It's fluffy bottom line time at Adobe. That's a good thing, if you were wondering Adobe has locked customers into its cloud services, and the fluffy white stuff has continued to, well, fluff up both its top and bottom lines. Total revenue for Adobe's second quarter of fiscal '17 ended 2 June was $1,77bn, up 26.7 per cent year-on-year - beating analyst forecasts - and rising 33.1 per cent for the six month …
Screw Adobe. Who the flip do these people think they are? How do you honestly expect businesses to use your products and turn a profit when you've engineered in this "rent software" don't "own it" mentality.
Sure, there is an advantage that the cloud product should stay "patched" - but really?
Sorry Adobe, but there are other products out there that don't suck. I for one don't need to pay a bounty every year to continue using the products I've already bought and paid for.
Hope your bottom line plummets.
Basically, you have no choice - but turning to another application - if you can find one that is a acceptable replacement, which is not always possible. Complaining became useless, Adobe never listened.
Those who resisted, and stayed on CS6, for example, will be slowly forced to accept CC as soon as they feel the need to upgrade. Then revenues will stabilize.
For users just using a few software, the model can work, you split the payment over n months/years (the drawback is software will mostly stop working if you don't pay, which may be an issue in troubled times), for users using many different software, sometimes just for side tasks (where older software may be good enough), it could become a problem.
And with CC too you can be a guinea pig to test beta software...
Exactly my thoughts. I work in media and we use Adobe CC on 5 machines. Media is doing it tough and it really hurts when they jack up the prices by a ridiculous amount each year. But what can you do? You need to use the software and you can only buy it on subscription.
Switching isn't easy, especially when you consider the time and cost of retraining the team, rebuilding templates and libraries and converting or recreating existing documents.
The costs of the subscription are high but changing to something else would end up costing more.
you could be trying out all the alternatives, whilst CS6 still works
tho i am sad to see a number of those companies who are trying to fill the gap created when adobe went SUB only are worse than adobe ever was ... trying to continually sell presets, guidance tutorials etc etc ad nauseum
so many just jumped onto CC without thought for the fact that they would be paying for the same software for numerous DECADES .... and if they stopped they would not be able to work on THEIR OWN PROJECTS
I can only thank my guardian angel I'm _not_ a "Creative Professional" sentenced to wear the Adobe ball and chain - the Paint Shop Pro 9 I got for free bundled with an SD card will serve all my image manipulation needs (and there are indeed few of its features I never use) for the rest of my life. FOR FREE. Go die of envy, you Flash-peddling fuckers...
I sure can, but I'm not sure it will help you much: apparently this was about a decade ago, bundled with a Lexar card. I have no idea whether they still do bundles like this or not - in any case, it was not a trial version but the full PSP9.
the Paint Shop Pro 9 I got for free bundled with an SD card will serve all my image manipulation needs
PaintShopPro version 4 worked for me for years until a Microsoft update shagged it.
Adobe are a bunch of greedy avaricious bastards. FireWorks was way better than Photoshop; Macromedia took the money and ran. Then Adobe killed the competition.
Why has no other company done anything like this? How did Adobe end up as the Jabba the Hut on top of the pile?
I've been gradually transitioning away from CC over to Affinity Photo and Designer along with Sketch. I appreciate those doing print design may have a harder time but web design is an easier switch. I'm maybe 20/80 Adobe vs. other software, using CC apps only for the stuff that the newer apps don't handle well yet. I object to renting the software but more than anything CC runs dog slow on my computer these days.
The problem is even if you find a decent replacement, unless it can import all Lightroom changes to the images (Lightroom performs non-destructive editing, the original image is never modified) and deliver the same exact results, you will be faced with the choices of starting anew (on 400K images, and for some people, even more...), or exporting them to formats like TIFF (or, worse, JPEG), losing the capability to return to an image and make new changes. If the replacement can import, but the algorithms applied are not the same, there are risks the images don't look as you wish.
In some ways, non-destructive editing is one of the best lock-in ever seen.
I'd probably export to some standard format (like TIFF or PNG) anyway, also keeping a copy of the originals as they were initially, and move on to something else - to be honest, I currently don't even keep originals: if I think it's good enough, I'm committing to it. I've had too much hassle getting out of lock-ins in the past (never an "if", always a "when") to bother with anything I can't get out of if need be, regardless of how magical it might be.
I always keep the original RAWs. I may export some of my best photos in TIFF also, but as improved tools are delivered, and my processing capabilities improve, there's always the chance I can re-process an old photo in a better way than I could do in the past. Also, when printing, maybe a new, different paper could require some different setting when soft-proofed, and I still prefer to apply them on a (virtual) copy of the RAW image in LR.
I never threw away negatives, after all...
I'm not a "creative" but I use DTP & Photo software as part of my work (and play, to some extent).
When Adobe first came out with the cloud thing, I resented it. I had bought Adobe software for many years (not every release, but most of them).
Whilst I still resent the general industry push towards rental (e.g. Microsoft with Office). Adobe is actually the only one I do and would continue to subscribe to without issue. For example, I would never subscribe to Microsoft Office, although I've probably jinxed it now and they'll take away "home & student" !
Why ? Quality and integration.
For £10 a month, you get Lightroom and Photoshop, plus various phone/tablet apps.
Lightroom is the best photo management software I've used bar none. I've got tens of thousands of photos, and the functionality it permits, both in terms of management and manipulation beats all its competitors hands down. I've used/tried most of the commercial photo libraries before settling on Lightroom.
As for Photoshop ... well...its the gold standard, I don't think anyone seriously disputes that. Its been the gold standard for years. All of its competitors are severely lagging, they had their chance to get up to scratch and failed.
The integration between Lightroom and Photoshop is beautiful and seamless. And the software copes wonderfully with files of all sizes.
£50 a month gets you the whole caboodle. And when you sit back and consider just how much you get for £50 a month, its extraordinary value for money (both in itself and compared to, say, what you get from Microsoft for £50 a month !).
You get Lightroom, the best
You get Photoshop and Illustrator, the big guns of photo and vector manipulaton
You get Indesign, the *best* DTP, full stop. (Adobe pretty much killed off the previous leader Quark)
You get Premiere,AfterEffects, Prelude and SpeedGrade four of the best tools in the world for video
You get Acrobat Pro
You get Audition for Audio manipulation
You get Typekit for fonts
You get Adobe Stock for stock images
and a few other things too, including phone/tablet apps.
You get regular updates for everything. And again, nice integration between the various apps.
I don't mind paying for it one bit. I can see the value. Infact I see far LESS value in paying £9.99 a month for a subscription to Spotify or Netflix ! So I put the money I save there into paying my Adobe sub. ;-)
As much as people like to complain about Adobe, you have to acknowledge that they have created (and/or acquired and renamed) a suite of products that are, without dispute, the industry standards.
They are industry standard because they are far better than anything else on the market.
What Adobe have demonstrated is that people are still willing to pay a respectable price if they feel they're getting the right tool.
I wish most other software companies tried to match Adobe's quality.
"And as revenue goes up, so do the incentives to compete."
And nobody is standing in the way of Adobe's competitors.
But let's face it, Adobe's competitors had decades to compete and they still haven't been able to come up with a viable alternative to even one of Adobe's core products have they !!
There have been all sorts of attempts to challenge Adobe !
• Photoshop and Illustrator ... they all failed miserably.
• Quark tried valiantly to retain market-share when InDesign came along ... they did for the first few versions, but then Adobe just kept improving and improving InDesign, and now Quark is a mere shadow of its former self.
• Lightroom ... as mentioned, you can try all the competitors you like. There's nothing like it.
• Video is about the only area where Adobe still has a few reasonably viable competitors, but I suspect Adobe will continue to erode them too.
Need I go on ?
Adobe Acrobat is perhaps the only exception in the Adobe arsenal, but the "real" Acrobat still does a lot of things better than the many PDF writers out there.
Yes, but therein lies the catch.
As has been mentioned before, you fail to comprehend how industry gold-standard the Adobe toolset is.
There is no possible way you can compare (for example) Photoshop to *ANYTHING* whether some freetard open-source nonsense or some wannabe Photoshop from someone like Corel ... there is no debate.
The "creatives of the world" *DID* have a great big hissy-fit when Adobe first announced subs-only.
But then the "creatives of the world" realised :
(a) There was nothing else out there as good as Adobe. Even in the few areas where there was previously genuine competition (e.g. Quark vs InDesign), Adobe rules the roost.
(b) The "creatives of the world" need interact with others, e.g. they receive vectors for corporates, or they need to ensure their print profiles are correctly setup for the presses to avoid expensive mistakes. Anyone who's anyone in and around the "creative sector" uses Adobe for good reason, its industry-standard both in terms of software quality and breadth/depth of adoption.
(c) The "creatives of this world" realised that by the time they expend time and money on migrating to a new toolset, it will be significantly cheaper just to go for the Adobe sub.
Creatives are not programmers. They will use the tools the suit them best, won't code one. This is also an area where you need programmers with very specific - and interdisciplinary - knowledge and skill.
That's why GIMP development, for example, is so slow. Most CS graduates may know compilers, kernel stuff and network protocols. Far less understand the "creatives" industry needs, and how to address them. And those who do, I'm afraid they're working for Adobe and the like (maybe even for Pixar and ILM...). Far more money, I guess.
Open source may work well to address some sectors of the software industry (especially when the open source product are a by-product of much larger economic interests), but not so well in others.
LEss than £10/month for Lightroom and Photoshop is not all that bad. Two pints of watery lager in London will set you back much the same.
As one poster has said and I tend to agree, just cancel your Netfix or Spotify or ... or ... monthly sub. At least with this, there is something at the end of it rather than just consuming stuff.
"I would have to work a whole year just to pay Adobe."
Your argument makes absolutely no sense !
Where does this £7–10k come from ?!? As previously stated it is either £10 or £50 per month, therefore at most £600 per year.
The £50 a month should be an overhead you factor into your overheads just like you internet connection ! With roughly 20 working days in a month £50 works out to be £2.50 a day .... peanuts ! As others have mentioned, if £50 means that much to you, make the savings elsewhere, e.g. booze, cigarettes or Netflix subscriptions !
I know people involved in running design studios and other similar outfits. For them, it is seen as a perfectly justifiable overhead of employing someone, you give them a desk, a phone, an internet connection, a Wacom tablet and an Adobe subscription.
£50 a month is peanuts compared to someone's overall salary, or the productivity lost (both to the designer themselves, and to the business as a whole) by forcing them to use lesser tools.
Unless you're a massive creative house, the best option I see is to wean people off piecemeal. Part of it involves education because a lot of people don't even realize that alternatives exist. Part of it also identifies "low hanging fruit", ie: people who simply don't need any unique features exclusive to Adobe.
For us, for example, we have several users who need to do some basic PDF manipulation. I could be spending $100/month just on acrobat licenses alone, but instead I pointed them to PDFElement by Wondershare (https://pdf.wondershare.com/). It does everything they need and for a fraction of the price.
For Illustrator and Photoshop, there's a rising star called Serif who put out Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. They're not quite as full featured as the Adobe equivalents, but they are priced downright cheap compared to Adobe. Importantly, there are both Mac and Windows versions, allowing for interoperability between platforms.
People have also mentioned Paint Shop Pro, which is also a perfectly good piece of software. It's Windows only, unfortunately, but if you're a Windows-exclusive shop, then this is another option. IIRC it even supports photoshop plugins.
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