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.
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?
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)