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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
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.
Yeah, those numbers are crap. That said, the conclusion isn't wrong, only the numbers. A typical non-corporate user:
A Creative Cloud user:
So it's on the order of 6 times as expensive for your typical Photoshop-only user. For a multi-app user, it's $600 per year, so for new users, it is cheaper initially, but unless you are the sort of person who buys an upgrade at least every two years, it ends up being more expensive. Existing users are badly screwed.
But the biggest problem I have with this arrangement is that it leaves me completely dependent upon Adobe's good graces. At any time, they can decide to crank the price to $100 per month, and I can either pay it or I lose access to all my files. They can decide to drop Mac support, and I either buy a Windows box or I lose access to all my files. They can lose so many customers over this idiotic rental plan that they file for Chapter 7, and thirty days later, my files are no longer readable. And so on. It's a lack of permanence that I would have a very hard time swallowing, even as a corporate user, much less as a home user.
In other words, this has all of the problems of a free Google App, only I'd be paying a quarter of a grand per year for the privilege of putting my faith in Adobe. And yet, this is a company whose management has so consistently proven themselves incompetent beyond measure that I have no faith that they will still be around in ten years.
My prediction is that a sizable percentage of users will treat the Creative Cloud a stopgap measure, to allow them to get by until they can fully migrate away from Adobe products to a competing solution. Now would be an excellent time to short Adobe's stock. I fully expect it to go down to somewhere around $15 (just above their book value per share) in short order.
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Why would you use the obviously inferior GIMP, when you already own CS3,4,5 or 6?
The real answer is to stop upgrading until something better comes along. Now whether that option is Adobe Cloud (which I highly doubt) or another competitor is to be seen.
But it's not GIMP and it never will be.