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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
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.)