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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
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?
If you want to use if for a couple of months at $20/month you'll have to steal it. The $20 a month plan is only available to people who bought the perpetual license and are willing to sign up for a 12 month contract.
I say fuck the cloud.
If you just want to try the software or use it once, $20 is a pretty sweet deal. For people who use the software on a daily basis, it's easy to see how the Cloud deal is more expensive. And even for casual users, $20/month could mean $20/use for them, which quickly adds up to being more expensive than the one-off purchase. Guess which kind of users are prevalent?
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
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.
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.
On long term, yes.
Car analogy - what solution is preferable for someone to learn driving: use a second-hand car or rent a car by the day?
Translation: how long it takes a PS-noob to get enough experience to finish a project in 2 months? How much it will cost if all one can find on the market is rental-software?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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?
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.
It's $75 for a single month. You only get the $20 rate if you commit to a year.
It's my understanding that most of Adobe's customers are businesses. A pay-as-you-go model means there's less chance of wasting money on licenses you don't need. After all, many businesses use temps, interns and contractors. And sometimes you'll need to switch an employee from one project where they need photoshop to another project where they need something else.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
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.
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.
> I can buy a 32 GB flash drive for less than twenty bucks and carry it around in my pocket.
Shhh... that's the "cloud": a bunch of dudes walking around with flash drives on their keychains. When you want to pull up your data, we look up which guy is carrying around the flash drive with your stuff on it, and we call him up and have him come down to the office and plug it into a USB port.
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
That's true, but they do offer a 30-day trial if you just wanted to check out the software. That $75 for the single month is also access to the whole creative suite, not just a single app.
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.
Assuming the executable is on the vendor's computer:
I realize that the /. summaries and to a lesser extent Adobe have done a poor job at conveying this information, but that assumption isn't right.
This isn't really "creative suite in the cloud" so much as "subscription-based creative suite with some cloud storage you can use if you want." You still download the programs and install them locally, and they check in each month (according to comments in a previous story).
I don't really want to say that this is a good thing; that's for each person to decide. But it does invalidate almost all of your statements, which I will now attempt to correct in the name of reducing FUD:
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
Not sure what versions will be available; I'd assume Mac and Windows. But they are native programs, not running in the browser. (Not sure why you say that last one is an advantage for the vendor...)
The code cannot be pirated
Slightly ironically, the way Adobe is doing probably won't mean much here.
If the company goes out of business or closes the server, you lose your work
You can still store information locally.
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
You only need a connection once a month for activation purposes.
The company gets to mine your activities for targeted advertizing
Unlikely. At least, it won't be significantly easier than it is now, since it's a local app.
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.
These are still normal applications you install on your computer. The only "Cloud" is the online storage, and you install the application from the web. The software complains every 30 days for you to authenticate it, but it will run for three months without re-authentication. But you can run it day to day without an Internet connection.
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.
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....
Actually more clarifications now that I've looked at the FAQ a bit:
You're forced to pay for access during months when you don't use the software - or you lose your data
Not only is this wrong for the reason I gave before (you still can use local files), but you have 90 days after cancelling your membership to still access your files. (After that, yes, you'll lose some work. Though there's still a free 2 GB you'll have access to.)
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
My once a month statement was low. The FAQ is slightly confusing, but it sounds like it will work for 6 months without an activation (just bug you once a month).
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.
Since they upgrade every 3 years at a cost of $375 then 375/36 = $10.41/Mnth That 29.99/Mnth is a whole ~60% more a month than they are paying now. And that is with the first year discount. I think the GP has a point. This looks like a massive money grab from Adobe. It should open up some of their customers to re-evaluate whether they really need Adobe products to function or at lest look at how many PCs in their establishment can do just fine wtihout it.
Car analogy - what solution is preferable for someone to learn driving: use a second-hand car or rent a car by the day?
The better car analogy is the guy who likes to lease a new car every 3 years instead of buying one. You always get to have a new car, and there are rarely ever maintenance costs. The same would probably be true for the software subscription where you will automatically get the newest upgrades for free as part of the subscription.
Car analogy - what solution is preferable for someone to learn driving: use a second-hand car or rent a car by the day?
The better car analogy is the guy who likes to lease a new car every 3 years instead of buying one. You always get to have a new car, and there are rarely ever maintenance costs. The same would probably be true for the software subscription where you will automatically get the newest upgrades for free as part of the subscription.
Not quite. With an offline version, one can buy a "second hand" install CD. With an "only for rental" offer on the market, there's no chance to do it.
Think textbooks
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
"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.
If you want to use if for a couple of months at $20/month you'll have to steal it. The $20 a month plan is only available to people who bought the perpetual license and are willing to sign up for a 12 month contract.
The contract termination fee is negligible.
No, I pay for an upgrade about every three to six years and the upgrade is only around $400 to $600 so the $400 quote was much more reasonable than your overpriced quote.
Mod this up! Professionals in the field often have to refer to or re-use assets from previous jobs-- do you think those stupid superbowl robots you see every year are re-built from scratch?
What happens when a deadline hits and a quick re-skin turns into a total rebuild because Adobe's servers went down that week... or Adobe has gone out of business?
Quark, Corel, anyone else?
In that case, how often does Adobe release a new edition of the software? It looks like (we'll be generous) 2 years for each iteration. So, if after two years you paid for about the boxed version, Adobe doesn't seem to come out very much ahead. Businesses will buy the latest one regardless, so it doesn't seem much different.
I'm thinking the benefit to them is the guarantee that there are only so many instances of CS available at one time to each customer. Businesses that over-license may save money (because they wouldn't be anymore), but the ones that have "one or two+ rogue installs" won't anymore. I'm taking a guess that's what's up here. Another poster made the point that the business customer gets to write off a "subscription cost of business" instead of an asset that has to depreciate over however long that is.
So, yea, it looks like Adobe wins in that they are guaranteed a license for every installation, and businesses get instant writeoffs (and built-in license compliance). Individuals, who might use the same software for 4+ years because of cost, get the downside. Adobe doesn't care because, individuals are a small part of their market.
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.
Except it isn't. Photoshop Extended costs somewhere in the area of $1000 (yes, the suite costs less than the big 3 individually). At $20/month, you're coming out way ahead, even id you'd previously skip versions. Unfortunately, TFA doesn't state which edition of CS6 is on sale for 499 (probably Design standard, which doesn't include Photoshop Extended - design Premium and Master collection cost around 2-4x as much).
If you don't skip versions, it ends up costing you the same, though less if you account for the much more frequent and "free" updates. This only hurts pirates, and nobody cares about pirates.
If Adobe went under tomorrow, Creative Cloud users would still be able access their files for 180 days, after which their copy of the app would no longer function. Unfortunately, Adobe tends to use proprietary file formats. A few other apps advertise the ability to partially read some Photoshop files, but AFAIK, none of them are anywhere near 100% compatibility with even CS3 files yet, much less CS6. I'd imagine the situation is similar (or worse) for their other apps.
So in effect, the GP was right, at least unless somebody buys Adobe out during those six months or until one of those other apps manages to reverse-engineer all the remaining file format bits that you depend on. Pedantically, the work isn't gone—merely inaccessible—but in practical terms, there's really little difference.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The big problem is relearning things.
Good people can easily retrain on a similar tool or technology, so a switch from Photoshop to Gimp (or vice veras) isn't a big deal.
Good people are extremely rare.
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Having control of access to your tools is worth as much as their capabilities..
I foresee even more rampant piracy than already present in Adobe's future.
Gimp is a piece of shit. The UI is probably the worst one I've everseen.
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.
You only need a connection once a month for activation purposes.
I work in the visual effects industry. To comply with security audits and various contracts our production network does not have internet access. Doing so would put us in breach with many of out clients.
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 CD itself isn't the issue; Adobe has had their most prized offerings freely downloadable for a few major versions now, AFAICT. It's been all about licensing, and not physical possession, for a long time.
If I can't already re-sell my CS6 license key (and I don't think I can) to an unrelated party, then your analogy means....nothing.
Kid-proof tablet..
No amount of money will help that incompetently run project. You'd be better off putting your money towards CinePaint or Krita. Or, heck, organizing a fund to buy out the Pixelmator guys and release their code as F/OSS.
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.
As someone who uses The GIMP extensively and Photoshop occasionally.. "uhm. no."
The GIMP is not even close to Photoshop yet. That's not to say it isn't a perfectly capable tool for what most people do, but then 'most people' would be fine with Elements, or Lightroom, or Instagram. Graphics professionals will have to weigh their individual demands and see whether The GIMP or one of the many plugins/scripts fills those demands in an acceptable manner.
Just as an example of what I mean by the latter, and I know it's a limited use case but this applies to so many things, content-aware rescaling.
In Photoshop you activate the tool and just scale the layer through the typical scaling interface (e.g. drag edges), and the result is shown instantaneously if your machine can handle it.
Now let's do it with The GIMP. First off, The GIMP doesn't have this feature. You'll have to grab the Liquid Rescale plugin. The main interface offers some great control, but if you just want to rescale the layer the Interactive mode sounds more promising. Except that all it does is update the layer every time you let go of the up/down control / enter a number into the fields while scaling from a fixed pivot (top left corner) While much better than going through the main plugin interface (where you have to commit, then undo if not to your liking, etc.), it's a far cry from essentially the scale tool using a different algorithm for its scaling - who knows, maybe that's on the feature list for a future version, it would certainly be a sensible place to put it.
Perhaps a bit less esoteric, adjust the canvas size, and let's say you want to add a 2mm border around the edges. First of all, you can't just say you want a 2mm border. You'll have to add 4mm to the width and height first, and then set the offset to 2mm on each axis. Great, keeps your brain accustomed to doing remedial math. So you do that and now go do it again. Notice how the unit dropdown is no longer set to mm? The reason for this is that the unit dropdowns always use the unit associated with the image (bottom left below canvas) rather than the last-used setting. Both have their merits, but % (percent) is not a unit for images, but is a common unit in the drop-downs. Similar things apply to e.g. the aspect lock button.
Some things a script-fu can address, but many things it cannot. Yes, it's open source, I can add the features (or pay somebody to add them) and with a lot of luck even get them accepted into the trunk (so I don't have to keep patching and compiling / paying somebody to do so). Can't really do that with Photoshop. But but for a long, long list of such features the fact is that with Photoshop, you don't have to to begin with.
There's plenty of reasons I dislike working with Photoshop - it's far from perfect and I like the direction The GIMP is going in - but there's many more subtle and yet aggravating things besides the ubiquitous CMYK and GUI layout arguments (two areas that are very, very low on my list - if I went into why, this comment would be even more rant-y.)
I had the same thought. Photoshop 7.0 (runs great through wine) fulfills all my photo-editing needs. I did pull up a changelog for a recent version of Photoshop, and it *does* appear to have some nice new features, but probably not worth the price for most people.
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.
"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.
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.
You haven't seen much then.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
The Gimp really needs a better name. Recently someone who knows next to nothing about computers asked me to recommend a free graphics program. I started talking about the Gimp but could immediately see in their eyes that the name turned them off, plus I felt stupid recommending a program called Gimp.
It's a good program, plenty good enough for my use but the name does not inspire confidence to anyone who doesn't even know about free as in libre software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"The big problem is relearning things."
Besides shortcuts, there's not much to relearn at all. Hell most of the icons look damn near the same anyways.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If that's the worst UI you've ever seen, you probably haven't graduated High School, yet.
Come back when you've seen Windowed Modem Environment. Or maybe some of the first GUIs available for Linux.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So... There is that.
I never liked adobe, anyway.
"For the user, not so much..."
Which begs the question is it really worth it to me to get f___ked?
Seems like a real incentive here to just hold on and wait until either 1) other more competitive products come a long that do most of what I need, 2) GIMP and open software get better, friendlier or 3) wait for Adobe's pricing model to bomb and get a better price as they realize they are losing customers.
Its not exactly like I have to use Adobe products.
Isn't GIMP open source that can be forked if the project managers are doing a poor job?
Car analogy - what solution is preferable for someone to learn driving: use a second-hand car or rent a car by the day?
The better car analogy is the guy who likes to lease a new car every 3 years instead of buying one. You always get to have a new car, and there are rarely ever maintenance costs. The same would probably be true for the software subscription where you will automatically get the newest upgrades for free as part of the subscription.
And has to call the leasing company to ask permission to drive the car he's paying for.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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
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.
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....
Sure GIMP could stay on par with PS CS feature-wise.
It's just that in GIMP, those features would be totally unusable.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Since they upgrade every 3 years at a cost of $375 then 375/36 = $10.41/Mnth That 29.99/Mnth is a whole ~60% more a month than they are paying now. And that is with the first year discount. I think the GP has a point. This looks like a massive money grab from Adobe. It should open up some of their customers to re-evaluate whether they really need Adobe products to function or at lest look at how many PCs in their establishment can do just fine wtihout it.
Adobe? Making a money grab? I'm SHOCKED!!!
You are obviously not an overseas customer of the Adobe corporation. Not that Adobe customers in the US aren't getting ripped off too, they just get ripped of a bit less. Presumably this is because they can more easily form a gigantic angry mob, drive down to Adobe HQ with torches and pitchforks and burn it down. Adobe needs to keep them teetering on the edge of snapping without actually tipping them over the edge.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
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.
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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.
Presumably you're able to download your .psd (or whatever extension they're using now) files. And in ten years' time, I'm willing to bet that someone somewhere will have figured out how to open the file in an open-source program (just verified that Photoshop 7.0 psd's are fully compatibile with the GIMP). So yeah, in ten years, the servers might not be there. But in ten years, the software that made your files will be ten years old.
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 >+
I need a version with smart objects if I'm running photoshop at all.
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I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
My point is that your personal anecdote an insults are useless.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
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
You can only upgrade from one version to the next - you can't skip a version.
So you'd be cool with Photoshop CS2. Looks like a used copy of CS2 will run you $150-$300 depending on your OS.
You're looking like an idiot trying to be a smartass. I'm speaking from the voice of experience, having designed my own UI for my research facility systems.
Perhaps you could do some reseaarch into modern GUIs, which I'm talking about and you quite stupidly failed to infer. There was no GUI in the 40s, moron.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I think GIMP adoption is set to rise significantly after this...
http://www.gimp.org
"There *IS* no patch for stupidity" -www.sqlsecurity.com
They just need to follow the lead of the other marketing geniuses who brand free software. Coming in 2013: LibreGimp!
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.
Not much to relearn? Gimp throws the user for a loop the first time he even tries to save an image he has just edited. If they can't even get something as basic as saving a file correct, what other surprises are in store for the average user?
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
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
Anyone worried about this can save their files in one of a dozen or so different standardized file formats, like tiff files.
So is your grammar. It doesn't undermine my point that Gimp has a piece of shit GUI. That'sa fact.
Do you want a dollar? Gimp is a shit UI. Just because you designed your own UI doesn't mean you did it well.
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.
Oh, dumb native speaker uses grammar of non-native speaker to try and make a point. I'm sorry you don't feel smart enough to actually offer arguments.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
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.
I didn't try and make a point. I actually explicitly said it didn't matter and that GIMP has a piece of shit GUI. It's so unintuitive it's painful to use.
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