Adobe kills Creative Suite – all future features online only Adobe had been expected to demo Creative Suite 7 at its MAX conference down in smoky Los Angeles on Monday, but instead announced there'll be no more versions of its boxed software and that the Creative Suite brand will cease to exist. All CS apps updates will only be added to its Creative Cloud suite, and Adobe showed off some …
Not quite sure about Adobe's "cloud" branding. The software is exactly the same as before. It installs on your computer, the licence is locked to that computer unless you deauthorise it. The "cloud" appears to be just the way Adobe have worked out to ensure they extract money from users every month instead of those pesky people who refuse to upgrade their software every year,
Make no mistake, this is just a scheme to squeeze money out of the end users. They may as well brand it "Adobe remote wallet opening device".
Very true. I purchased CS 6 three months ago, after evaluating both offerings. It took me a while to figure out that Creative Cloud really doesn't have a lot of "cloud" to it. You'd instinctively expect something running on the web, but it's just a subscription program, in the end. Not sure if the marketing drones at Adobe were wise to call that "cloud".
Been paying this for nearly a year now, "upgraded" from PS 5 - Quite pricey in France. You do not need to be always on to use this, though it does need to call home form time to time. Unfortunately, this has happened to me several times when on the road with no internet. Not fun when trying to edit some photos with the application when paying a special offer price of 36,89 euros per month. Thank god my copy of LR5 was bought!! I don't remember what the new price will be (I tried to find it but they seem not to want to share this easily with me), but think it is over €50 per month!
I think I have no choice but to pay for one more year, but it is time I start to look for an alternative to LR+PS workflow, including someway of easily importing over 200k photos edits to a similar program to LR (not the edited files in PS, rather any edits I made in LR that are not applied until I export).
So Adobe has my cash for at least 12 more months (may not be possible to switch, though I hope it will) - providing I can find a software suite that is rich enough in functionality for me to use that runs on mac (don't like Linux and not about to move all my software to open source just because one provider is now too expensive). Willing to pay providing the software is good.
Exactly my biggest worry. I'm a fellow snapper and sometimes you're out on the road with only GPRS for very, very basic internet, sometimes if you're deep in a valley shooting for a day or two you have no connection at all. So if I want to load an Adobe product back on the laptop after it breaks down, I can do that from a USB dongle right now, in future I'm stuffed! Somehow I can't see my GPRS connection shifting 2-3GB of download particularly swiftly!
Adobe think that everyone uses their kit in an office on lightning fast fibre connections, sorry but some of us are out there in the field with only a mains connection every couple of days and very limited internet.
The whole POINT of cloud computing is to force a rental system on users.
No, its not.
The whole point of cloud computing is to provide redundancy in a way which is impossible to achieve when working with hardware-only solutions. Just because these <del>idiots</del> marketing people continue to turn it into a commercial slugfest doesn't mean that this is what cloud computing is all about. FAR from it.
Here in my office we're not sure whether to cry or slit our wrists. We are a creative company that uses Adobe products for 3 out of our 4 main packages (Photoshop, After Effects & Premiere), and our initial estimates means we'll be spending at least twice as much as before. Our 4th main package, 3DSMax went subscription-based a few years back, but even corporate behemoth Autodesk still allow you to buy standalone, and use the software after the sub runs out.
Wow Adobe, what utter bastards. I think we'll let the 'Tap play this one out
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iazv-tIy5Js
"Make no mistake, this is just a scheme to squeeze money out of the end users. They may as well brand it "Adobe remote wallet opening device". Yeah, and the pint of milk I bought from the newsagents this morning had a price tag attached to it. Pesky thieving capitalists wanting my money for their product.
So, you have to pay for a new cereal bowl every month, plus a monthly charge on your mug? No, thought not. You bought those tools outright, just the same way that plain old software ought to be sold (if it must be sold at all.)
This IS just a greedy short-sighted money grab by Adobe.
The software is a lot slower on the same hardware comparing CS6 to CS5, I'd imagine the new version will be slower still and probably drop support for OSX 10.6.8 (the last decent production version of OSX). InDesign is the best application in the suite and if they have any sense it will include externally referenced style sheets like CSS.
Any reg readers out there who are developing alternatives please reply in this thread if you need any professional users of design tools to help make new ones suitable for professional work I'd gladly help. There's no way I can professionally advise my clients to purchase business tools that are at the mercy of an internet connection and regular updates that don't play with existing tools that get the work done.
For a Photoshop-only situation, that may work. Although, as close as I can figure it out, Gimp is still missing some features that my graphics friends consider indispensable, such as a seamless PDF process.
And Gimp is comparatively mature. Any studio is also going to want Illustrator & InDesign & friends. Good luck finding adequate competition there.
Somebody like me on the other hand, who just needs to occasionally slap a bitmap into submission, I've switched to Gimp years ago and never looked back. So this is going to be a serious case of YMMV, but I suspect the majority of the professional CS users will be stuck like a yacht in the middle of the Sahara.
I quite like it. I mean, the direction that proprietary software is heading to.
Make no mistake, I like owning a license, especially if it comes with perpetual support/free upgrade option. This is exactly what open source gives me (but some small proprietary applications provide this as well, although without self-support option).
So basically we are put before a choice: regular payments to software developers (under "cloud" branding) or use alternative software for free, perhaps supporting the developers on voluntary basis. This puts me, consumer, in nice and clear situation.
Of course, this might be a death toll to proprietary software. So be it - as I said, this is heading in the right direction.
Oh, I forgot to put explanation why I like it. Until now it was difficult to explain what "customer capture" actually means. Microsoft, and now Adobe, made it so clear that only dumbest of businesses will fail to understand the cost of operating proprietary software.
A beer to "fifth column" at Adobe.
"GIMP cant even compare with the 80's Photoshop."
You speak the truth and get downvoted. I'll jump in here to ease your downvote count:
The GIMP sucks. It's more than a decade behind Photoshop. It's not even comparable to Photoshop, you could probably say that it's a good replacement for MS Paint. Except its UI sucks even more.
Bring on those downvotes.
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"<bitch>
Or maybe even try and get the exposure and composition correct in camera? It ain't rocket science..
</bitch>"
I'm a part time wedding photographer as well as an IT guy. One of my recent brides was paranoid about the fact that she had a small double chin when she smiled and she wanted me to edit it away - A straightforward task in Photoshop. Could you show me what combination of in camera exposure and composition settings would achieve the same effect?
Try to ensure that the bride always looks up slightly; it tends to make the double-chin disappear.
However, the stupid *^*$%·s that think that photoshop just does exposure and colour balance know as much about real-life usage as my gardener knows about the pros and cons of string theory vs. loop quantum gravity.
"GIMP is no use for the professional Adobe Addict, because GIMP is no use for the professional Adobe Addict."
Until people start using it as a replacement for PS, it will never be a replacement for PS. If it doesn't do what you want, don't smugly tell all your hipster friends that GIMP is a useless POS, tell the GIMP developers what you need, maybe even contract someone to add the missing feature.
"One of my recent brides was paranoid about the fact that she had a small double chin when she smiled and she wanted me to edit it away - A straightforward task in Photoshop. Could you show me what combination of in camera exposure and composition settings would achieve the same effect?"
#1 - shoot from slightly above the bride so she is looking up, it will stretch and flatten the skin under her chin
#2 use a white bounceboard/reflector in front (which you should be doing anyway) to even out any shadows under her chin.
Sounds like you are a VERY part time wedding photographer.
"Or maybe even try and get the exposure and composition correct in camera? It ain't rocket science.."
You're obviously one of those people who's happy to takes their shots, a little tweak of contrast, a little tweak of hue/sat and you're done. Some of us shoot RAW and do very selective corrections, sometimes down to the pixel level. If you shoot RAW correctly and "expose to the right" what you're talking is absolute crap, because "exposing to the right" immediately pushes the image to a very bland exposure state to ensure all the highlight and shadow detail is captured by the sensor to minimise any detail loss. It is then a necessity to pre-edit the RAW for preparation for entry into Photoshop for the proper editing.
I shoot landscapes to a very high standard published in magazines, sell prints to ad agencies and solo customers, I'm still a only a hobbyist/semi-pro trying to make it full time pro. An average image will start off as a basic 30MB full-frame RAW by the time it's done and dusted will have been edited for at least an hour minimum sometimes up to 2-3 hours. It will be about a 1.5GB PSD with anywhere up to around 10-15 layers of adjustments, both from internal PS tools and other plugins, to ensure that the image is worthy of printing up to at several feet wide at least. When you print anything bigger than A3 you'd better have done a damn good job of editing every tiny detail correctly because any tiny problems will stick out like sore thumbs to the viewer and that's a lost sale.
"You're obviously one of those people who's happy to takes their shots, a little tweak of contrast, a little tweak of hue/sat and you're done. Some of us shoot RAW..."expose to the right" what you're talking is absolute crap"
How on earth would you know how he shoots? Expose to the right 1 stop, then have import settings that automatically correct 1 stop of exposure on import - takes no time at all.
BTW how is this relevant to Adobe's pricing? You said yourself you do that before using photoshop.
Or are you just trying to prove what a super photographer you are just because you shoot RAW?
"An average image will start off as a basic 30MB full-frame RAW by the time it's done and dusted will have been edited for at least an hour minimum sometimes up to 2-3 hours"
OK shoot 2000 shots at a wedding and try that - you'll be editing until next century, and the couple will be divorced before you deliver their wedding photos.
"If GIMP is fine for what you need to do, then you ain't doing much."
Funny thing is.. Neither are many of the most vocal Photoshop fanboys. They want the same software the pros use, but are unwilling to pay for it.
I'm ordering a really big bucket of popcorn.. And going to delight in the anguished cries of the entitled.
Gimp is fine as what it is. A quite capable bitmap editing application. It is not, nor has it ever been presented as such by anybody with the authority to do so.. A Photoshop replacement.
And you do CMYK properly?
Just please don't ever mention GIMP, or Linux for that matter in these discussions. It's not fitting to discuss in a filthy manner with grownup's. Keep it in the boys room if you have to talk about it.
There is very little that can even get close to Photoshop's professional level. There are programs that do better than PS. But they are programs designed for specific tasks not general pixel manipulation software's.
The best PS competitor for home users and semi pro users I've seen is Pixelmator. Still it can't compete with PS for a number of reasons. Yet it performs better than PS on some tasks.
But when it comes to Adobe, it's all about their suit. The combination of Photoshop, Illustrator and In Design. Nothing outperforms that combination.
Unfortunately Adobe is not Adobe anymore, it became the new Macromedia after the acquisition of that company. The development of Adobe as a company is actually really saddening, for those who been in the business from the early days and can see the transformation.
"And you do CMYK properly?"
That's the printer's job, not mine. And I've not had any problems in the last decade. Spot colour is more of an issue than CMYK, really.
Photoshop is very over-rated - users tend to count the features it has rather than the features that they use/need. InDesign is a gem, though.
GIMP is a very fine product and great for some basic adjustments but I'm afraid that if you're very serious about photo editing then Photoshop is the only option, even Elements doesn't cut it for pro level photo editing.
If GIMP is all you need then fair enough but some of us need the very subtle and powerful features that only PS offers, and no Elements does not cut it either, the tools are very limited and the ability to have dozens of multiple layers and very refined selection adjustments which Elements cannot handle.
GIMP is not 100% PS compatible as it does not render 100% of PS's layers/objects/filters with 100% accuracy, 100% of the time; which would be a mandatory requirement to act as a PS replacement in a professional shop.
Oh, and GIMP doesn't have CMYK support (bug 123598), so it's a non-starter as a PS replacement.
This is simply a case of PS being the de facto standard, and that means you have to support it and its features (which will be hard due to patents).
That all said, GIMP is fine if that's all you use and all you need. Nothing wrong with GIMP. It's just not PS.
"GIMP is not 100% PS compatible as it does not render 100% of PS's layers/objects/filters with 100% accuracy, 100% of the time; which would be a mandatory requirement to act as a PS replacement in a professional shop."
Well, it's a requirement today. In a few years, given that Adobe have just committed suicide, it won't be.
"Cloud" (ie, rental) computing was the norm in the 60's and it was shit then; it's still shit now.
'Tis embarrassing when the twats shoot themselves in the foot. It's simply incomprehensible when they shoot themselves in the head!
With MS committed to their Win8 lemming-plunge, and Orifice 365 annual subscription payments; and now with Adobe rushing to Balmerize their flagship suite, it can only serve as an injection of rocket-juice to boost the Penguin ascendency. One could predict a new movement, similar to The Document Foundation, to enlist the creative community. Somewhere must lurk a corporate nemesis with a firehose able to erode the Adobe bricks supporting those cele$tial a$pirations?
I'd look for a LibreCreative suite rising up to counter Adobe's corporate hypoxia. Air gets pretty thin up there in the clouds, Sparky! Fools run out of oxygen and perish before they realize they've made a fatal error.
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While Irfanview is a great little image viewer with some handy batch editing abilities, and Paint.Net is a great alternative for people who think GIMP is a stupid name for a piece of software, neither they nor GIMP are a serious replacement for Creative Suite. I use Paint.Net regularly but I am not a graphics professional, so it is more that adequate for my needs.
For a graphics professional, I imagine that Corel's products like PSP and Painter, are the only ones that approach parity with Adobe's. I have no idea If they would be adequate, they seem to have stagnated recently, but I get the impression that many of Adobe's products have too (or possibly just reached maturity). Possibly this is why Adobe are moving to the subscription model. When there are no significant new features in your new product, there is no real reason to upgrade.
PS: when you resize and image larger, it still only has as much detail as the original image. No matter now good your tool that adds semi-random noise is, it still just gives the impression of more detail.
PPS: Paint.Net doesn't do CMYK, which is something GIMP added only recently and only after much persuasion.
No, they don't. Corel is where old software goes to die after being mauled by marketing morons. By the time they've added all the 'features' they want, you're left with something ten times the size of the original which does half as much and is horrific to use.
Sadly, there is no realistic competition to CS for professional users. It would be really, really good if competition existed, but taken as a whole, nothing comes close to CS - for now, anyway.
Considering the development cost, it probably never will. It's more likely CS will simply become irrelevant as other design techniques become popular. CS is basically still about editing for print. As code becomes more prominent, it will have less to offer.
But I'm not expecting that to start happening for at least five years, and more likely ten.
Couldn't agree more. Adobe software doesn't come cheap but in the past I've extended the life of boxed product by skipping a few upgrade cycles.
Adobe's international pricing is a major rip off too. Last time I bought CS the list price in GBP was numerically the same as in USD despite the fact that the pound was very strong against the dollar (not far off 2 dollars to the pound) All attempts to buy the US version online were blocked. I ended up getting a friend in US to buy it and bring it over on his next vist.
Gimp and Kompozer (with Handcoder) seem to be as good as it gets with OpenSource, I'd gladly pay a few hundred dollars for something a bit better but not USD1000 a year for CS cloud. I'd buy CS6 while I still can but if I'm going to have to drop Adobe at some future point on grounds of cost I might as well bite the bullet now rather than further enrich them.
Really...
This should be to limit piracy ?
This is going to outrage paying customers, professionals.
Having to be always-on connected just to use the "algorithms on the cloud" for filtering images and so on... it's beyond stupid.
This is a huge fraud!
Shame on Adobe managers!
Adobe deserves to go bankrupt on this shame!
What in god's name are you ranting about? Filters only done online?! I'm an extremely pleased creative cloud customer, and I suspect i might notice if the apps didn't run when the computers are offline - which they do - and if it took four or five hours to upload / download the data to do a gaussian blur on a 2gb+ image!
Do you even know what 'fraud' means?
If it means being ripped off, it's no ripoff for me. My business can't justify the huge upfront cost of a straight up purchase, but cc is a no-brainer. I have vastly more capability than I did before, and I can have access to stuff like premiere and muse and audition that i don't use enough to make a full purchase sane but that are really useful sometimes.
There are cases where subscription services are exploitative, but honestly, right now I think I'm getting more out of this than Adobe. Sorry if reality doesn't match your frantic and uninformed outrage...
I am in the same boat as you, I have a client who is now licensed up on 4 or 5 (maybe more now) copies of creative cloud. They were moving off of one legit CS5 and a bunch of bootlegs. They couldn't justify frontloading 15'000$+ of adobe software. 200~300$ish a month is seen as an incredible bargain. I wouldn't be surprised if they end up with 10 or 15 seats when it is all said and done.
You guys gotta remember that adobe has never been the right company to do business with if you aren't in the business of making money with your tools. But if you are in that business - the subscription options are perfectly reasonable.
Because it has come up as a parallel, I also have a number of clients getting ready to go office 365 E3. The price hurts a bit, but nowhere near as much as front loading 500$+ per Office OpenLicense. Plus they get to get rid of their exchange servers (or google apps accounts) and their skype premium group-conference accounts (for lync). This is to say nothing of the support niceties you gain.
In most cases when we are doing an ROI on SaaS, we are seeing payback times at or over 3 years vs buying it ourselves. It would be stupid not to seriously consider that.
I understand that for home users there are different realities, and those may need to be addressed in better ways and/or at more flexible price points.
Do try and remember, for as many people as are here complaining about the SaaS movement, there are many, many more that are either indifferent or even in support of these changes.
There are several companies that have charged annual subscriptions far, far higher than Adobe for single pieces of software for many years.
Many of them even still exist!
A lot of them don't, having been undercut by competitors offering a better product for less money, then thrashed around for a few years burning all goodwill cranking the price handle until even the most dedicated can't afford to keep it.
However, in most cases the original market leader is the only one of the "old guard" remaining a decade later, so Adobe are probably safe for another decade.
Their users however are not, and really should start looking for alternatives.
For an example, I've watched the price of Cast Wysiwyg go up rather quickly, from about £50pa (after large up-front) fifteen years ago to the current about £1500 per year. There have been very few notable new features and shitty to non-existent support in the last decade - one big overhaul of the graphics five years ago, and that's about it.
What happens when you stop paying? With Wyg you used to keep whatever you currently have, only forfeiting future updates. That £1.5k however marks a change to a "lease" model, just like this Adobe deal where you appear to lose everything back to your last boxed version (if you have one at all). That is and should be utterly terrifying to a business reliant on the software.
One really big question - can you convert a Photoshop/Ilustrator image into any other format without losing your data?
Wyg is dying - they have a cash pile which slows their death, but when competitors like Capture Polar are so much cheaper, while almost as good, and Vectorworks is cheaper (albeit higher upfront) and much better - the writing is on the wall.
Who will kill Adobe? I don't know yet, but somebody will and going by the example of Wyg, any business reliant on it will do very well to jump earlier rather than later.
Well I have moved away from Adobe, mostly because I'm not in the industry professionally anymore.
On the otherhand, while doing that I have quit doing vector based graphics. Simply because there is no great alternative out there.
For tasks similar to PS I use Pixelmator. It feels fresh compared to the old hog PS, nothing for the really pro users (yet). They have added CMYK support, I have not tested it. Here is their marketing talk about it: http://www.pixelmator.com/blog/2012/11/08/color-perfect-pixelmator-2-1-3/
Step by step they step up the competition against PS. Some of the features are far better than in PS. On the other hand they lack some features, but they are getting fewer.
With CS5 and now CC Adobe has done some good improvements, for the professionals. So there is still a long way to go, for these app makers. But then, they have no need to compete with Adobe. There is the other market, the non professionals. And when targeting them slowly they might kill the old Macromedia dinosaur Adobe.
"My business can't justify the huge upfront cost of a straight up purchase, but cc is a no-brainer."
No, you have no brain.
The subscription costs more than double the cost of upgrading every 18 months!
You are either an Adobe employee, or have such little business sense I have a bridge I'd love to sell you...
Yup. Cash flow is what kills small businesses.
This is why they usually need to borrow from a bank to fund their startup and expansion costs, like purchasing important tools.
You don't hire a lathe if your business is turning widgets. You hire the tools that you don't use often, and you buy the tools you use every day - probably on credit, but you still buy them so that next year, the monthly payments have gone and your cashflow is therefore improved, leaving cash for other expansion.
There are exceptions - the really, really high capital cost things like premises are usually rented.
ROFL! Wait til 70% of the userbase who are not cutting edge commercial users migrate. Then you will be stuck in an unholy feedback loop of inflating subs, degraded support and degraded product development. If their motives were noble they would carry on offering both revenue models. For them to pull the boxed version for reasons of version control costs is as disingenuous as EA were with their 'cloud processing' lies. They won't be getting any money from me ever!
The upgrade pricing for existing CS6 users looks quite favourable until you work out that it is pretty much the same as the old upgrade cost, but also that after 12 months potentially the cost could double!
If they did whack up the price after 12 months you could find yourself paying more than double the price that you paid previously to jump to the latest version.
How long do you think before we get the "we've listened to feedback from our customers, and now realise that the subscription model wasn't great" statement, and it's CEO and the board "agree that it would be best for the CEO to leave"?
Seriously though, the cheapest option for Photoshop is going to be $360/year?? Presumably there will still be an Elements version available as a one-off purchase (please tell me they're not crazy enough to drop that?!?). But it's going to really cut the number of users down to a very small and dedicated bunch - I can't imagine many who (like me) use their products for a hobby / casual work shelling out $30/month for one app!
That could happen IF and ONLY IF there would be a huge drop in sales.
If professional won't be buying the Adobe CS7 fraud crap, refuse being ripped off by the Adobe CEO thief and his gang, then investors might force Adobe CEO to leave and policy to change completely.
Otherwise it's not going to happen.
Look at Electronic Arts with their SimCity fraud, a real shame, the law doesn't touch them although they got $$ millions selling an absolutely faulty product. They issued a 2.0 patch that just added more bugs to paying customers.
That is the cloud fraud. That is what these managers and CEOs are using cloud for. To steal money and nothing else.
Good thing all the colleges and uni's have expansive design suites full of Adobe software then isn't it?
I'd love nothing more than to be rid of this expense. I'd love to be able to replace Photoshop and Illustrator with GIMP and Inkscape but the reality is that it isn't going to happen any decade soon.
"For a lot of people.... if you cant pirate it, you cant learn it. If you can learn it, you wont use it. If you dont use it, Adobe goes bust."
Original article mentions special prices for students and Colleges/Universities. Adobe will need that price model to keep the students flowing into paid work using their tools.
Does anyone know what a typical upload/download figure per hour for this cloudy thing is when using (say) Photoshop in an enthusiastic kind of way (think teenager trying out ideas and playing with shiny shiny filters).
Colleges in UK have rooms full of computers with CS on them. IT techies are used to requests for network storage in the 10s of GB. I'm just wondering about bandwidth...
"Michael Gough, Adobe's VP of product experience, said that these two devices completely eliminate the need to sketch out ideas on a piece of paper."
Dream on. I'm with Heidegger on that one. Did I really read that the pen thing talks to Internet directly and accesses account details to convey drawing to software or have the antihistamines kicked in?
My kid was "taught" web design at school using heavily subsidised CS suite. Several problems with that. It's not aimed at schoolkids. The product learning curve is such that the teachers only knew the basics. Kid came home and said "I need a copy at home to do my project". I said *expletive deleted* and showed him how to do everything he needed with a text editor and a couple of HTML/CSS cheat sheets. (Teacher rejected the project because the animated buttons were not implemented using Flash!)
Using CS in schools is like trying to learn to fly in a jumbo jet rather than starting out in a little trainer.
All those supposed updates, and Corel Draw and Photo-Paint is still much easier to use and does 99.9% of what 99.9% of users want. I tried blending an image into a background last week and spent three hours trying to do it in Photoshop/Illustrator/fireworks and utterly failed, with instructions on the web and in their own help being incomplete or arcane or outdated or all three. Got out Photo-Paint and blended the image in about 10 minutes from not knowing how to do it at all.
Illustrator is bloated, overly-complex, and not worth adobe reaching into your pocket every month. I'm sure if you spent extra money for classes on how to use CS, you might do okay, but then classes are hundreds to thousands of dollars anyway. I just don't see most of the CS suite being much of any use to anyone but the most wizened and trained graphic artists anymore. Everything you could possibly need is in Corel and maybe AlienSkin if you want nice filters.
I'm a long-time professional Photoshop user; I started using it for a living with version 1.0.7. I don't mind paying for my tools. Adobe has made rather a lot of money from me over the years.
I stopped at CS5, however, and I won't be upgrading to any cloud-based offerings. Like most small business owners, I don't always work where there's an Internet connection available, and I am not going to bet a client's job my business on my broadband not being down at an inconvenient time.
I am perfectly willing to buy^H^H^H license desktop software that I use to make money, but this? No way. Sorry, Adobe, I've been with you since 1992. No more.
I'm a CC subscriber (via work) and think the model works well. I'm not forced to take our a year subscription, paying monthly instead. I can stop when I want. The software does *not* require an internet connection all of the time, only occasionally on start up - and these days, I rarely close photoshop when I'm not using it anyway. It doesn't use any resources to worry about while in the background.
It's not for everyone, granted, but I prefer the more frequent updates that CC already offers rather than the 18-month gap between boxed releases, and I love not having to drop £££ on the upgrades up front.
"I'm not forced to take our a year subscription, paying monthly instead."
And you pay 50-100% more for the privilege of not taking out a yearly subscription!
"I can stop when I want."
And then not have any programs that can open your files. Buy a real licence and you can access them forever.
Another Adobe employee obviously!
You don't need a net connection. I'm not sure why the previous poster got downvoted for saying so - i guess the truth is not an acceptable defense to Re readers when being outraged is so much more fun.
Feel free to shoot yourself in the foot and sacrifice your career because you'd rather be pissed off than do 20 minutes of research, though.
So the op is supposed to 'what' when he goes to a client? Open cs beforehand and hibernate laptop? Pray client has net for him (with him accepting their audit of aup foe using their net or connecting his device to their network)
replacing 'needs net connection' with 'might need net connection' isnt much help to the op.
@ David W "You don't need a net connection."
Err. Yes you do. It's not a need for a permanent "always on" connection, sure, but the software does phone home periodically at startup and if it can't get a connection when it wants to do this then you're shafted.
As a happy user of their offline tools, and one machine licensed with CC (laptop - see above - really annoying when travelling because "free wifi" isn't that ubiquitous in rural England), I'm sad to say they won't be getting any more £££ from me.
... after about 18 months the calculation swings in Adobe's favour, at whatever level or license model (full suite, per app, educational, etc)... I upgraded from MX2004 suite to CS6, which might be an extreme but the old Macromedia titles did what I wanted, plus the Gimp or Serif titles for the other stuff. However, I would have definitely looked elsewhere if in the pricing demanded a monthly rental fee that would have amounted to paying for the software six times over in the ten years or so between...
"Adobe is offering "hundreds" of improvement to its Creative Cloud applications, with more introduced on a weekly basis by the company beginning June 17." And also no doubt in the small print reserve the right to taketh away any of those features, and any others at any point in the permanent "upgrade" cycle.
When it comes down to it, there is actually little I use in the newer versions.
I have an ancient copy of PS7, and my girlfriend has a copy of CS5 (she's a graphic designer) the only thing I use extra in her copy is the vanishing point filter, which admittedly is pretty nice. I guess people like me is who the monthly licensing is aimed at!
This way they could get rid of most pirated copies, but they are going to kill the market of honest hobbyists who pay their copies but of course don't upgrade to each release. For them a monthly fee is a nonsense, they're not those using those products on a daily basis, the perception is "paying for something I don't use".
Sadly, we're getting back to the old Unix world were many applications were not sold, but rented for an annual fee. The PC ended these practices, and transformed the device in something really personal. Now the "cloud" looks just a way to turn the clock back and force people to rent applications - unluckily it will work only for people using them as their main tools, the others will look elsewhere.
Whaddya mean, "risk"?
This is a near one-shot kill to the hobbyist market!
Very few partners will happily allow someone to spend that much every month on hobby software, compared to "It's your birthday so I got you the newest Photoshop" every four/five years.
Smaller outfits will be concerned as well.
Given the other attacks on photographers (commercial k copyright grabs), I suspect many one-man-band professionals will also be reexamining whether they actually need any new versions of Photoshop or can get by with the old one they currently have, or something else entirely. Margins are tight.
"This way thy could get rid of most pirated copies.."
Are you serious? Look at the patcher for CS5, it intercepts the activation from Adobe and also puts a white-list of ports on a modified hosts file that prevents the app from calling home yet *somehow* manages to get a valid key.
What witchcraft that is, I know not.
It may take a while for the code-head pirates to work it out, but they will. They ALWAYS do. This 'cloud' shift will only alienate users that can't pony up money every month..
The major pro cameras from Canon and Nikon have all been recently updated, and are fully supported by a very capable CS6. Same goes for the mid-low end. I think most users will simply not bother to upgrade for the next couple of years, substantially harming a significant revenue stream for Adobe.
Am I the only one who is always a little more hesitant to buy software now that it's delivered online?
I mean, back in the day I got a nice shiny box, with a stack of 5.25 floppies, and a manual in it. The box was about the size of a ream of paper. While I may understand that the important bit was the bits on those disks, when I gave them my money, I got something I would walk out with. I could hold, I could touch (just not the magnetic part in the window of the disk!). Buying software delivered online just doesn't feel like I'm really getting my money's worth the same way.
I'm starting to warm up to it, I just signed up to Chris Robert's Star Citizen for digital delivery, but still, I'm much more hesitant.
Oninoshiko, no, you’re not the only one. I like physical media: disks, manuals, albums, books, magazines, newspapers, photographs — but perhaps that’s due to my formative years in the third quarter of the 20th century. Once upon a time, HP had first-rate printed manuals for their calculators; I wish that I could say the same for the content of their modern PDF manuals. (Yes, I’m a dinosaur — I prefer a calculator to a calculator app. Now get off my lawn!)
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As I pointed out earlier, this isn't a true "cloud" product. It's still running off your hard disk as before. So it doesn't require a web connection all of the time to work. It just phones home every month to check it's still activated. Pretty much like CS6 already does!
Of course some of the new bolt ons do require web access such as their new storage solution. But Photoshop, Premiere, etc will work as they always have. Lets face it, Premiere certainly doesn't lend itself running on a sever considering I have projects here that have 200gb of raw materials.
So the issue here isn't worrying about being forced to work on remote servers you have no control over. The product is exactly the same as before. Except instead of buying a licence, you are now leasing the software and locked in to having Adobe extract money from you every month.
I can't see my employer going for the cloudy version (corporate licence - 1000's of machines) for many reasons, including 1) the cost and 2) managing the upgrades across the board. See they bought into the hype of using 21st century skills to create interesting assignments eg - "you're doing science - create a flash animation of an atom - for your assignment" (poor science teacher has never heard of flash, let alone knows how to use)
The bright side is I will not have to upgrade my teaching materials for new versions every time they come out, and play the "where did they put the fartvergnuegung filter in THIS version" game
So, what happens if you buy CC for a year ($360, or whatever) and then decide to terminate the subscription?
Do you keep access to the software in its state as of the end of the subscription, or does the Adobe license manager delete it from your machine (or deny you access, which amounts to the same thing)?
I suspect the latter, and for that reason, I'm out. Subscription only works if it's cheap; Adobe hasn't realised that yet.
Subscription can be cheaper, especially for small or single worker shops. Although it costs more in the end the subscription model frees up operating funds which can be used for growth (as opposed to just delivering your product service), which is more valuable.
So no different to borrowing from the bank to fund the purchase of essential tools, except now you're stuck paying that forever instead of paying the loan off completely in six months to a year?
Why would any sane small business choose to do that?
It can fit in with the capital/running budget madness that is a large corporate entity by moving the bill under the Finance radar, but that's it.
"Do you keep access to the software in its state as of the end of the subscription, or does the Adobe license manager delete it from your machine (or deny you access, which amounts to the same thing)?"
#2 - it kills the program - wont start without a subscription, that's the whole point.
I'm out too - CS6 is as far as Photoshop goes for me...
hmm not April 1st...
They say necessity drives demand and it's possible this move will drive some significant customers in the direction of evaluating if it would be more worthwhile to fund development of an alternate solution instead. The long term costs for something like this could be astronomical, as will be the additional training costs if this does reduce the number of people using the suite illegally at home.
I've worked at several companies where workflow relies on very specific versions of applications being installed to build and maintain older projects without risking the breakage an upgrade would cause. Any cloud solution kills that going forward by taking control away, it's a non-starter so migrating away from anything heading in that direction for future projects would be the recommend course of action.
At which point I expect to see Adobe turn into the next big patent troll in an attempt to squash the competition all their former customers are fleeing to.
So, only works where there's a web connection then?
If anyone DOES come up with an alternative suite, please make it independent of always-on interwebs. That way we can do stuff in a power cut (Long Island occasionally resembles a third world country now; what with hurricanes and super storms and blizzards and people stupidly running their A/C in summer, LIPA can't keep the juice on reliably 365x24x7. I have my own genny for such occasions but it won't make teh webs work when Cablevision, Verizon et al are dark too).
So I guess that's the last of my money Adobe will get then. I don't buy every release of Creative Suite, but I do tend to update every 2-3 versions. I use the suite daily, but I don't use it all day, and I don't use it enough and certainly nothing you can't do in older versions to justify paying monthly for it.
So it looks like I'll be using CS 5 for as long as I can make it run (pretty much indefinitely then).
If you use it daily as a core tool, like a design house might I can see CC might be a better way to do it as you pay the same sort of money IF you keep up to date. For everyone else, it's an epic fail.
Given that multiple sources have said that the software does not need an always-on connection and only phones home occasionally, how long before somebody makes a fake activation server that tells the software all is fine with the world?
I am well aware of the fact that companies need to make money in order to continue existing, so surely a business model which positively encourages people to pirate will always be less successful than one where you can buy a copy of CS6 Master Collection for personal/educational use for say £100, as opposed to the £2800 a professional user would pay. In that case, most people would say fine and pay the cash and Adobe has £100 instead of nothing. Of course there are those that will never pay for anything, but they will always be there.
The annual plan in the USA costs $49.99. In the UK, the same plan is £46.88 which equates to $72.84, an increase of 46%.
Since everyone is access the same software from the same servers, in the same language, why is the UK being surcharged?
I bet that since Adobe are based on the USA, they won't have to pay UK company tax too.
"The annual plan in the USA costs $49.99. In the UK, the same plan is £46.88 which equates to $72.84, an increase of 46%. Since everyone is access the same software from the same servers, in the same language, why is the UK being surcharged?"
Wouldn't VAT account for a heft proportion of the price increase?
Just another GREED move by big guys not having ALL the toys yet, so they want MORE OF YOUR MONEY!
There will still be plenty of bootleg copies to go around for all those graphic enthusiasts.
Oo Oo Oo - and the really GOOD news is all future How-To's in PS will cost you money to view on PAY For YOUTUBE!
YAY! Another victory for evil!
Every piece of software Adobe has taken over and rolled into the "Creative Suite" has gotten ever more bloated, unwieldy, bug ridden and gods awful slow. I have been using Corel's suite in my spare time to duplicate some of the smaller projects I have done at work just to have a concrete "something" to work on as well as something I can compare to results I've gotten with Adobe. Adobe's announcement today has just made my mind up about doing the full switch. Also as I am the person who picks out new graphic/web design software my company will be dumping Adobe when we upgrade to windows 8 in a few months. That would be 8 full seats fully upgraded every year that will be going elsewhere. Honestly, this "cloud" nonsense is just not a viable solution for offering up full applications that require the power of a desktop over it or tying my ability to make a living to the dicey proposition that the connection between my computer and the Adobe licensing servers is NEVER going to be down is ludicrous.
Why does no one look into the facts before they spout off? The software is installed locally and only connects to the Internet once a month for license validation or if you want to take advantage of the online storage. You aren't dependent on Adobe servers 'not working'.
Why do fanbois insist on trying to make a rather obvious cash grab at the expense of longtime users seem like a good thing just so they don't have to look at their favorite developer in a harsh light? Yes, they check once a month. Two things with this 1) Adobe has not been this straight forward with customers in at least a decade and I guarantee an attempt to validate your license will be made more than once a month in one way or another. Mine is checked more often than that now on a standard desktop install, why would anyone believe Adobe would become less stringent. 2) The "once a month" is random; which means my connection to Adobe's remote licensing server needs to be up 100% of the time to ensure that when it checks; it gets through. I taught graphic design at a school that used remote licensing with Adobe. The upside was supposed to be that we got every update and new addition as they came out for our rather substantial monthly subscription- very important at a school that advertised teaching at the leading edge. The reality is that any intermittent problems with connecting to Adobe when the software tried to connect could result in validation problems and lockouts propagating through an entire lab; which could lead to an entire day of dealing with some Indian schmuck who barely speaks English and has no understanding of networking or licensing trying to fix our problems and activations by stepping through a damn telemarketing phone center script.
In the end however, this is probably the best thing Adobe could have done for the graphic and web design communities. Now small competitors that been in the wings will see increased users and cash flow and begin to develop their products further. There have been better products than Dreamweaver and outdated Flash to develop websites for a while now anyway. Maybe now the graphics competition will heat up as well.
Also, new buy in price for CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6 is $479. New buy in for Adobe is $49.99 a month. The difference being you OWN Corel and in about 9 1/2 months you are ahead of any Adobe user in terms of cost of ownership; functionality is in reality about equal. Even if Corel were to come out with a full new suite every year and you were to purchase it every year you would still be ahead of the game by about $125 or so. Given that many professionals will upgrade only about every three years regardless of developer offerings and that savings becomes about $1325.00. Remember that that is PER SEAT. In a small to medium business this is a huge deal and even in a larger enterprise that might be able to absorb the cost - it is a good reason to consider alternatives.
Adobe has confirmed if you stop paying the subscription, the software stops working. That's what the objection is to, not the purported "cloud" aspect.
It's not cloud software, really, that's the problem. The software resides on your computer, yes. It doesn't require you to be online 24/7, no.
The problem is, it's software rental. The product will no longer be purchasable. The End User License Agreement terms will be completely altered. You will no longer be able to buy software that works indefinitely unless you are willing to pay a monthly fee indefinitely.
Your are correct, however, that uses aren't dependent on a daily basis on Adobe's servers, and that failure to connect ALONE doesn't disable the software immediately.
I manage college computer labs filled with various Adobe products. We use to buy just the programs we needed for specific labs, now I have to get yearly licenses for a suite no matter how few of the programs we actually use.
Normally we would update these programs as soon as the textbooks caught up with the new releases, which was about six months to a year behind the release. Not any more.
The icing on the cake is now worrying about automated updates. They will push them out on the same regular schedule as Adobe Reader. This was an Adobe selling point! I hope I can disable this for fear of crashing a student's project in the middle of a semester.
For now, Academic licensing will still works roughly the same way as it use too, but it is scheduled to go away some time in the near future. No more extended licensing update agreements though.
I did not know that CC was to be the ONLY way these products will be available from now on.
I think this is a TERRIBLE idea.
What about those who do not want to buy CS-latest every year, perhaps buying upgrades every three or so years?
And what about those who are happy to buy CS suite now and use it for many years without any plans to upgrade? Are they not customers anymore?
I personally hate the idea of renting software. When I buy it I want it to be mine, for as long as I want to use it. Anything less feels like a sneaky move bordering on theft.
VERY Bad move Adobe.
They're not really online only, just online occasionally.
Buy CS6, Buy the cloud offering in 3 years when you probably need the upgrade. No point giving yourself a heartattack because you don't have a new version that probably isn't that relevent for you. Most people know if they need it. Personally I still find new stuff and I've been using Photoshop since version 5.5 and other than content aware actions and maybe gpu offloading most changes have been a bit meh. Sure the usually 'fix' a tool (or make it so you can't find it or it doesn't work the same) per release and that might improve your productivity but that then has a value you can justify expenditure on.
Maybe we'll get a resurgence of Quark and Corel, that probably wouldn't be a bad thing.
As for the UK pricing, it's fairly arbitary. Australia was $59.99 a month until the Australian government started its pricing investigation for software sales and then 'coincidentally' the prices dropped $49.99
Flash became obsolete because it really was a crap.
Acrobat became history because of outrageous pricing, it was much cheaper to upgrade people to office 2010 and produce pdfs with it than licensing Acrobat. I suspect Office 2013 directly opening pdfs will make Acrobat even more relevant.
Now Adobe is strong-arming us into subscription instead of license purchase, at the outrageous price of about 5x Office 2013. We say no and continue using CS6 in the hope that alternative products will appear, and wish Adobe a good travel into Oblivion.
This is to the person(s) employed by Adobe to scrape all the 'feedback' from this announcement.
Keep working on CS7 in the backroom, so that when this subscription only plan doesn't work like you expected it to, you'll be able to say sorry, pop a U turn and get something on the market pronto, because otherwise you're going to get pwned by some 'good enough' alternatives and the days when you used to charge people a 'bargain' $600 to upgrade will be just a memory.
Don't wait too long, you've just chummed the water, sharks will come.
I do not like subscriptions as you always end up paying more.
A 1 year vs 1 year comparison may be ok, but do you always upgrade, every year on day 365?
The reason i do not like subscriptions is that there soon becomes many of them. So with office 365, photoshop etc and various others, soon a typical user could be paying hundreds of dollars per month on software.
It is far easier to manage with a straight one time purchase.
I started using photoshop at 5.5 since i am web developer. Not really being a creative, i only have sporadic use for it and GIMP is from the 80s with an interface to match.
I had no real reason to upgrade from PS 6.. but i still got one of the creative suites. For some reason i could never get my version to work in anything but spanish (which is not the language on my computer). Still i have stuck with it and will continue to while i can.
Next time though, i wont be buying into the subscription model as adobe stuff was silly price anyway.
We make mobile apps and i'll be damned if i am paying them 1000s of dollars so i can make my software product that sells for 99c.
Software has been devalued by Apple and its time for the bigger players to realise that.
Adobe are simply cutting off the people who have anything but a serious professional, almost full time, use for their software (like design people). The rest of us will just not use it anymore.... another will rise.
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Dictionary dot com
av·a·rice
noun
insatiable greed for riches; inordinate, miserly desire to gain and hoard wealth.
Adobe knows human behavior is to refuse change and that they have a lock in with Commercial art. In the colleges and the studios there is only one accepted software for what Adobe delivers and it's theirs, now they are taking advantage of you with it.
Being a favorable Linux user, I actually prefer my software to be online, but managed.
However, I am *very* much against the so-called "Cloud." Largely for the fact I see far too many liabilities for far too little benefits. Adobe is already demonstrating, quite well, one of the big liabilities of the cloud, in pulling this. I prefer paying for my sofware *once* and only *once.* Not pay a software developer repeatedly to be able to use my computer how I like, aside from normal ISP costs, of course.
All that said, sometimes I can appreciate holding physical media in my hands because then I know I generally will only be dependent on myself for getting its data. I still am fine with getting my software online so long as my software isn't being held hostage for a regular fee (That and none of the software I use is on the "cloud." And I will make sure to keep it that way.)
As I am not a professional graphics user, I'm never needed to use Photoshop, ever. GIMP handles my needs very well.
Iain, the pouce was the pre-metric French inch, one twelfth of the pied du roi. (There was a “metric pouce” in the mesures usuelles, but it was only used in the retail trade.) Citizen Bonaparte measured 5 pieds 2 pouces 4 lignes, or (slightly over) 1.687 m, which corresponds to a bit above 5 feet 6 inches 5 lines in the pied des rosbifs.
I actually had a very firm "chat" with my local Adobe office a month ago with respect to this matter.
A senior Adobe sales representative had called me to preach their Creative Cloud offerings. She claimed that it was more "economical" than their boxed solutions of the past and et cetera. What?
(A) We've been utilizing a dozen copies of CS3 since 2007. Each license cost us USD 1,400.00 at launch and said license allows us to use the product for as long as we see fit. That's USD 233.33 a year to date. You'll find that "Creative Cloud for Teams" costs at least three times that amount.
And that's an amount which is further subject to review on a yearly basis.
(B) No Adobe, we do NOT need every single damned product under your umbrella in order to function our business. We are perfectly fine with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat. We do not see it as "value added" having a ton and a bit of applications we do not use. We see it as a complete waste of money.
(C) Upon hearing earlier in the year that Adobe was headed in this direction we actually upgraded all of our licenses to CS6 which enables us to shun away from Creative Cloud for as long as it is possible to do so. We have used CS3 for six years... I don't see why we can't use CS6 for just as long if not longer.
(D) It's obvious that Adobe has lost touch with reality and firmly believes that every single business in the creative industry is swimming in cash. It's a hugely competitive arena and there are many who barely survive. Both I and my finance controller will definitely sleep better at night if we don't have to worry whether or not we can afford our upcoming yearly license renewals because that'll be a pretty shitty situation of "if we upgrade, we're in the minus; if we don't, we can't work".
So to sum it up...
Adobe: F*ck you.
(P.S. We need Linus's iconic nVidia-Middle-Finger as an icon here...)
I work in the print/publishing industry and for me, everything from CS4 on has been bells & whistles. Most CS users I know are still using 5, & most Design/Ad houses & Mag publishers I work for are still running it. Seems Adobe have become too comfortable in their monopolistic statehood. Perspective works both ways, but theirs appears only to work inwardly these days. Time for some heads to roll methinks.
"I work in the print/publishing industry and for me, everything from CS4 on has been bells & whistles."
Until a few years ago there was a jobbing printer in Birmingham who had a Quadra complete with Syquest hard drives to drive his plate making machine. Would only take TIFFs.
Ink on paper is a conservative industry. There still seems to be plenty of ink getting onto paper as well. Good potential for a paid for linux end to end system developed specifically for printers? (the pendulum swings)
A monthly fee works for many companies, may even be more cost-effective. For others, it's untenable, possibly to the point of financial impossibility. Many will no longer be able to stay upgraded to the "latest" version, because they can't afford to go on paying forever.
I paid, happily, for my copy of CS5. It was an investment, and well worth it. But I can't afford a never-ending ever-increasing monthly payment.
Well, OK: I expect that, to an extent, when it comes to overhead, e.g., electricity, rent, etc.
I don't expect it, or intend to incur it, when it comes to purchasing "tools." Nor do I believe it is fair for a company to "sell" newer, better tools ONLY to those who can afford to make larger and larger "payments" forever, yet never end up owning anything.
Obviously, if Adobe sticks to this decision, "renting" Adobe tools will become the only option. As a result, If a company or individual can't pay a monthly fee for however long they are in business, or however long they need the Adobe tools they currently use, they will either be forced eventually to give up Adobe tools completely or, if dependent on them, go out of business.
How does that benefit anyone, even Adobe? And why can't they offer both options, for that matter?
Companies are not only trying to lower day-to-day expenses, they want more control over FUTURE costs. It's no longer affordable - or practical - for any but the largest corporations to be at the mercy of arbitrary price and fee increases when it comes to business-critical tools and functions, including software and IT in general. Even the "warhorses" of enterprise software are starting to lose market share in favor of open-source alternatives, customizable and controllable in-house or with minimal outside assistance.
Yes, a subscription model works beautifully for many. It is the best and only option for some. However, where it doesn't work - where it doesn't "fit" - it tends to fail miserably.
I have to wonder if there aren't hidden costs as well. For example, what are the tax advantages/disadvantages of purchase vs. subscription? Is there as big a tax write-off or deduction for a software subscription as there is for the purchase of something like Adobe CS? And so on.
If "cloud" madness continues to infect those who make some of the best "tools" on the market - to the point companies and individuals can no longer purchase tools they've used for years, but only rent them - a majority may have no choice but to look at and/or switch to tools from other manufacturers.
(Psst...All you graphic software companies out there? Your biggest competitor just knocked themselves out of the running where product PURCHASE is concerned. So go for it. Good luck. We're all counting on you.)
"Companies are not only trying to lower day-to-day expenses, they want more control over FUTURE costs."
And they presumably want to access legacy project files. How different are the file formats? Is there a guarantee that (say) a PSD from Photoshop 3 will always be openable? What happens 20 years down the line when Adobe goes bankrupt and they switch the servers off?
"Is there as big a tax write-off or deduction for a software subscription as there is for the purchase of something like Adobe CS?
Aha, yes, no more rolling software into the capital budget in UK Colleges... that will be fun as non-pay recurrent budgets are a bit thin at present.
I am a UK Mac Technician with just over 100 active accounts that I look after, and of that 100, there are over half that are still coping with a broadband speed of less than 1 MBps. Some of my BT customers in villages such as Catworth, Cambridgeshire, don't even get a broadband signal part of the day. I have a customer who has just gone off to the desert of Chile for a year on a research trip. How does Adobe expect to service these customers who rely on CS for their work if when the Cloud version calls for authentication there's no internet connection to authenticate by?
And then of course you've got to pay by the month for your license!
Remember FreeHand and PageMaker. Perhaps there's a business opportunity here.
==> "Remember FreeHand and PageMaker. Perhaps there's a business opportunity here."
Back in the PageMaker days, there was another DTP app with a strong print industry interface and capabilities: ReadySetGo! by Manhattan Graphics. It was acquired by a megacorp and allowed to rot on the vine, until a UK company bought it, where it has survived to this day as a very capable app. My weekly newspaper/printing shop used it exclusively for composition and page layout for years. Check http://www.diwan.com/english/products.htm for both Mac and Windows versions.
If you can cope with a Photoshop-like product without it actually being Photoshop, I can heartily recommend Photoplus from www. serif.com. It is by far the closest I have come across to a clone, and is only 70 quid. They even have a cut down version free on their website. I tried GIMP and it is just so behind on features and development is so slow I just gave up on it in the end. PSPlus is so much faster than PS for batch editing pics too. Inkscape is very nice for an AI replacement. It's lacking in some features, but better in other areas, so it's swings and roundabouts. Make the break for it while you can!
I work in a large corporate and the last Adobe software we had bought was 5 copies of CS5 of which I principally used Photoshop (for graphics) and Fireworks (for prototyping). I used to use Gimp (on Linux and Windows) and Paint.NET (and still use Paint.NET on home PC).
These Adobe products were superb and did (and still do) everything we need to do in terms of graphics work and in saving time (which is the most important). I love Fireworks for prototyping and it allowed a quick 1 hour turnaround for UI design with customers on quite complex layouts. The free products in comparison (including Gimp) don't even come close to Photoshop and Fireworks.
I was quite underwhelmed with subsequent releases as it didn't warrant the price - plus we were a bit miffed of some of the discounts offered to "students" etc in comparison.
In our company we have to raise purchase orders and invoices etc - and it's quite involved. The monthly subscription just doesn't work in that case. (It would take a while to get purchasing to raise those monthly orders)
Okay, I am just a hobbyist who "lashed out" to buy Photoshop CS5 a couple of years ago. I'm not a big account that Adobe is going to care about... but when CS5 is too out-of-date to continue using it I'm not going to be going into the software rental market.
It's only one future sale that Adobe has guaranteed they won't be getting, but I suspect it's not the only one
When I went freelance last year I looked at CS vs. CC. I use two Adobe applications: Photoshop and Illustrator (grudgingly, I'll always prefer Freehand, RIP).
1. I don't need access to all of Adobe's stuff
2. I don't want to pay for something I'm never going to use
3. I don't want my files held to ransom
4. I don't want to tie myself into an ever-spiralling monthly cost*
*I give it two years before Adobe double their prices, just long enough for users to build up a reasonable back-catalogue of files.
I'm not going near the question of Creative Cloud pricing, but I can dispel some myths:
1) The mandatory move to CC only affects those products we have in the current "CS6" range. Bundled products without a CS6 badge (including Lightroom and Acrobat, plus all the "Elements" versions) will continue to be available under perpetual licenses as they are now, and there are NO plans to change that.
2) Enterprise and educational licenses for CC will be available, in addition to the current personal and team plans. Rollout of CC to multiple machines will be a lot simpler than it seems, and you can run CC alongside any previous version of CS or point product with the sole exception of Acrobat.
3) CC normally pings the activation server once every 30 days. It will run offline for 60 days before deactivating, and there are plans to support users who may be offline for several months at a time. CC desktop apps do *not* run in the cloud so your files don't need to be uploaded for editing, nor is the computing done on the CC network (actually CC runs on Amazon's platform),. There are new features which do of course require a live Web connection (for example the ability to download and install any of the TypeKit fonts on demand, or publishing to Behance) but anything you can do now offline, you can still do offline with CC.
4) All paid CC members will have access to a select set of archived versions of the desktop apps. Starting with CS6, select older versions of the desktop creative apps will be archived and available for download. Archived versions are provided “as is” and are not updated to work with the latest hardware and software platforms but ensure you can work with legacy versions of file formats and plugins.
5) CC users have up to one year to apply each released update, so if you have a reason to hold off (for example waiting for a plugin to become compatible) that's fine.
6) If you stop paying the subscription then of course your software stops working. Any files you have stored in the Cloud above the free 2GB limit will need to be downloaded before they're erased, and bundled packages such as ProSite will be closed (unless you pay separately). The rules on expiry of font licenses are more complex, details will be posted on Adobe's website before launch.
7) Moving forward, the 'CC' brand is fixed. There won't be "CC2" next year, etc. - but each product retains its internal version numbering system so users (and plugins) can tell which build they're running.
8) There are no announcements about the enterprise product ranges (LiveCycle, Media Server, etc.) - you can assume they remain the same in terms of licensing.
"If you stop paying the subscription then of course your software stops working."
That statement as a whole, and the phrase "your software", are mutually exclusive. If it's my software, it should go on working for as long as my hardware and OS are compatible with it.
If nothing else, this makes a subscription-only model untenable. As others have pointed out, businesses and individuals will not be able to access or use old files created with the subscription-only software that has stopped working.
I have lost count of the number of clients who go back to files from years ago and need to make changes to them for some newer purpose.
Being unable to do this makes a mockery of the entire concept of "backup" in general, and again simply makes "your software" a, well, direct lie.
End users need some control over their tools and the products created with those tools. Adobe is taking away as much control as possible, and all control under some circumstances.
Sorry, but I can't see how this is anything but a "lose/lose" situation over a period of more than, say 5 years. And 5 years is NOT that long a time. Good luck being able to do anything with "your" files in 10 years, as you actually can now.
To see how many people learn the CS suite via bootleg's or dodgy old copies that go on to Pay full whack when they use it in their jobs / make some money....
Adobe risk eliminating the casual starter who would have learnt the tools this way and therefore the knowledgebase would disappear making Adobe products either less attractive in business or push the price of hiring Adobe Pro's up in the future.
Seems like a chance for other companies to up their ante.... I wonder if this was a reason Apple has started to once again push Final Cut ?
Lot of big vendors are increasingly moving to complex licensing schemes that introduce a level of inscrutability into day-to-day ops.
It's mental energy that a lot of creatives just won't indulge in - licensing hasn't been straightforward for a long time - indeed with Redmond issuing 'qualifications' just for understanding the arcana neccesary to jump in, you know it's all gone horribly wrong - and in contempt of the consumer, the cash source.
The reality is most won't move to Ubuntu / GIMP / Lightworks / open-source whatever. They'll be stuck, with gritted teeth. However, this is enough of an insult to at least make them *look* at alternatives. And that can be just as damaging for Adobe.
I'm reminded of that Doctor Who episode with the Prime Minister. 'Doesn't she look old'. All it takes is a push.
"Adobe goes out of business - so do you"
Not that it's likely to happen, but Adobe's sunset policy is (and always has been) that if they ever go to the wall, they will make the current version of their products freely-available. The same policy applies to any closure of the license servers, which is why DRM-free installers for CS2 were released earlier this year.
I started investigating Inkscape, Pixelmater, etc. last month, as my old copy of Illustrator now isn't recognised by anything fromn this century (yes, that old), and knew I could not afford CS. I wasn't especially motivated, but Adobe has kick-started my avid interest. I use PS constantly at work as a web designer, and PS and Illustrator at home for charity things (websites, publications). I can't afford a subscription for my personal use. Once I become reasonably proficient in the alternatives, I'll have no reason to ask my company for upgrades. I think my manager will love me when I ask for cheaper stuff. Or let's see how long I can coast on the CS version I have. Probably into the sunset...
I've loved Adobe Products since the late 80s when I was running the first version of Adobe Illustrator. It is now 25 years later and I have to say this will make me move away from Adobe products - and here is why:
Over the years there have been good times and bad times. During the good times I happily upgraded my products. But when times were tough I kept hold of versions and skipped a version. So I jumped from CS3 to CS5 example because I could not justify the expense at the time.
I have no problem with paying for Creative Cloud - so long as it will continue working without upgrades if I decide to skip paying for a year.
However my understanding is that this is not the case - and if I stop paying after year one - I have no software.
For me that is a step backwards and I am incorporating that purchasing model into my business as we lose control.
Illustrator and Photoshop are the 2 core products we need - and this sounds like we'll be using CS6 for years to come. By which time we'll move away from Adobe if they are continuing to treat software as a utility rather than a product.
Hey Adobe, just like movies - I like to be able to rent sometimes. But I do want the choice of buying my favourite movies so I don't keep needing to pay when I know I'm going to watch it 100 times.
good bye and farewell Adobe.
That's certainly what I will do -- stop at the last version that comes with a perpetual license. Of course, that means that I also have to be more careful about updating anything else -- obviously the O/S out of fear of compatibility issues, but also things like Lightroom which interact with Photoshop.
Also, given that I know that *eventually* there'll be some incompatibility I can no longer avoid (e.g., old computer dies and new hardware only runs an incompatible O/S), that sure gives me an incentive to gradually move my workflow off Adobe products entirely. Sigh, I'd rather not have to go through that hassle... but I will *not* have my files held ransom by a corporation.
I'm already not using Photoshop because I can't afford it. And I'm not using GIMP as some sort of political statement. It just happens to work for what I need. Is that not allowed?
I should also mention that I like KompoZer because it provides what I need over Onenote. Should I feel bad for being productive with that software as well?
'gimp - what a joke, truly awful software trying to compete with the king.'
Ok, I suspect you're trolling, but feck it, I'll bite.
At work, we have CS4 Installed on all the Win7 boxes (the Mac has CS5, I think - which should give you an indication of how often it gets used).
So guess what pixel editor gets used most?, yup, Gimp.
Oh sure, Photoshop still gets used for those jobs that Gimp just cant quite seem to manage (usually manipulation of photos for things like transfer printing), everything else, Gimp is the first port of call.
This wasn't deliberate, there was no edict along the lines of 'for task X thou shalt use Gimp forsaking all other graphics software..' it's the way things have developed over the past couple of years.
'the king'?
'.. You do not mean so much to me, Nor that crown upon your head ..'
Okay - I get the general drift towards negativity in the 4 pages of postings so far.
This is a non-Adobe sponsored attempt to find positive things associated with CC.
Maybe employers/businesses with creative needs cannot be sure how many seats it needs with access to Creative Suite type software.
And sure, wile things are turning down in traditional end of elite market (Europe, USA, Brit empire, ... ) the new emerging areas (BRICK) might find rental solutions better than full product price?
Maybe the rental model is helpful to some and yes! it does seem frustratingly unhelpful to others.
Bring back Creature House Expression (especially the Acrylic betas?)
Just to repeat: I ain't no Adobe payee but something must be behind Adobe's move - maybe marketing to organisations rather than to end users?
Yes, any number of posters have already noted the same potentially positive points you did. A subscription model is wonderful for a lot of businesses and individuals. It simply isn't wonderful for everyone.
The negative reactions all seem to be an objection to being shoved against the wall with only one option: buy a subscription, or going forward you won't be able to use the software at all without one. Stop paying monthly, and "your" software will stop working.
(BTW, I have to ask: what is the difference between marketing to "organisations" and "end users"? The "end user" is the entity using the software, whether the entity is a group or an individual. That comment doesn't seem to make sense - could you clarify?)
I was thinking along lines of:
corporate customer (a business user with some flexible demands on its software users depending upon business)
end user: individual purchasing software for personal use rather than commercial-business related use.
So, for example, I could use my word processing application on an end user type arrangement to reply to my council using their word processing application on a commercial use purchase basis.
Adobe don't usually make mistakes or costly mistakes otherwise it would not have the farm it presently holds?
FireFox has taken a large chunk of the browser world so why not stop bickering and get pissed off developpers and games programmers together and make an uber open source alternative to PS.
Do you really need that de-blur tool, or would you rather employ a photographer with a tripod instead of a trampoline?
Come on people, our fathers won wars and we fall apart because we can use pirat, err, 'learning' editions of software anymore.
I calculate that the subscription is (a) not value for money: it is at 3 times more than what I pay now, 5 times USA prices (b) ties me into a rental contract when I want to own my software and control the cost.
For many people who do not work for a big company, buying software is a big consideration, especially with the recession on. I have several pieces of software that I have stopped upgrading, because the publisher thinks that adding 15% of new features (5% worth having), is worth paying 60% of the original price.
But I continue to use old software, because it does not cost me any extra. I'm still using Acrobat Pro v9.5. There's about 2 new features I would like, but they are not worth £200 to me (and it doesn't help that the upgrade cost in the usa is $200, about £130).
So perhaps I upgrade once every 3 years. Today it would cost £200, or £200/36=£6/month (in the USA £130/36=£3.60). Or I subscribe for £17.50 per month, nearly three times the cost.
So I run a fully licensed PS CS5 Extended under Snow Leopard Server via Parallels because some extremely expensive add-ons won't run in my fully licensed PC CS6 Extended under Mountain Lion. Sometimes I work in bunkers, sometimes in deserts, sometimes both. I haven't got time to *rse around wondering if and when my s/w wants to call mummy. FFS Adobe grow a brain or pass quietly into history.
And sometimes I would require an internet connection to use the software.
An internet connection that no longer existed because the only links existed in the "After Cloud" and was only available to "internet mediums".
Which since "internet mediums" don't exist means I bought a cheap "box of rocks".
Adobe had best hope that Gimp and Gimp2 never become replacements or that people will not decide to get by with MSpaint.
And if I used Adobe, I would be on a scramble for a replacement,just in case.
Welcome to Microsoft where we have a failure to innovate! Adobe = the new Microsoft.
Solution: Change everything up. Charge more money. Lock customers in. Get them to forget that 99+% of what they want to do, they can do with the existing product.
Smoke & mirrors.... "Look at our new go to market strategy and ignore how uncreative we have become".
Meanwhile, inside the padded cells at Adobe HQ:
MBA1: What do we do with CS to keep selling the latest versions and maintain revenue? The suite is mature and innovation is too much like hard work and expensive. How much more bloat do our suckers, cough, customers need?
MBA2: Why don't we switch to a subscription model? We can rest on our laurels, fire half the staff and just throw users a bone now and then while raking in the cash.
MBA1: But won't existing users just quit upgrading and stick with their old versions if development of the suite stagnates?
MBA2: We'll stop selling it outright and eventually they'll have to lease it permanently because they'll be incompatible with the latest version. We just mess around with the file formats a little. It's genius!
MBA1: Great job everyone. Hefty bonuses all round!
While out in the real world: CS isn't structurally dependent on cloud services, and enterprising people in China, India and Eastern Europe are setting about addressing the lack of a standalone installer. The internet has a long track record of filling artificial vacuums.
"And you do CMYK properly?"
Yes, Gimp has supported CMYK for quite a while, and on recent distros (including Ubuntu) they also have color correction support (monitor and printer). I really don't know about feature parity over all, both gimp and photoshop have many addons so I'm sure there's features missing going either way.
Anyway, hate to say it but I guess you have 3 options; 1) Freeze your system in time and use what you have. 2) Pay Adobe more and more money. 3) Suck it up and deal with something else.
If the release cycle for an adobe product is 18-24 months then you can probably expect users to upgrade on average about once every 2 years. If the cost of an upgrade is around £200 then this makes the cost of ownership for that product around £100 per year, not the £200+ that Adobe are charging.
Subscription pricing actually sounds like a pretty good idea (no need to pay for upgraes, you can use it for a couple of months and ditch it), but the massive price hike just makes me think "money grabbing bastards".
We understand that the future is cloud-based. But it isn't at the moment. There are vast populations who are not able to access the internet reliably, never mind enjoying a cloud-based existence. In some cases the issue is infrastructure-based, in other cases the issue is cost - sometimes both. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Adobe will need to revisit this stance and modify it accordingly.
And the cloud subs cost!!?? What a blunder!
one commenter mentioned Serif.com as an alternative. I went there, looked around, DL'd their Movie Making program as a 'test' and got a huge surprise - UNLIKE Adobe, they insisted on installing a TOOLBAR, A SHOPPING SERVICE, etc., etc.
Revo Uninstall/System restore/update all anti-virus/FORBID myself any further contact with them - oh, damn! I had to register, and now they know who I pretend to be! :)
Say what you will about Adobe but they never said bend over and receive our malware.
I was using it for my work and had a deadline looming I needed to deliver some documents to a client urgently. The Creative Cloud licensing server rufused to open any programmes and my files after a few attempts (about 15) I had to go and use a friends copy to export IDML files and then open them on CS5 to get the work done on my backup system, this wasted about 4 hours of billable time. I was not impressed by the reliability of software that's been really solid for getting work done in the past. Once I was back working in CS5 I realised that it is faster and more reliable than CS6 two things that matter to me. The help system for the new tools like edge is terrible, there's hardly any documentation at all.
I looked at the new features in CS7 and to be honest I'm really dissapointed that really useful features were not implemented - x-ref stylesheets and content like 3D, CAD and web design have been doing for years I thought was a no brainer to implement in InDesign, I was expecting InDesign and Dreamweaver to be merged into the same programme. Doing that alone would be worth the upgrade.
Behance and QR code generators as major features? WTF?
I think this is a particularly crappy move on the part of Adobe, but I don't use PS much any more so I don't really care. They can take their overpriced software and shove it up their activation API.
Back when I did more graphics, though, my go-to vector app was often Xara X. Now called "Xara Photo & Graphic Designer" or "Xara Designer Pro" depending on edition.
Worth a look if you want to get off the Adobe treadmill and CorelDRAW or Inkscape don't quite do it for you.
Or you could avoid using any software at all and shoot film and print your images in a darkroom like everyone used to do only about 10 years ago . . . . Or maybe you prefer to work in a room with 18% grey walls and subdued lighting and hope that your printer can satisfy your needs. Oh BTW, yes, I have done this in colour and black and white and it's really not that hard and it involves standing up and not sitting down which is apparently very bad for homo sapiens. Is digital so appealing then, given the "costs"?
I won't need a coat as, at the moment, it's not raining in Cornwall.
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