There are numerous security flaws in all the major browsers. Vulnerabilities are getting fixed all the time; just look at the change log of Firefox or Chrome over the last few releases, for example. If you think you're magically virus-proof because you're running your pet OSS software, you might consider the list of popular OSS web servers in the title of this discussion.
The thing is, we value the better results we can get with CS compared to the cheaper alternatives, but we only use CS applications occasionally, not as our main full-time work. So in our case, it's not so much 30 seconds of productivity in a day that we'd need to save as a half-hour or more on each of the handful of days we actually use CS.
There are plenty of changes that would pay for themselves in a few weeks at that rate, and would we gladly pay for an upgrade that included them even without CC, but Adobe don't seem to be interested in making those sorts of qualitative improvements. Instead we get little tweaks like editable rounded corners, which while they might be useful occasionally still only save a few seconds compared to doing things the "hard way".
Which describes every large software project implemented by a non-software company, ever.
It describes plenty of large software projects written by software companies, too.
Software maintenance is hard. Very few people actually know how to design and build a software system that is maintainable over the long-term, and since even the people who can can't also see the future, we'll never be able to build idealised, perfectly maintainable systems.
The logical conclusion is that we may wind up with critical systems that are working and stable but prohibitively expensive to develop. The best solution to that situation is often to leave the existing system alone but try to isolate it via some controlled interface so you can still build your new systems with a degree of separation and better maintainability.
To give credit where it's due, Adobe's font people have been very good over the years as well. Their work is of excellent quality, and their pricing and licensing are far more reasonable than some of the other big name foundries.
I'm not convinced by Typekit and all the other similar font-as-a-service things, for much the same reasons I'm not convinced by renting software via Creative Cloud, but obviously enough people disagree with me to make it a useful service. What worries me right now is that enough people might disagree with me about CC to make that a viable service as well...
The comparison should be made to Adobe CS6 Master Collection
Only if you actually use most/all of the applications. I expect that many customers go for something less comprehensive like Design Standard instead, for a little over half the price you mentioned depending on the choice of package.
With the prices actually being charged where I am and right now, not any hypothetical future ones they've said they'll do later or anything that is restricted to a short period of time or in another country, it works out cheaper to buy the entire package if you use more than two of the CS applications, and the cost for renting over about two years is around the same as the cost for buying CS6 Design Standard outright, and then the cost of renting stays up whereas the cost of buying each upgrade has been much lower with the one-off purchases.
I'm all for investing in the best tools and practices. However, your entire argument is predicated on the newer versions of Creative Suite applications actually having that added value. Presumably for some people they do, but I've yet to see a single feature advertised since we last upgraded around CS5 time that seems likely to help us significantly with any of the work we do, in any of the CS applications we use regularly.
So in our case, your argument is apt but backwards. Instead of paying a few thousand extra per year to keep everyone on the latest versions and render videos a bit faster, we could maintain a small dedicated render farm or give everyone a useful bump in their PC specs that will pay dividends for all applications all the time. Of course, this isn't really a very strong argument because it's a false dichotomy and we would invest in both new software and updated hardware if we thought they would bring worthwhile returns, but it does show there is an opportunity cost to spending more money on software just to keep on the treadmill too.
Well, it does change in one slightly important way... With the old situation, we already paid our dues once, and that's it unless and until a new version comes out with some significant improvement that we're willing to pay more for. With the new situation, we would have to keep paying those dues, year after year, with no guarantee of getting any advantage at all in return.
Although... If everyone running academic programmes switched en masse to using alternatives next year, even something like Corel's packages, it would be entertaining. Adobe would lose a small fortune in academic licences for that year, but worse, they'd then have to watch an entire generation graduate using someone else's product as the default instead. I bet that would hurt pretty badly, and more so for every extra year it went on. As a bonus, if the entire academic community suddenly started expressing a renewed interest in alternatives, they could probably get a pretty good deal, while not so many years later that sudden influx of cash could be driving up the level of competition at the high end.
No, but if you use more than a couple of the applications it becomes more cost-effective to do so, give or take whatever discount programmes might apply to your particular circumstances. I'm reading this right off Adobe's current Creative Cloud pricing page for the UK, where it is currently a rather odd-looking £46.88/month for the full suite as an individual.
You can save a bit on that as an upgrade, but it says (in text that is literally too small for me to read without zooming the page, underneath the entire table) that the reduction only applies for the first year and if you purchased the original product directly from Adobe. I suspect that both this policy and the way the catch is almost entirely hidden are going to prove fairly accurate predictors of Adobe's future pricing intent.
$50/mo is the full-suite subscription price without the discount for CS licensees.
Not to those of us in the UK, it's not.
And once again, these are the prices now, while they're trying to sell everyone on the idea. It is extremely unlikely that the prices will stay this low once people have committed to the new scheme so they are locked in even if the prices go up. If you think otherwise, try to find a single legally actionable statement from Adobe anywhere that guarantees any kind of limit on their future pricing; I've never seen one.
As nice as it sounds in a "rooting for the little guy" kind of way, I don't see the GIMP being any sort of serious Photoshop challenger in the future. It's a geek's project for geeks.
I'm not a huge believer in the power of FOSS communities to create focussed, high quality products. FOSS has had a few big success stories, but as a movement it enjoys most of its success when producing "good enough" clones of what commercial software does that cater to non-power users and don't come with all the nasty costs and strings attached. I think it will take something much more heavyweight to disrupt a powerful incumbent like Adobe, though.
But it's not $20/month for Photoshop, it's almost £50/month (about US$75) for the suite, and that's today when they're trying to convince us all to switch to renting our software. If you think we wouldn't be paying upwards of $1,000pa for something we used to get for not much more than that price as a one-off, and probably within a year or two, then I think you're... well, a very optimistic person.
But your basic point is correct: staying up to date with Creative Suite isn't very important to any of my businesses. We mostly do software and web development, so while we dropped the cash to buy Creative Suite at one point because having good tools for your staff is valuable, we make most of our money coding in one way or another and could survive quite happily without upgrading our existing CS installation for a long time. And there are many, many small businesses like us out there, and Adobe have made a lot of money from them over the years.
If Photoshop etc. is your means of making a living, 50 per month for a subscription likely won't be your largest cost.
That depends on how much of your living is made using Photoshop, I guess. If you're a solo professional photographer and practically live in a Photoshop window, that's one thing. If you're, say, a web development firm with a dozen people, who use Photoshop for occasional front-end graphics on a project but mostly work on other things, that might be something else. Each licence is probably still just a small dent in your profits, but if you're throwing away money by the thousands each year, that adds up pretty fast for a small business.
So you are basically betting your company on luck and hope?
On the contrary, I'm betting it on keeping our situation under our own control and making rational purchasing decisions based on expected ROI and watching the bottom line.
I hope you wont suffer from feature envy when the newest whiz bang features get released for PS
Well, we haven't so far, we so we'll take our chances, thanks.
FWIW, I hope you won't suffer from purchase envy if the newest whiz bang features turn out not to be so whizzy after all when there's no longer any meaningful incentive to improve the product and the subscription fees are up 50% in a year or two anyway. Which of our hypothetical futures do you think will be closer to reality?
Don't click the update button then... no one is forcing you to take the updates, you're just a luddite if you don't.
The Luddites were against improvements in technology that would save lots of effort, increase efficiency, and therefore potentially make them redundant. I see no evidence that any recent "upgrades" in Creative Suite have had that kind of effect. They do seem fond of redoing their entire UI theme every couple of years, but there haven't been any must-have new features that were of more than niche interest for quite a while.
And that's the biggest problem with this whole scheme. We're talking about a pricing model where you basically have to pay the equivalent of full price every couple of years. Even on the old, one-off purchase model with a substantial up-front price, you only paid that once and you paid a much lower price if you wanted to upgrade to the next version. Something that is going to work out that much more expensive, not to mention having the risk of breaking at least once a month, has to have something serious in it for the market to make them want to shift, and I just don't see that happening given Adobe's track record lately. As the likes of Microsoft have found out recently, there is always at least one viable alternative for large, profitable customers who don't like your new offering: stick with the old one they already have.
Adobe could very easily lose this market within a few years - they've already lost the trust of most of their professional customers, and for many this move will be the last straw. It's a gift for their competitors, this is the perfect time for them to step up a gear and poach a lot of the userbase of Adobe software.
Unfortunately, at the moment their competitors are mostly older and/or illegal versions of their own products. I doubt tools like the GIMP or Inkscape are ever going to be appealing to the professional market who have paid for CS up to this point, and certainly not any time soon.
What would be interesting is if this move prompted someone more dangerous to step into the market. There are companies out there who probably have the resources to make a serious play for some or all of the territory held by Adobe if it looks like a golden opportunity is coming along. Of course, the bad news is that they might want to go for a subscription-only/SaaS model from the start as well, since it's basically all upside for the vendor as long as they can find a pricing point people will tolerate and actually pay while they complain about it.
Wildcard for the day: someone we've never heard of, probably with a much smaller team of smart and customer-friendly people, sees an opportunity and exploits it through some non-conventional means. Whether or not it was the vehicle for such a move, Kickstarter has shown a couple of relevant things in terms of market forces already. For one thing, no-one is making the 8/9 figure budgets everyone assumes would be necessary to take on an incumbent giant like Adobe that way, at least not so far. But on the other hand, someone with a compelling vision, a market crying out for a certain kind of product, and a niche to exploit can raise a few million. With a few million to fund a small, smart development team and the backing of an enthusiastic community movement, you could do some serious damage to a dinosaur like Adobe.
You have no choice. What are you going to do, stop using Photoshop?
No, but luckily, we already bought enough copies and ours don't stop working at the end of the month.
And as I noted, buying legal buy second-hand copies is also a possibility, and nothing Adobe does is likely to change the legal position on that in Europe on the evidence so far.
This will force the people that actually profit from it and use it professionally to step up and buy.
Only if the new features are actually enough of an improvement to justify an "upgrade" from what we already paid for. Buying a reasonably recent version of CS puts you far ahead of the cheap/FOSS equivalents for professional work, but I haven't seen a single compelling argument for upgrading any further in a long time.
For professional users a subscription makes a lot of sense
Why?
We're already seeing the usual rip-off pricing for non-US customers: Creative Cloud is currently just shy of £50/month in the UK, which works out at about two years to break even compared to the current advertised price for buying the key applications in CS6 outright (a little under £1,200).
I don't want to have my UI move around arbitrarily. I hate it when browsers do that. I hate it when mobile apps do that. I use Creative Suite to earn a living, and I won't tolerate those kinds of tools doing it.
I don't want to work more in the cloud. I have invested a considerable amount of money in building a high performance system here, with robust storage, networking, back-ups etc. And my system and devices don't trust anyone outside my company with access to material I'm working on for clients.
And most of all, I don't trust Adobe not to screw me. When my boot drive failed, they were the only company whose DRM couldn't figure it out and reinstall cleanly after the replacement was installed. It took weeks (and their tech support people who could barely speak English or understand the problem calling me literally in the middle of the night and then wondering why I wasn't impressed, and ultimately the first step toward formal legal action) to get them to fix the problem. As far as I can tell, that problem turned out to be due to completely fictional records somehow magically becoming linked to the serial number of our legitimate, legal copy of the product in their database, which sounds a lot like either an admin screw-up or someone's key generator coincidentally hitting our number, but certainly no fault of ours either way.
I predict with 100% confidence that none of my companies will be giving any more money to Adobe if they go ahead with this. They aren't trustworthy, their pricing model is predatory, and their track record of improvements/bug fixes -- or rather the unspectacular lack thereof -- doesn't speak well of how much value any of us are going to get out of renting our software. If we need more copies of CS for new people, we'll just source legal but second-hand permanent copies of the same version we've already got, as the courts in Europe seem happy that we are perfectly entitled to do.
If you want to sell your product, you have to listen to what your customers want. You can't just brush off their complaints by saying that they will eventually get used to it.
Of course you can, particularly if you're right. Most people are naturally resistant to change, even if in the long run it is change for the better. Experienced business management teams know this, as surely as politicians do. They still promote ideas that their research tells them are better than what was there before or necessary to cope with where the world is heading, and they accept that in the short term they will take flak for it, and they hope to survive market forces/elections for long enough that their newer idea starts to pay off.
Obviously there is a risk involved in that strategy if you're not in a secure position to start with. That's why these big tech companies love their war chests. And obviously sometimes people do push things that aren't really better at all. They made the wrong call, and in the long run the hostility is still there and their strategy doesn't pay off.
But I think the important question here isn't whether Microsoft should be listening to their customers more, it's whether they're right about the change. The immediate, knee-jerk feedback from customers may or may not be a reliable indicator of that.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. -- Henry Ford
It's kind of interesting that it took tablets for us to realize that full screen, and I mean every pixel, not full screen, minus task bar, minus title bar, minus menu bar, minus a tool bar can actually be quite nice to use in many situations.
I agree with your point, but I don't think you're taking it to its logical conclusion yet.
I suspect what really didn't work about "traditional" WIMP systems is having arbitrarily stacking/overlapping windows. Partially obscured background windows are often useless for both reading and interaction, so most of the time they are merely noise. All the window dressing that comes with arbitrarily movable/resizeable windows then amplifies that noise. The end result is a lot of clutter with little if any practical value.
Tablets have given up on all of that clutter, and shown that you can still work just fine with a cleaner visual style and a UI that makes switching contexts to another task easy but comprehensive.
However, tablets are mostly aimed at doing one thing at once. The screen typically isn't big enough to show lots of things at the same time, and on a touch screen the only interactions you've got available are tied directly to what you can show. Neither of those limitations necessarily applies to a desktop or laptop system where Windows would traditionally be running, where it is often both possible and useful to have many things on-screen at once.
So we evolved concepts like window tiling utilities to organise the main screen area where applications live, and we also see smaller areas reserved for helpful things like the task bar and notifications in Windows 7. Having that instant access is useful enough to justify borrowing a bit of screen real estate when you've got a large screen and have many things happening at once. On tablets, it's the opposite argument, because that screen space is more precious and there's less advantage to having the shortcuts and notifications there all the time.
Where Microsoft seem to be going wrong at the moment is in trying to produce one UI that fits both situations, which seems like one of those games you can't possibly win.
Please notice that I only advocated for Postgres on objective/technical grounds. There are always questions beyond pure technical merit when choosing which technologies to use, and things like non-standard behaviour/vendor lock-in are just as damaging in MySQL's case as they can be in any closed/proprietary system.
I suppose in this case, the question is for how long MariaDB really will be a foolproof switch from MySQL, given the direction Oracle seem to be taking MySQL in these days. Your wetware and incremental change points are all fair and valid, but I suspect in time they will naturally weaken.
OK, that's a fair point, though I'm not sure hosting providers are falling over themselves to offer MariaDB either if my own experience is at all representative. In that market, it's more about popularity and the established brand than anything else, and if you want anything other than a canned MySQL/WP/etc. set-up then you basically need to move up a tier and get yourself a shell account on a VPS or something.
As long as CPanel only supports MySQL and all the tools and code support mysql then postgresql doesn't have a prayer.
A prayer of what? If we're restricting the discussion to MySQL's stronghold, which notwithstanding some very large users I would argue is mostly cheap shared-hosting services, then neither Postgres nor MariaDB seems likely to get widely adopted any time in the near future. If we're talking more widely, about projects with a free choice about their hardware, software and hosting arrangements, then I don't think cPanel is particularly important in the big picture.
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There are numerous security flaws in all the major browsers. Vulnerabilities are getting fixed all the time; just look at the change log of Firefox or Chrome over the last few releases, for example. If you think you're magically virus-proof because you're running your pet OSS software, you might consider the list of popular OSS web servers in the title of this discussion.
The thing is, we value the better results we can get with CS compared to the cheaper alternatives, but we only use CS applications occasionally, not as our main full-time work. So in our case, it's not so much 30 seconds of productivity in a day that we'd need to save as a half-hour or more on each of the handful of days we actually use CS.
There are plenty of changes that would pay for themselves in a few weeks at that rate, and would we gladly pay for an upgrade that included them even without CC, but Adobe don't seem to be interested in making those sorts of qualitative improvements. Instead we get little tweaks like editable rounded corners, which while they might be useful occasionally still only save a few seconds compared to doing things the "hard way".
Which describes every large software project implemented by a non-software company, ever.
It describes plenty of large software projects written by software companies, too.
Software maintenance is hard. Very few people actually know how to design and build a software system that is maintainable over the long-term, and since even the people who can can't also see the future, we'll never be able to build idealised, perfectly maintainable systems.
The logical conclusion is that we may wind up with critical systems that are working and stable but prohibitively expensive to develop. The best solution to that situation is often to leave the existing system alone but try to isolate it via some controlled interface so you can still build your new systems with a degree of separation and better maintainability.
To give credit where it's due, Adobe's font people have been very good over the years as well. Their work is of excellent quality, and their pricing and licensing are far more reasonable than some of the other big name foundries.
I'm not convinced by Typekit and all the other similar font-as-a-service things, for much the same reasons I'm not convinced by renting software via Creative Cloud, but obviously enough people disagree with me to make it a useful service. What worries me right now is that enough people might disagree with me about CC to make that a viable service as well...
The comparison should be made to Adobe CS6 Master Collection
Only if you actually use most/all of the applications. I expect that many customers go for something less comprehensive like Design Standard instead, for a little over half the price you mentioned depending on the choice of package.
With the prices actually being charged where I am and right now, not any hypothetical future ones they've said they'll do later or anything that is restricted to a short period of time or in another country, it works out cheaper to buy the entire package if you use more than two of the CS applications, and the cost for renting over about two years is around the same as the cost for buying CS6 Design Standard outright, and then the cost of renting stays up whereas the cost of buying each upgrade has been much lower with the one-off purchases.
I'm all for investing in the best tools and practices. However, your entire argument is predicated on the newer versions of Creative Suite applications actually having that added value. Presumably for some people they do, but I've yet to see a single feature advertised since we last upgraded around CS5 time that seems likely to help us significantly with any of the work we do, in any of the CS applications we use regularly.
So in our case, your argument is apt but backwards. Instead of paying a few thousand extra per year to keep everyone on the latest versions and render videos a bit faster, we could maintain a small dedicated render farm or give everyone a useful bump in their PC specs that will pay dividends for all applications all the time. Of course, this isn't really a very strong argument because it's a false dichotomy and we would invest in both new software and updated hardware if we thought they would bring worthwhile returns, but it does show there is an opportunity cost to spending more money on software just to keep on the treadmill too.
Well, it does change in one slightly important way... With the old situation, we already paid our dues once, and that's it unless and until a new version comes out with some significant improvement that we're willing to pay more for. With the new situation, we would have to keep paying those dues, year after year, with no guarantee of getting any advantage at all in return.
Although... If everyone running academic programmes switched en masse to using alternatives next year, even something like Corel's packages, it would be entertaining. Adobe would lose a small fortune in academic licences for that year, but worse, they'd then have to watch an entire generation graduate using someone else's product as the default instead. I bet that would hurt pretty badly, and more so for every extra year it went on. As a bonus, if the entire academic community suddenly started expressing a renewed interest in alternatives, they could probably get a pretty good deal, while not so many years later that sudden influx of cash could be driving up the level of competition at the high end.
you don't have to buy the suite
No, but if you use more than a couple of the applications it becomes more cost-effective to do so, give or take whatever discount programmes might apply to your particular circumstances. I'm reading this right off Adobe's current Creative Cloud pricing page for the UK, where it is currently a rather odd-looking £46.88/month for the full suite as an individual.
You can save a bit on that as an upgrade, but it says (in text that is literally too small for me to read without zooming the page, underneath the entire table) that the reduction only applies for the first year and if you purchased the original product directly from Adobe. I suspect that both this policy and the way the catch is almost entirely hidden are going to prove fairly accurate predictors of Adobe's future pricing intent.
$50/mo is the full-suite subscription price without the discount for CS licensees.
Not to those of us in the UK, it's not.
And once again, these are the prices now, while they're trying to sell everyone on the idea. It is extremely unlikely that the prices will stay this low once people have committed to the new scheme so they are locked in even if the prices go up. If you think otherwise, try to find a single legally actionable statement from Adobe anywhere that guarantees any kind of limit on their future pricing; I've never seen one.
As nice as it sounds in a "rooting for the little guy" kind of way, I don't see the GIMP being any sort of serious Photoshop challenger in the future. It's a geek's project for geeks.
I'm not a huge believer in the power of FOSS communities to create focussed, high quality products. FOSS has had a few big success stories, but as a movement it enjoys most of its success when producing "good enough" clones of what commercial software does that cater to non-power users and don't come with all the nasty costs and strings attached. I think it will take something much more heavyweight to disrupt a powerful incumbent like Adobe, though.
But it's not $20/month for Photoshop, it's almost £50/month (about US$75) for the suite, and that's today when they're trying to convince us all to switch to renting our software. If you think we wouldn't be paying upwards of $1,000pa for something we used to get for not much more than that price as a one-off, and probably within a year or two, then I think you're... well, a very optimistic person.
But your basic point is correct: staying up to date with Creative Suite isn't very important to any of my businesses. We mostly do software and web development, so while we dropped the cash to buy Creative Suite at one point because having good tools for your staff is valuable, we make most of our money coding in one way or another and could survive quite happily without upgrading our existing CS installation for a long time. And there are many, many small businesses like us out there, and Adobe have made a lot of money from them over the years.
If Photoshop etc. is your means of making a living, 50 per month for a subscription likely won't be your largest cost.
That depends on how much of your living is made using Photoshop, I guess. If you're a solo professional photographer and practically live in a Photoshop window, that's one thing. If you're, say, a web development firm with a dozen people, who use Photoshop for occasional front-end graphics on a project but mostly work on other things, that might be something else. Each licence is probably still just a small dent in your profits, but if you're throwing away money by the thousands each year, that adds up pretty fast for a small business.
So you are basically betting your company on luck and hope?
On the contrary, I'm betting it on keeping our situation under our own control and making rational purchasing decisions based on expected ROI and watching the bottom line.
I hope you wont suffer from feature envy when the newest whiz bang features get released for PS
Well, we haven't so far, we so we'll take our chances, thanks.
FWIW, I hope you won't suffer from purchase envy if the newest whiz bang features turn out not to be so whizzy after all when there's no longer any meaningful incentive to improve the product and the subscription fees are up 50% in a year or two anyway. Which of our hypothetical futures do you think will be closer to reality?
Don't click the update button then... no one is forcing you to take the updates, you're just a luddite if you don't.
The Luddites were against improvements in technology that would save lots of effort, increase efficiency, and therefore potentially make them redundant. I see no evidence that any recent "upgrades" in Creative Suite have had that kind of effect. They do seem fond of redoing their entire UI theme every couple of years, but there haven't been any must-have new features that were of more than niche interest for quite a while.
And that's the biggest problem with this whole scheme. We're talking about a pricing model where you basically have to pay the equivalent of full price every couple of years. Even on the old, one-off purchase model with a substantial up-front price, you only paid that once and you paid a much lower price if you wanted to upgrade to the next version. Something that is going to work out that much more expensive, not to mention having the risk of breaking at least once a month, has to have something serious in it for the market to make them want to shift, and I just don't see that happening given Adobe's track record lately. As the likes of Microsoft have found out recently, there is always at least one viable alternative for large, profitable customers who don't like your new offering: stick with the old one they already have.
Adobe could very easily lose this market within a few years - they've already lost the trust of most of their professional customers, and for many this move will be the last straw. It's a gift for their competitors, this is the perfect time for them to step up a gear and poach a lot of the userbase of Adobe software.
Unfortunately, at the moment their competitors are mostly older and/or illegal versions of their own products. I doubt tools like the GIMP or Inkscape are ever going to be appealing to the professional market who have paid for CS up to this point, and certainly not any time soon.
What would be interesting is if this move prompted someone more dangerous to step into the market. There are companies out there who probably have the resources to make a serious play for some or all of the territory held by Adobe if it looks like a golden opportunity is coming along. Of course, the bad news is that they might want to go for a subscription-only/SaaS model from the start as well, since it's basically all upside for the vendor as long as they can find a pricing point people will tolerate and actually pay while they complain about it.
Wildcard for the day: someone we've never heard of, probably with a much smaller team of smart and customer-friendly people, sees an opportunity and exploits it through some non-conventional means. Whether or not it was the vehicle for such a move, Kickstarter has shown a couple of relevant things in terms of market forces already. For one thing, no-one is making the 8/9 figure budgets everyone assumes would be necessary to take on an incumbent giant like Adobe that way, at least not so far. But on the other hand, someone with a compelling vision, a market crying out for a certain kind of product, and a niche to exploit can raise a few million. With a few million to fund a small, smart development team and the backing of an enthusiastic community movement, you could do some serious damage to a dinosaur like Adobe.
You have no choice. What are you going to do, stop using Photoshop?
No, but luckily, we already bought enough copies and ours don't stop working at the end of the month.
And as I noted, buying legal buy second-hand copies is also a possibility, and nothing Adobe does is likely to change the legal position on that in Europe on the evidence so far.
This will force the people that actually profit from it and use it professionally to step up and buy.
Only if the new features are actually enough of an improvement to justify an "upgrade" from what we already paid for. Buying a reasonably recent version of CS puts you far ahead of the cheap/FOSS equivalents for professional work, but I haven't seen a single compelling argument for upgrading any further in a long time.
For professional users a subscription makes a lot of sense
Why?
We're already seeing the usual rip-off pricing for non-US customers: Creative Cloud is currently just shy of £50/month in the UK, which works out at about two years to break even compared to the current advertised price for buying the key applications in CS6 outright (a little under £1,200).
I don't want to have my UI move around arbitrarily. I hate it when browsers do that. I hate it when mobile apps do that. I use Creative Suite to earn a living, and I won't tolerate those kinds of tools doing it.
I don't want to work more in the cloud. I have invested a considerable amount of money in building a high performance system here, with robust storage, networking, back-ups etc. And my system and devices don't trust anyone outside my company with access to material I'm working on for clients.
And most of all, I don't trust Adobe not to screw me. When my boot drive failed, they were the only company whose DRM couldn't figure it out and reinstall cleanly after the replacement was installed. It took weeks (and their tech support people who could barely speak English or understand the problem calling me literally in the middle of the night and then wondering why I wasn't impressed, and ultimately the first step toward formal legal action) to get them to fix the problem. As far as I can tell, that problem turned out to be due to completely fictional records somehow magically becoming linked to the serial number of our legitimate, legal copy of the product in their database, which sounds a lot like either an admin screw-up or someone's key generator coincidentally hitting our number, but certainly no fault of ours either way.
I predict with 100% confidence that none of my companies will be giving any more money to Adobe if they go ahead with this. They aren't trustworthy, their pricing model is predatory, and their track record of improvements/bug fixes -- or rather the unspectacular lack thereof -- doesn't speak well of how much value any of us are going to get out of renting our software. If we need more copies of CS for new people, we'll just source legal but second-hand permanent copies of the same version we've already got, as the courts in Europe seem happy that we are perfectly entitled to do.
If you want to sell your product, you have to listen to what your customers want. You can't just brush off their complaints by saying that they will eventually get used to it.
Of course you can, particularly if you're right. Most people are naturally resistant to change, even if in the long run it is change for the better. Experienced business management teams know this, as surely as politicians do. They still promote ideas that their research tells them are better than what was there before or necessary to cope with where the world is heading, and they accept that in the short term they will take flak for it, and they hope to survive market forces/elections for long enough that their newer idea starts to pay off.
Obviously there is a risk involved in that strategy if you're not in a secure position to start with. That's why these big tech companies love their war chests. And obviously sometimes people do push things that aren't really better at all. They made the wrong call, and in the long run the hostility is still there and their strategy doesn't pay off.
But I think the important question here isn't whether Microsoft should be listening to their customers more, it's whether they're right about the change. The immediate, knee-jerk feedback from customers may or may not be a reliable indicator of that.
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. -- Henry Ford
It's kind of interesting that it took tablets for us to realize that full screen, and I mean every pixel, not full screen, minus task bar, minus title bar, minus menu bar, minus a tool bar can actually be quite nice to use in many situations.
I agree with your point, but I don't think you're taking it to its logical conclusion yet.
I suspect what really didn't work about "traditional" WIMP systems is having arbitrarily stacking/overlapping windows. Partially obscured background windows are often useless for both reading and interaction, so most of the time they are merely noise. All the window dressing that comes with arbitrarily movable/resizeable windows then amplifies that noise. The end result is a lot of clutter with little if any practical value.
Tablets have given up on all of that clutter, and shown that you can still work just fine with a cleaner visual style and a UI that makes switching contexts to another task easy but comprehensive.
However, tablets are mostly aimed at doing one thing at once. The screen typically isn't big enough to show lots of things at the same time, and on a touch screen the only interactions you've got available are tied directly to what you can show. Neither of those limitations necessarily applies to a desktop or laptop system where Windows would traditionally be running, where it is often both possible and useful to have many things on-screen at once.
So we evolved concepts like window tiling utilities to organise the main screen area where applications live, and we also see smaller areas reserved for helpful things like the task bar and notifications in Windows 7. Having that instant access is useful enough to justify borrowing a bit of screen real estate when you've got a large screen and have many things happening at once. On tablets, it's the opposite argument, because that screen space is more precious and there's less advantage to having the shortcuts and notifications there all the time.
Where Microsoft seem to be going wrong at the moment is in trying to produce one UI that fits both situations, which seems like one of those games you can't possibly win.
OK, it sounds like we probably agree on most of this then.
Please notice that I only advocated for Postgres on objective/technical grounds. There are always questions beyond pure technical merit when choosing which technologies to use, and things like non-standard behaviour/vendor lock-in are just as damaging in MySQL's case as they can be in any closed/proprietary system.
I suppose in this case, the question is for how long MariaDB really will be a foolproof switch from MySQL, given the direction Oracle seem to be taking MySQL in these days. Your wetware and incremental change points are all fair and valid, but I suspect in time they will naturally weaken.
OK, that's a fair point, though I'm not sure hosting providers are falling over themselves to offer MariaDB either if my own experience is at all representative. In that market, it's more about popularity and the established brand than anything else, and if you want anything other than a canned MySQL/WP/etc. set-up then you basically need to move up a tier and get yourself a shell account on a VPS or something.
As long as CPanel only supports MySQL and all the tools and code support mysql then postgresql doesn't have a prayer.
A prayer of what? If we're restricting the discussion to MySQL's stronghold, which notwithstanding some very large users I would argue is mostly cheap shared-hosting services, then neither Postgres nor MariaDB seems likely to get widely adopted any time in the near future. If we're talking more widely, about projects with a free choice about their hardware, software and hosting arrangements, then I don't think cPanel is particularly important in the big picture.