Adobe Cloud offers leg up over Creative Suite's price wall Adobe has launched its mighty Creative Suite in to the cloud, potentially giving designers and illustrators a slightly more affordable way to access its reassuringly expensive tools. On Monday the company unveiled Creative Suite 6, which is available for the first time on a subscription basis from the Creative Cloud, also …
You should look at the European prices, the UK gets away relatively lightly. We have to pay an additional 73.5% more than the Americans about 32% more than the UK! (Based on the UK, US and German Adobe websites).
The UK version of the Master Suite is over 334 quid cheaper than the German version (based on Amazon prices).
Where is the home use/non commercial version of CS Suite? If you want more people to use your software then you need to make it more readily available to more people.
I'll gladly pay £100 for a non commercial license for CS. I already use a fully licensed CS3 Suite at work. But for personal stuff or invites for friends parties, I don't make any money, I'm not going to pay £1500 for the suite... but... the more I use your software, the more likely I am to want to use it in a commercial setting where you can charge whatever you like as it will be the company paying...
Elements is cynically aimed at the home users market - which just enough functionality to satisfy the casual hobbyists manage their photo collection - and at the price it's still not cheap.
Most major software development companies now offer free basic editions or reasonable monthly subscription rates for on demand. Even with the exchange rate - the Adobe collection is not cheap.
I always assumed that the home version was fulfilled by the pirate versions of Adobe software. I know plenty of graphic designers (etc.) who started off at home with their pirated version, then went to work for a large company, who had to buy a fully legal version from Adobe, because that was the tool that pretty much all graphic designers know and use.
Basically, piracy is Adobe's demo version and home/non-comercial version rolled into one, and they don't even have to distribute it themselves.
Yeah, pirating it seems to be the only option (other than not using the software and getting left behind in terms of your skills) if you don't have £1500 kicking around. But I want to pay Adobe... and I can't... I have even looked at becoming a student officially to get the educational licence, but, frankly that was a ridiculous idea given the cost of courses and even then CS suite is still £300 odd...
And no, Elements is not CS Suite by any stretch of the imagination.
Adobe's prices are always on the highish side. Actually, scratch that. They slide over to the 'that price has to be a joke, right?' end of the high price range on pretty much everything except their free stuff. The free stuff, in turn, is only free because no one in their right mind would buy their overpriced tools otherwise.
So here's my deal with Adobe: until and unless they apply some sanity to their pricing they'll never have me as a customer. There are plenty of alternatives to their products out there that are either free or sanely priced and can do just as much. In fact I was much disgusted with Photoshop when I was forced to use it recently and discovered that it lacks many of the filters I've come to rely upon in Gimp. There's no excuse for missing such basic filters as lighting sources in a product that expensive.
I really don't get it. Why would anyone use ColdFusion for $1200 when you can get Railo for free? Surely the few features Adobe's version has aren't that good. Or Photoshop, which actually does LESS than the free alternative Gimp (I speak from experience here). Dreamweaver I can kind of understand. The other WYSIWYG webpage editors out there are pretty lousy by comparison, but given that I usually work in the code view anyway, why would I use it?
And before anyone goes calling me a clueless hobbiest, I am a professional web developer. I depend on the tools I use to feed my family and keep a roof over our heads and I make a pretty good living doing it. Good enough that my wife doesn't have to work anyway. All this without giving up most of a month's income to Adobe or using illegally obtained software.
"There aren't any alternatives to their suite for professional use."
Maybe not as a bundle, but there are alternatives. As a disclaimer, I have and use CS5. I just don't feel like I have to.
Photoshop - Gimp. It can do anything Photoshop can. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it can get the job done. In fact, I spent years using Gimp exclusively and actually prefer it to Photoshop.
Acrobat Pro - Foxit Pro if you REALLY need the kind of features it offers, but honestly in my experience most PDFs could be done with Office and a PDF printer or LibreOffice by itself.
Flash Pro & Flash Builder - Silverlight...or just learn HTML5 and do away with plugins entirely. That's probably the better option anyway, given the number of iPads out there.
InDesign - MS Publisher comes to mind, but I'm certain there are others. Desktop publishing isn't my thing.
Fireworks - To be honest I've never actually used Fireworks. I just don't see the need for this application, even as a web professional.
Audition - I don't know what the alternatives are, but none of the musicians I know use Audition. Granted these aren't people you've ever heard of, but one of them actually pays his bills (barely) off his music gigs and selling CDs that he makes in the studio in his basement.
Media Encoder - There are only about a zillion encoder apps out there. Given that they all do about the same thing and half of them are free, pick one.
Dreamweaver - You could use KompoZer or Sharepoint Designer, but personally I'd rather use Dreamweaver.
The rest are tools I've never used and thus can't comment on. I will say this though: to say there's no professional grade alternatives to pretty much anything is to be just plain lazy (or a shill, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt). There are ALWAYS alternatives, even if you limit yourself to professional grade software. You just have to put out a little effort to find them.
I downloaded the Gimp. It may be powerful but boy it could do with a re-design of user interface. Easy to use it is not. There are a few books on Amazon on how to use it at least.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=The+Gimp&x=0&y=0
I just preordered Creative Cloud because I think it is great value for money. If I take the price of the Master Suite (2599), I would need >50 months. This is more than 4 years and I bet in this time there will be another update, which I will get for free in Creative Cloud.
And if you are a student, you can have a 50% discount...
I think this is great...
It's good business to a point. Worked great for Microsoft (Windows and Office) for a while, but it makes one heck of a target for open-sourcers. Now Linux and Libre Office have genuinely eroded MS's core sectors that they really did 'own' for years.
The GIMP does much of what people want from Photoshop - it's not as slick, but it's pretty potent. Adobe Premiere is laughable compared with lightworks (now open-sourced, simplified versions to follow), After Effects is still holding reasonably well with some cheap alternatives suiting many users (eg hitfilm.com for an NLE with 3D effects engine for a few hundred notes).
Own a sector, but manage it well - if they price carefully, they can keep the sector they currently control
Good business to a point is right.
Look at what happened to Quark. They used to own the whole DTP market, until Adobe bought-out all the other real competition and brought out their (actually) superior product.
Adobe have owned the market for years and done almost no innovating, while their apps get bigger, slower and more buggy.
Where is the open-source product to compete with InDesign for instance?
That's a serious question actually - cos I can't find anything worth a damn yet.
Adobe roll out annual upgrades for their CS suite, and the current is around £360.
Assuming that the price stays at around £50 / month, and this isn't cranked upwards in six months or a year's time, then it would take around eight or nine years (assuming you bought the annual upgrades) for the boxed software to work out cheaper.
If you're buying into the product for the first time then the cloud version makes sense, particularly as I suspect that Adobe are going to insist you buy it this way within a few years in any case.
One big advantage of the Creative Cloud version is that you'll be able to install both Mac and PC versions off one license. (You're limited to two machines.) That makes switching between platforms much easier.
If you'd don't have the Adobe apps, then this seems like a good deal. If you're a user who already has CS5 and you don't need more apps than you have, then it's pretty pants. You can upgrade for less than £357 (for example, if you have the Premium Suite) but a year's subs costs you £562.56. I'm struggling to see the incentive, other than to access products I don't really need and services I wouldn't really use.
They do a cheaper subscription for existing users at £328.08 for the year.
I think that buying the upgrade would make sense, as it isn't limited to the subscription period. If you shifted to the cloud version then you'd have to continue to shell out to retain access to the software, and the price would rise to the £562.56 level the following year.
The upgrade price is from CS5.5 - the intermediary version of the software released halfway through their normal upgrade cycle (as far I'm concerned - and indeed, Adobes own press releases at the time). If you're like me and you decided to hold out for CS6, then tough crap. The upgrade price is over £700 - effectively that's doubled what it used to be in the CS1/2/3/4/5 days. Either you pay for each .5 release or you pay double for the full update. Total rip off.
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