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Adobe Creative Cloud Is Back
As reported by TheNextWeb, the extended outage of the authentication mechanism of Adobe's Creative Cloud service has been resolved. From the story: 'According to a series of tweets: 'Adobe ID issue is resolved. We are bringing services back online. We will share more details once we confirm everything is working.' Adobe said further, 'We have restored Adobe login services and all services are now online. We will be sharing a complete update on the outage soon.' and 'We know we let you down. We apologize and are working to ensure it doesn't happen again."' A good time to revisit this prediction from last year about how going to an all-cloud, all-subscription model might hurt customers.
yay
So what happens when they no longer sell their products and you have no choice but to have the Creative Cloud. Should the entire design industry shut down when Adobe has an issue?
Is it http://thenextweb.com/creativity/2014/05/15/adobe-creative-cloud-worldwide/?
B-but Curtis Peterson told me that the cloud is the f-f-future!
it only happens when pork prices are lowest.
Seriously.
The major advances in tools in Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver et cetera have flattened. I love the perspective drawing tools in Illustrator and some of the improved tools in Photoshop but really the major changes in CS have been in workflow, lifecycle and preflighting.
That latter stuff is great but largely a) is for technically advanced production users can talk to other technically advanced production users and b) locks you in to Adobe.
That stuff serves no other function for anyone else. People have figured that out and so to keep revenues up, Adobe switched to the cloud model. That's it. There's absolutely no benefit for most users to switch to the cloud model given that most companies skip two or three versions of Creative Suite. My prediction is that CS 6 will be around for a long, long time.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
While I agree in principle that "cloud"-based services are overrated for reasons we are all aware, the issue with Creative Cloud was a minor one.
I use Adobe software every day and I noticed the error just because I tried make a change in the subscription plan.
The apps run locally and the license is checked every 90 days. Yes, some people could not activate their licenses or they couldn't download an application. This is a DRM issue, like Microsoft's or EA licensing servers being down. This could have happened regardless of Creative Cloud.
The only cloud services are their Typekit and Edgefont font distribution and Behance portfolios.
So let's make this clear: Creative Cloud is a fancy way of saying "rented software". Compared to the traditional model, it may cost more or less, depending on the upgrading habits (personally I used to always upgrade and use the newest version, other users upgrade to every other version)
That is what happens when a company realizes they don't know what to do to get new creative apps out to a larger base of customers.\
Sad but true. Definite limitation of the Adobe Board of Directors.
I can only hope the mad rush to get everything to the cloud continues so as more and more of these incidents occur people will see the folly of letting someone else manage their data.
Further, if someone is able to get into a cloud service, it's not just your information that is compromised, it is the thousands of other people as well. Imagine a company having its internal documents about an upcoming product being made available to its competitors.*
* To those who might cheer this scenario, image if it's your company or the company you work for. Not so cheery when the product you were working on to get your paycheck won't get made because someone else has the same information, is it?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Some sites such as the daily mail missed publication because of the outage, so it obviously wasn't minor to everyone.
This could have happened regardless of Creative Cloud.
Of course I don't think people would be very excited about any such DRM scheme. In the professional environment, software vendors take particular care to enable privately hosted license management servers *precisely* because of this risk. EA is a steaming pile in general, so that's not setting the bar high. MS has KMS servers for enterprises to deploy and even failing that, their activation is fairly forgiving in letting you use the software at least for a while without successful activation.
Compared to the traditional model, it may cost more or less
The problem from what I hear in this case is that Adobe is not delivering a lot of compelling new features. Hence the push by them to get you into renting the software, because perpetually licensed photoshop is less and less likely to drive upgrade revenue. Same thing with Office365, at some point these applications are 'finished' for 99% of the market and the vendor finds themselves in a tricky spot of having no where to go.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
FUCK YOU.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The "Cloud" and SaaS are about the reoccurring revenue model. The trend exists for the bottom line, not customers. This motive is simple: mature software markets can no longer compel upgrades, so they simply switched the system: implement file incompatibility, poor import/export between versions, and switch from a lump sum contract to reoccurring revenue-based subscriptions. Most software is a complete and total sham now, benefiting their bottom line of corporations at the expense of the customer and cost-effectiveness.
The $20 / month price is for the first year of the student-teacher pricing. Second year goes to $29.95. It's a better deal than purchasing the software at the outlandish prices. Adobe is not making software for the casual user. It's all professional stuff and I'm quite happy with my subscription. I don't store my files in their cloud, I keep them locally and on a backup elsewhere that costs me very little.
As for the outage, the software is loaded onto your machine and continues to function for 30 days even if you can't authenticate. I didn't have any problems using my Premiere Pro CC over the last several days nor any of the other apps such as Audition or Speed Grade. It seems those doing the most complaining are not users.
One would hope that any company relying on cloud services would also be smart enough to use either A) encrypted storage like Dropbox or B) pre-encrypt their sensitive and confidential information before putting it into the cloud. All said and done, more companies need to read Mitnick's 'Art of Deception' anyway.
The Amarri pray for god, the Caldari pray for profit. the Gallente pray for peace, but the Minmatar pray their ships hol
If one of our sites was down for as long as Adobe's was, heads would roll.
What took so long to restore? Crappy process for restoring server images or recovering a database?
Or, as others have speculated, was there a security breach and they couldn't bring it back up until all the evidence was gathered and the vulnerability was closed.
Oh wait, this is Adobe we are talking about. Their code doesn't have vulnerabilities.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
Unfortunately it's already like this - "where are my flyers!" - "Oh it's Adobe's fault, whatever you're not getting my business again."
When I first saw they were moving to subscriptions similar to Microsoft for office I almost quit working with graphics. Microsoft doing it is one thing, at least it will work or they will work with me to find a solution, Adobe on the other hand may cuss you out on the support line if you accidentally offend them by asking out loud what they have against software development standards.
I wanted to upgrade.
I had the cash in hand.
But Adobe destroying file compatibility (can't write CS4 files), forcing the subscription model, cloud and 30 to 90 day reauthorizations on me make it not something I'll do.
So I just keep using CS4.
It works.
Adobe loses money they would have gotten as upgrades by tens of thousands of users like me.
If another program comes out that I can afford that will read and write all the Adobe formats I need (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat) then I would switch to it in a heart beat.
You're arguing my position. If your needs are relatively simple, you can use Gimp, Elements, or Pixelmator roughly interchangeably. If you need to do anything tricky, you'll probably run into a wall with all three.
Old way.
1. Buy Photoshop CC, create thousands of editable images using CS6 proprietary features and saved in CS6 proprietary format. Cool.
2. Loved CC, but Acme Studios has finally released a superior product that will improve my images and workflow. It's incompatible with PS CC, but that's ok.
3. Buy Acme Studios to edit my new images; continue to use CS6 in parallel to edit my old images.
New way
1. Buy Photoshop CC, create thousands of editable images using CC only proprietary features and saved in CC only proprietary format. Cool.
2. Loved CC, but Acme Studios has finally released a superior product that will improve my images and workflow. It's incompatible with CC, but...oooh I think I'm seeing a problem.
3. Buy new software to edit my new images, but must continue to pay $$ ransom to Adobe to unlock and edit my old images forever and ever. Oops. Hmmm.
Moral. Until Acme Studios comes out, use CS6 and collaborate on your own terms.
that one cannot trust the so-called "cloud" with anything serious like your work. Honestly, companies should be doing all of their work in-house. The "cloud" is codeword for someone else's servers -- servers you don't control. No, thank you.
Sorry, your premise is questionable.
http://www.cultofmac.com/232682/photoshop-and-whole-creative-cloud-already-cracked-and-pirated/
Shady's back.
The sad thing is that now that everything's back up, it'll be business as usual.
I grudgingly subscribed to Adobe Creative cloud when I found that buying Illustrator would have cost me $750 for a legal copy, or $30/month and also include the rest of the CC package. I already own a legal copy of Photoshop CS5, which is good enough for me, so I haven't downloaded that, but I've had two projects that required video editing (so I downloaded Premier) and extracting difficult text from a PDF (so I downloaded Acrobat Pro after spending hours with PDFtk and PDFBox).
Before I subscribed, I found a torrents for a cracked version of Illustrator, which I used to determine that the program would solve the problem I was working on. After that, I bought the subscription. Adobe is really annoying; the software nags me a lot, and it opens a million network connections. Still, if I'm using their software to make money, I feel like I need to pay them.
Given the choice, I'd still rather have stand-alone versions of everything, but I can't afford to spend that much for programs I won't use very frequently.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
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