that takes a many hours to read?
I expect the per GB price for video/artistic stills to be far less than clouds setup for other purposes. Since the tasks demand higher GB per value, I expect the end usable amount to still be much higher.
If if takes 20GB for 20 minutes of video and less than half a GB for 80 pictures you could enjoy for 20 minutes at 15 seconds per picture, should they cost the same to store as a
Check in any photo forum, everyone is mad at Adobe.
Photographers used to pay $240 every 3 years to upgrade, now it is $20 for life. Perpetual licenses became perpetual payments.
Adobe has been manipulative by going from an alternate version discounted upgrade price to a consecutive version discounted upgrade. The customers who upgraded (or bought Photoshop CS6) recently thought they were making an investment in this system, only to see it taken away.
Ownership of the program is another issue because someday a photographer might not need Photoshop but will be locked out of their files unless they were saved in a non proprietary format with a loss of layer information.
-Ron Scubadiver
I think GIMP adoption is set to rise significantly after this...
http://www.gimp.org
"There *IS* no patch for stupidity" -www.sqlsecurity.com
1. the software can identify when it is actually being used. For every second of use, they should charge you a microfee, which gets invoiced on a monthly basis.
2. if the software crashes, you shouldn't owe anything for that session.
This would make customers happy because:
a. they would only be charged for the time they use the software, and
b. bugs would get fixed faster
Sign the Petition:
http://www.change.org/petitions/adobe-systems-incorporated-eliminate-the-mandatory-creative-cloud-subscription-model
Many of them I know generally spend $2k and get about 4 years out of the software before upgrading.
This also means they don't have to learn a whole new package every time, perhaps with new shortcuts, etc. What I haven't seen anyone raise yet, is what happens to workflow and efficiency, when everyone has to use the same software online, which may be updated every 6 months (to keep the market "impressed") and designers all over the world lose time learning new stuff when they could be working.
What happens to that advertising deadline when the UI is changed/upgraded, and you lose hours (and sleep) getting around the new UI?
On top of that, every user will be limited by the speed of Adobe's servers, where all image processing will be done. Want to upgrade your rig to make Photoshop REALLY fast? Too bad. On the upside, your laptop will work just as quickly as your desktop. Not that there's a lot of difference these days anyway.
For folks that want to let Adobe know about their displeasure regarding the new licensing model, make a Feature Request here: http://www.adobe.com/go/wish
The more, the merrier.
jas
Jason Van Patten
Good bye Adobe CSS and hello Gimp 2.8!
Not a total solution but it is free and doesn't jack you for web storage you don't want in the first place.
This sucks. Our workflow was developed outside of the Adobe infrastructure (xinet) and have been upgrading fairly religiously (except 6 due to integration problems/growth) and we have little to need for some of the collaboration tools included with the suite. We have seen our costs increase a minimum of 230% (Depends if we go Team or Individual CC licenses). I'm not happy about that at all, but what really bugs me is the fact that this handcuffs my budget.
I can no longer, delay, skip or schedule my investments to when it makes sense for the company. My CapX budget gets reduced as all my money gets tied up into OpX. If my company has a soft year budget wise, I can't make budgetary decisions that will put us into the best situation possible. We simply have to pay this massive OpX increase or stop making widgets.
We could run on a creative suite platform for a number of years before we simply have to upgrade. While we try not to do that we all know the reality of the budget some times makes us do it.
Once you create something in CC you cannot open that file on older versions of Adobe software which means you will ALWAYS have to subscribe in order to work on said files. This translates to hundreds of thousands of dollars over a career for software you never own. I owned CS and used it for 10 years until hardware issues forced me to upgrade. I saved my money, paid for CS6 and hoped to ride that pony until I longer could. I still can open all of my old files without any problems. I also run across printing firms who need me to back save to an earlier version because it is expensive to upgrade. So, this move will kill small business and young artists/photographers trying to keep costs down. It's the worst kind of business practice and Adobe is forever tarnished for me.
if they are trying to circumvent piracy, this will make piracy easier. Like windows, a user will just have to use a similar KMS server to validate by passing adobe all together.
The steady revenue will drastically decrease as loyal users will drop their software for something else more convenient and not be "data" monitored.
This is a BIG FAIL on adobe's part. Stocks dropped 4% already today. A take-over prediction is looming.
My company is already looking for alternatives to their software. Good bye adobe, goodbye.
I own a video production company. My company has been in business since 2000 and I have been in the industry since the late 1980s. I have been involved with computers since I was building them from kits in the 1970s. In other words, I’m not new to the party. I also don’t (ever) work with pirated software. I have owned a license every single bit of software I have EVER possessed. This is not about wanting something for nothing. So here’s the problem. The relationship between software company and customer exists in a balance. Each party has an amount of power in that relationship, as well as competing motivations and needs. As a publicly held company, the software company wants to minimize expenses and maximize revenue, because these things are necessary to hold its share price up (otherwise stockholders bail and the company goes bust). There’s NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS as long as the other side of the equation also works. To wit: customers want cool new features that make their work easier or more lucrative or enhance their creativity, and they want them for the lowest possible price. When (in the traditional model) the software company comes out with an upgrade, customers will pay for it IF the features are attractive to them and IF the price is acceptable to them. If the features are uninteresting or the price is too high, they won’t buy. This motivates the company to continue innovating and keep control over prices. What forced migration to the cloud does is to transfer most of the customers’ power to the company. This is at least true in my industry; maybe it’s not in yours. You be the judge. In video production, a “project” consists of an Adobe Premiere project file, often with one or more imported Adobe AfterEffects projects and Adobe Audition projects as well as layered Photoshop and/or Illustrator files whose layers can be independently animated. These file formats are all proprietary to Adobe as is the relationship between the files. A project created a year from now is likely to contain attributes unrecognizable to CS6 applications and therefore is unlikely to be backward-compatible. This means that the pain of subsequent migration to another platform is much greater in a CC model than a CS model (where the user always has a perpetual license to the software that was used to create any existing projects). Under CC, if one stops paying, one loses access to the applications and therefore to all the projects that depend upon them. This increased migration pain means customers are likely to endure more abuse under CC than they would under CS before they finally migrate. Merely failing to have attractive innovations in future upgrades will probably not provide sufficient incentive. Slowly increasing the subscription fee will also not move people who are already trapped into a CC-only relationship, at least not right away. So how high could those fees go? Well, I can tell you that my company was surveyed by Adobe about making this move nearly two years ago, and at the time the fee they were floating was not $50/month. It was $150/month. I believe the $50 monthly fee announced this year is a lowball fee intended to get the majority of customers to switch over quietly. I believe if this happens without incident the rate will go to $150 pretty quickly. No doubt Adobe intends to tune the amount to maximize revenue, where increased fees from people who remain exceed what is lost from customers who leave. So my prediction for Adobe if they succeed in this move: innovation will stagnate since they make the same money whether they innovate or not (one of the primary risks of the subscription model), rates rapidly increase over the next two years or so and then increase more slowly (but never remain the same), and no user will ever have access to their software again without paying an unending monthly fee. Also, if this works for Adobe, other software companies will follow suit. Expect to pay a monthly fee for Windows or Mac OS, for every plugins package you own and