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.

Comments

Only Creative Cloud?

[MindStalker]

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?

Re:Only Creative Cloud?

[Rinikusu]

Well, I'm a film guy, not a photog, so my options are: Avid (industry standard), or switch to a mac and use FCP, not to mention work with prosumer software such as Vegas. Editing is editing and there's not a whole lot of differences between the suites that don't have workarounds, etc. I particularly enjoy the Premiere->After Effects workflow, and while Audition is no ProTools, it's good enough for my purposes. The most exciting thing for me lately is reading that Speedgrade CC 7.1 has a better roundtrip workflow, but I haven't tested that out yet.

Anyway, "creative cloud" is to "cloud" as "javascript" is to "java". Unless you're using Adobe's cloud storage program. But why the fuck would you do that? I generated over 250gb in footage (non-raw) for a 6 minute short recently.. How long would that take to upload to cloud storage and how long would it take to pull it back down? No thanks, I've got local storage and I like it that way.. maybe if we ever get ubiquitous fiber connections and $10/month/terabyte cloud storage options I might consider using it for archival, but yeah, no thanks... I did not even know Adobe's shit was down until I read about it here. That's how much it affected me.

Re:Only Creative Cloud?

[WillAdams]

The problem is, Adobe has bought up so much of the industry that they have a huge warchest of patents.

They also aren't terribly nice about sharing information to competitors --- look at how poorly FreeHand handled .pdfs for one example --- the devs complained that Adobe was _not_ forthcoming about aspects of the format which were needed to improve it.

Re: Only Creative Cloud?

[walshy007]

I don't think that many people who use photoshop require the entirety of it's functionality.

It's like microsoft word vs openoffice, there are some fairly commonly required features that are catered for that handle the overwhelming majority of the population, but each person has their own little outlier function that only word handles.

gimp is becoming viable for more types of work by the day, it may not ever do everything photoshop does, but it doesn't have to. All it has to do is enough to "get the job done" for a decent subset of people.

Re:Only Creative Cloud?

[ganjadude]

well in my case, im still just using CS6 - it has everything *I* need for what I do with it, I dont care about the online only model for tools that i NEED at any given time.

If I had a deadline and was unable to access my stuff, is adobe going to pay for it? I doubt it

Creative Suite Six will be Adobe's XP

[sandbagger]

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.

Re:Creative Suite Six will be Adobe's XP

[Smerta]

Totally agree. Still chugging away on my 7 year old copy of CS3, bought back when I qualified for the student discount. (Actually if I want to find CS6, I should probably start looking now. Just did some poking around, looks like slim pickings already. Even Fry's, which I normally avoid, is only selling Cloud now, sigh...)

Re:Creative Suite Six will be Adobe's XP

[lurker412]

For me personally, you're quite right, though I'm on CS5 and will stay there for the foreseeable future. I'm an amateur photographer and have no need to keep up with the latest and greatest effects for graphic artists. There are a lot of Adobe customers like me, and many of us preferred the old model, where we could pay to upgrade when the new features seemed worth it. The new model makes sense for companies and design pros who (think they) always need the latest. They probably will save money. I'm not interested in the lock-in the new model imposes.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the "cloudiness" of CC. The recent outage didn't take all the subscribers down, at least as long as they are using local storage for their work. The software runs locally. It would actually be a step forward if, say, they came up with some killer algorithms that require super-computer power to run and gave subscribers access to those cycles in the cloud. But currently, the cloud is mainly used for license validation (periodically) and software updates.

Adobe is leaving money on the table by not accommodating the customers who used to go for every other or every third update. I expect that within a couple of years they will realize this and come up with some sort of hybrid subscription/perpetual license scheme.

What's becoming of this site?

[gaspyy]

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)

However...

[Junta]

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.

No Problem Here

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Adobe better take a look at their SLA

[xanthos]

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.

This is why I don't upgrade

[pubwvj]

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.

Re: Gimp vs Photoshop: no comparison

[tangent]

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, New way

[Dahlgil]

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.