Adobe's Creative Cloud fails at being a cloud The file-syncing part of Adobe's new Creative Cloud family of technologies has been intermittently broken for a week, taking the "cloud" part out of Adobe's "Creative Cloud" redesign of its products. Now Adobe is suspending it "for the next couple of weeks" to make updates. The sync feature, which means files being fiddled …
I moved from Freehand to Illustrator and found it much better.
I moved from Xpress to InDesign and also found it much better.
However, Adobe's move to the cloud is not a good idea on their part, and is just an excuse to milk users and reduce or eradicate illicit usage - or piracy, if you want to use the vernacular.
Creative Suite components are, IMHO, good solid products - but the marketing/financial "genius" who came up with cloud subscription should be forced to move in with Simon Cowell for a month!
"""However, Adobe's move to the cloud is not a good idea on their part, and is just an excuse to milk users and reduce or eradicate illicit usage - or piracy, if you want to use the vernacular."""
Nope, all this is is an attempt to milk their paying customers better.
The pirates will either keep pirating (The apps run in your computer, they'll be cracked like before sooner or later) or move to other products.
Me I wish people who can not afford to pay the monthly fee would move to cheaper products, or open-source solutions. Why? So we have a healthy software market for that type of applications.
Psssst. Sick of Adobe? Give Corel Draw a punt, you can even try it out for free for 30 days IIRC.
Mentioned it on the forums last time this brouhaha reared its head. Does what Photoshop and Illustrator does, only cheaper.
Its major advantage over the GIMP is that it is not GIMP (i.e. the UI makes some kind of sense).
To most people on the user end of things, Cloud means easy access / sync.
It has been previously discussed at length on here, what the benefits to the cloud rent model for software is to the vendor, but now without sync is there *ANY* other user benefits over the installed boxed version.
You could call me a techie, but my files from Photoshop and my other work / important files are synced with the cloud by at least 2 other vendors on my machine; SugarSync and Dropbox....
So in summary, i currently have a boxed installed version of Photoshop with immediate cloud sync fully working and redundant.... can i be the boss of Adobe now?
Adobe do not have expertise in Cloud technologies.
What would have made more sense is integration into existing Cloud hosting services such as Dropbox, Skydrive and the like. That way the users can use the services they already use at the click of a button, and Adobe would not have ongoing costs having to maintain their own infrastructure as an entrant to the market.
"""What would have made more sense is integration into existing Cloud hosting services"""
But this is not about customer's convenience, it is about Adobe increasing their revenue size and predictability, or as the Americans say: "Better milking the customer".
Any likeness of improve service/new features useful to the paying customer is mere coincidence.
I think it's reason number 2:
1) It's horrifically insecure and you might lose all your stuff.
2) It's flaky and you might lose all your stuff.
I don't need 1057 reasons not to go cloud. Those two are good enough for me. If you really want, here's reason number 3:
3) You are paying a monthly fee for something you can normally do with a hard drive and a USB stick.
I agree that as a "rentier" I should be compensated for loss of service! That's what respectable services do. Anyway, i tend to use Google Drive r/t Adobe Connect for syncing between laptop and desktop.
But I'm not sure if subscribing to the cloud with all those apps I don't use and don't need is economical. I'd like to see "pick 3 apps", "pick 6 apps"... pricing.
There's no mid-point either. It now jumps from a single app to the whole master collection. Previously there were suites such as "Production" aimed at different markets that cost less. This avoided people like video editors ending up paying for Dreamweaver which would never be touched.
Now you pay for the lot if you like it or not. It's rather like doing your shopping and then the supermarket forcing you to also buy 10 tins of cat food when you don't have a cat. Then they claim you are saving money.
"We asked Adobe whether they would compensate users for the downtime, exactly why the technology has failed, and why they didn't test the updates in a sandboxed environment while still giving paying punters access to the sync feature. At the time of writing they had not responded to any of these questions. "
Does anyone think there are answers? Other than the sound effect of a till ringing?
I'm amazed, actually shocked, that with all the complaints against big businessabout products and security, people actually trust and use them for storage.
As with all things, if you don't want anyone else to see it, then why on earth put it in a "cloud"?
And keep in mind, the technology used to create these "clouds" is built by someone else, and that someone else would love to get their hands on others work to incorporate into their own. It's already been shown that certain companies can create backdoors into hardware they sell for "security reasons" which, as we've seen in the past, is exploitable.
And, like all things, companies are always looking to save a penny. It takes nothing for joe smoe in an office somewhere to convince his some VP that he can save the company millions of dollars over X time if it used brand Z product to build a cloud instead of the current brand Y. He gets a nice bonus while data is now less secure and subject to more downtime.
Or worse, the "cloud" you are using is based on some storage server or a "backup server" in a less than trustworthy location. every corp has some jackass that wouldn't give a second thought to getting a cheap "cloud" service just to put money in his/her pocket no matter what the name or location is.
No one has any idea what happens to their data once it's transmitted, where it goes, who sees what. And to sit somewhere for periods of time........
I'm amazed by the sheeple.
I got the impression that they don't actually store all your stuff for you, but just allow your portable device to work on the files that you have on your fixed device? I assume that the local app has a server component that connects to an Adobe C&C server to receive commands to upload your files so you can use them on your mobile device?
That doesn't necessarily stop someone from getting the C&C to upload all your work though.
That is the phrase/mantra that should be recited to every CEO by the remaining IT staff after their data gets stolen or there is a complete work stoppage due to any number of reasons that they can't access their cloud-based applications or storage.
There is always someone saying "We could save a lot of money by outsourcing our IT staff and using cloud-based apps, and they're usually some "Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt" douchbag.
The first question anyone should ask is "Why is no one else doing it?" Remember that just because you don't know the reason, doesn't mean there isn't one.
Adobe can join MS in a huge software debacle. This play is not going to work. My guess is that they will roll back their nebulous ambition -- at least for a while. Adobe claim they won't add features to their boxed sets from now on. It's the cloud or nuttin'. I think a lot of creative people will start looking elsewhere. And especially after this confidence-crushing FAIL during the roll out of an already risky play.
Wark my mords....Reds will hole.
Adobe know nothing about running a cloud. The idea that they're going to suddenly get rid of boxed product and move to the cloud and they're going to run it is nothing short of insanity. What is the biggest piece of insecurity on any modern system today? It's a tie: Flash and Java.
Adobe knows nothing about security or running a cloud service. (Just like Apple.) Nothing. The fact that they're out the door and immediately have two weeks of downtime says it all. They have no clue as to what they're doing. They should focus on what they know how to do: Creative. They should port their apps to Azure PaaS and focus on building the apps not running the infrastructure.
I'd suggest it's a bit like buying a beer, looking forward to drinking it; half way through it suddenly disappears, and you exclaim
"But I paid for that, I want to enjoy it"and the barman saying
"no you only paid for 2 minutes; if you want to continue enjoying it, pay again"
This desktop syncing was a preview function only! We had the official release (1.0) and a test, beta, preview release (1.05) that allowed desktop syncing. So, read again: preview...beta... Test...
It will only be official from June 17th. So nothing really going on here exept a lot of people that do not read what it says on the Creative Cloud site nor read the specifications when installing test software...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
