back to article Adobe chomps down more fat subs revenue, points sucking straw at all your delicious customer data

Price increase or new customers? That was the question analysts quizzed Adobe on last night as subscription profits swelled in Q2 ended 31 May – the response from its chief bean counter was "both". CFO John Murphy referenced the bottom line-fattening Creative Cloud price increases in April 2018 on a conference call with …

  1. a_yank_lurker

    Subscription Rates

    The photography community is not very happy Adobe's fleecing them with higher rates. There are a couple of YouTube channels actively showing there are options to Creative Cloud (some free, some commercial) that might work for many. (See JChristina for one).

    1. TRT Silver badge

      Re: Subscription Rates

      Ditto for the research community who resent forking out the same amount each year that they would have previously spent every 5 years or longer for a piece of software which isn't allied to their core business and doesn't generate income but just makes it a little bit easier to complete one or two tasks. People seem wedded to the idea of Photoshop and Illustrator because its dominance of the sector means most people will have had exposure to it at some point or another during their education, training or work experience.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        The problem with subscriptios is about secondary tools.

        For primary/main tools, subscription are not much an issue, you will pay more or less the same sum over the same period of time. That changes with secondary (or tertiary) tools you don't need every day, and you're ready to accept to use older versions until they really become too old.

        Anyway the scare tactic employed by Adobe when it warned its cash cows users to uninstall previous versions of CC - conveniently forgetting to tell users that perpetual licenses were not affected - helped too boost the sales. Just like the A/B testing about users willingly to pay more the Photo subscription for more cloud storage.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Subscription Rates

      Thankfully, I never got hooked on Lightroom. It had some nice functionality (the workflow and having cataloging and editing in the same application is nice), however when I tried it (LR5), it had three primary failings - conversion quality was worse than the manufacturer-provided software (Nikon), editing was slower (for some reason, it never really stressed the CPU, and the GPU support only covered Intel IGPs and some AMD units - not the GTX 980 I had...), and batch exports were *significantly* slower. Since Nikon stopped supporting Capture NX, I've moved to Raw Therapee - excellent functionality and conversion quality, and performant; only thing is, it doesn't do catalgouing, but there are other tools for that...

      1. a_yank_lurker

        Re: Subscription Rates

        I could not afford Adobe products many years ago when I started using a DSLR so I went with cheaper alternatives for my RAW photo processing needs. My experience is there are many options that will do an excellent job of RAW processing. Some are free and many of the commercial products are much cheaper than Adobe.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh. Whoop. De. Doo.

    Indeed.

    Yet more ads for stuff I ALREADY HAVE.

    Yet more ads for suppliers I ALREADY KNOW ABOUT

    Yet more ads for stuff I have already looked at and DONT WANT

    Yet more ads for what is "Trending" (as if I should give a rats arse.)

    Whoop indeed. De. Doo.

  3. MrNed
    Happy

    Escaped

    Oh, did Adobe put their prices up? Didn't notice cos I escaped when they first brought in their tax on designer-y types. Bit of a bumpy road at first, but when Serif released Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo the road smoothed out again (Affinity Publisher is imminent too). Reasonably priced pay-once license, regular updates and improvements, slick and fast to use. Not identical to their Adobe counterparts, but easily as good for most tasks, and better than Adobe at others. On the rare occasions that Affinity doesn't cut the mustard I've still got my old CS5.5 license that runs quite happily in a VM.

    When I hear about the "Experience Cloud" and other such guff, I feel even happier about my choices.

    1. localgeek

      Re: Escaped

      Another +1 for Affinity Photo. As a photographer, it does nearly everything I need for a standalone Photoshop replacement. I use it in conjunction with Alienskin's Exposure X4 software, which is a quite capable replacement for Lightroom. Between the two, I'm well covered for editing.

  4. 89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921

    Bah! That's nothing! Facebooks' new cryptocurrency brings together all of the usual suspects such as Experian into a great big consortium of mass profilers and I don't see any way of mitigating such an all pervasive threat to privacy.

    1. IGotOut Silver badge

      Don't use Facebook and pay cash wherever possible.

      That buggers their businesses models up.

      Yes, yes, you neef to work hard to escape them completely.

      1. 89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921

        "Don't use Facebook..."

        Facebook tracks you even when you don't use it.

        "...pay cash wherever possible."

        Cameras+AI - the technology isn't there yet but the data will be stored for later perusal &processing by our silicon-brained overlords.

        IT'S NOT PARANOIA IF THEY'RE AFTER YOU(R PROFILE)

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A lot of stitching..

    So, if I get this right, by stitching customer data together they are stitching up the customer.

    I use Affinity Designer, Affinity Photo and just bought Affinity Publisher because, to be honest, I needed a DTP packaged that worked with the first two. The latter is not quite perfect yet, but I've seen how rapidly the first two matured so I have no reason to believe this won't either.

    For all of the above you pay ONCE. I am no pro in this, but many who use Adobe aren't either, and the above is a much cheaper route to take IMHO.

  6. I.Geller Bronze badge

    AI database is a blockchain database

    Search and find the right shopping good that you are interested in, that is a game-changer.

    Personal profile contains structured on timestamps synonymous clusters. For example there is a paragraph:

    -- Alice and Bob exercise with joy, she trains a lot. She swims well and wears blue.

    In this section, is synonymous with the cluster

    - Alice exercise with joy

    - Alice trains a lot

    - Alice swims well

    - She swims well

    - she trains with joy

    - she trains a lot

    - she exercise with joy

    - she exercise a lot

    - Alice wears blue

    - she wears blue

    This cluster is related to the cluster

    - She swims well

    - Alice wore a pink robe

    A timestamp for the first cluster indicates a later time than the second cluster, from which the computer may conclude that the habit of the pink robe is more recent than the colour blue.

    AI database is a blockchain database, it allows computer to "Search and find the right shopping good that you are interested in". So Adobe's interest in my patented AI database has a good reason.

    1. I.Geller Bronze badge

      38 per cent of companies have made the leap to AI or machine learnin

      More than a third of companies have adopted some form of AI in the past year, according to an MHR Analytics poll.

      The poll revealed 38 per cent of companies have made the leap to AI or machine learning by adding the technology to their analytics approach in the past 12 months.

    2. I.Geller Bronze badge

      Re: AI database is a blockchain database

      14. The computer system of claim 9 in which said facility configured to extract predicative phrases is further configured to assign to the subtexts information regarding the date of their origin.

      A context phrase is a "predicative definition" characterized by combinations of nouns and other parts of speech, such as a verb and an adjective (e.g., city-be-in). A single sentence may include one or more predicative definitions.

    3. ds6 Silver badge
      Meh

      Re: AI database is a blockchain database

      Are you an AI?

      1. I.Geller Bronze badge

        AI finds cause-and-consequence sorted information.

        I'm a prototype and creator.

        AI search queries contain the logic of thinking in the form of timestamps because these queries are annotated with patterns that are already pre-sorted by time. That is, if the usual queries help to find any (presumably the best) information, AI queries initially pre-sorted by the time of their origin and AI finds cause-and-consequence sorted information. This is my design, how it should work.

      2. I.Geller Bronze badge

        AI database

        Now you see the reason for the massive misinformation in the media about what AI technology is and how it works, don't you? Indeed, AI database makes absolutely all IT companies obsolete and out of business. Now you see the reason why no one says a word about me and my role in the discovery of AI, don't you?

  7. ds6 Silver badge
    Flame

    Their new revenue model also has continually fucked over education. Most education peeps had a bunch of Device Licenses, where no Adobe account is required for the end user and everyone can use the products. Previously, you used the desktop-based package creation tool for image deployment, where you build it locally on a computer or derver and then slap it on a USB or push it out over the network.

    When the new plans came out a while ago, there was no equivalent for Device Licenses, only Named Licenses that require EVERY USER to have an Adobe account, so you had to stay on the old version of CC if you were unable or unwilling to do that. Months later, they finally have plans for education and other Device License users, but they have implemented it horribly. Now they're forcing you to upgrade to Shared Device Licenses which are identical in functionality to Device Licenses, except they cost exorbitantly more per device, and can no longer be built locally or automated in any way (yet); everything is done through the web-based admin console.

    To migrate to the new licenses, you are given a 30 day window to migrate ALL EXISTING DEVICES. Any devices not migrated will fall off the plan and everything Adobe will cease to work, and you will have to manually uninstall and reinstall everything; if you don't start the migration process before your current pay period ends, the same thing will happen.

    Fuck you, Adobe.

    Fun fact: their migration webinars have comments sections, and they are filled with people from the industry complaining. Guess what are now heavily moderated or just fully disabled in some circumstances??

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