Here is the way I look at it. Creative Suite Master was like $3K. Once purchased, as soon as I got used to the featured, another version came out and I upgrade for around $600-800. My first year of CC cost me $360 or about half of the upgrade. I can keep it for $600 year, or about the same as the upgrade I would have purchased anyhow. In addition, I received more products and always have the latest tools.
I admit, when I subscribed I always thought I would eventually downgrade back to CS5, but I like having every Abobe product on both my Macs.
no one is mentioning the fact that they have also just ditched a decent sized and very useful app from their collection - Fireworks, yet the price is the same
All I use from Adobe is Dreamweaver. I really don't want to pay for the whole suite. Guess I'll be checking out WebStorm and other tools.
Me too. My main concern is that Apple will do something in an OS upgrade that prevents Dreamweaver 6 from running. (It happens a lot.) Then I'm screwed.
So Apple, i would suggest you buy that darn company and do the same thing with it as you did with FCP to FCPX. From 2000$ to a fraction of that price.
Apple buying Adobe would be amazing. They are two very successful companies and their business model and organization might be difficult to unify though.
So Apple, i would suggest you buy that darn company and do the same thing with it as you did with FCP to FCPX. From 2000$ to a fraction of that price.
Yes, they should buy adobe, throw out the features that Pros need to use like MultiCam and Time Mapping, make it a nice simple application for average users and sell it for $300... these are professional apps, not consumer ones. If you want something cheap and easy to use there's Adobe's Elements line.
Here is the way I look at it. Creative Suite Master was like $3K. Once purchased, as soon as I got used to the featured, another version came out and I upgrade for around $600-800. My first year of CC cost me $360 or about half of the upgrade. I can keep it for $600 year, or about the same as the upgrade I would have purchased anyhow. In addition, I received more products and always have the latest tools.
I admit, when I subscribed I always thought I would eventually downgrade back to CS5, but I like having every Abobe product on both my Macs.
Here's the way I look at it. I don't need the Master Suite. I was fine with the Design Premium edition I've been using for years. Upgrades cost me about $400. And I adobe didn't release upgrades every year, it was every 18months to 2 years. And I didn't have to buy every upgrade, I could skip versions. So now if I want Photoshop, Indesign, and Acrobat I need to pay $600 a year instead of paying $400 every 1.5 years (or 3 years if I didn't feel that CS4 gave me much for my money). For someone who purchases Master Collection (which is $2,300 new) and bought subsequent upgrades every time Adobe came out with a new version, and they bought upgrades to Lightroom as well. They will save some money. For one person who needs to use it on several computers, it's a great deal. But there are fewer options for those who don't need everything. And it also is problematic for larger companies because the rates are based on the number of full time employees. So if only 30% of your staff need it but Adobe's enterprise solution requires to pay for licenses for janitors and security guards... it's not a great deal.
Here's the way I look at it. I don't need the Master Suite. I was fine with the Design Premium edition I've been using for years. Upgrades cost me about $400. And I adobe didn't release upgrades every year, it was every 18months to 2 years. And I didn't have to buy every upgrade, I could skip versions. So now if I want Photoshop, Indesign, and Acrobat I need to pay $600 a year instead of paying $400 every 1.5 years (or 3 years if I didn't feel that CS4 gave me much for my money). For someone who purchases Master Collection (which is $2,300 new) and bought subsequent upgrades every time Adobe came out with a new version, and they bought upgrades to Lightroom as well. They will save some money. For one person who needs to use it on several computers, it's a great deal. But there are fewer options for those who don't need everything. And it also is problematic for larger companies because the rates are based on the number of full time employees. So if only 30% of your staff need it but Adobe's enterprise solution requires to pay for licenses for janitors and security guards... it's not a great deal.
If you actually are an existing customer, instead of a pirate like most of the whiners, the price is 29.99/mo. And you don't have to buy the Master Suite, you can also buy a license for a single app such as photoshop for 19.99.
For one, Creative Suite for years now, hasn't really added much value from release to release, because the functions people really need have been implemented ages ago, and the new features are mostly special use tools that most users have no need for or that plug-ins could do just as well.
Yet at the same time, Adobe, despite the outrageous license fees it charges, hasn't even managed to make their apps properly compatible with OS X in more than a decade because they don't know proper coding techniques or are plain lazy (you take your pick over what proportion incompetence and laziness is to blame).
In other words, many many professionals really see no compelling reason to upgrade, and skip one or two versions, particularly since Adobe started these "for pay" .5 releases, i.e. started charging twice to go from e.g. CS5 to CS5.5 to CS6.
There was one reason to upgrade which was the PPC to intel shift, and there's now an other one, which is the shift to 64-bit processing, and each of these steps, despite well announced in advance by Apple, Adobe is the laggard when it comes to adoption, transitioning one app at a time, and each time charging a lot of money for close to the same app.
Adobe also hasn't managed to either have a UI that's platform compliant or consistent across all their apps. In short, their app suite is a mess, and people are less and less willing to pay the steep license fees that are about an order of magnitude higher than those of competing products. The reason people use them, is because they feel locked into an industry standard, which they can't shake.
So the people who claim anyone who isn't using the latest and greatest version isn't a true professional, don't understand these products and how little of true value is added with each version.
Which brings me to another issue people don't get: the differentiation between software and services. iCloud is a subscription. But what you pay for is not software, you pay for data centers running, using electricity continually, to host your files, receive your e-mail, sync your files, etc.
Creative Cloud contains some online features that most people could do just fine without, and which Adobe offer separately as a service for those who care about it, just like you can buy Pages without subscribing to iCloud. Adobe tries to pretend a software product is a service, and to make people continuously pay for a software that is extremely slow in evolving and to hide the true cost of the Adobe tax from its users.
Adobe tries to sell a software product as a service. That's like buying a couch at the furniture store, and each time you sit on it, a meter starts running and at the end of the month you have to pay a "sitting bill", in perpetuity, until the couch is busted. And if you don't pay, spikes shoot out, so you can't use the couch to sit on anymore.
The third thing some people here don't get is the buy-vs-rent decision. Just as you can lease cars or buy cars, different things make sense in different circumstances. There's no one fits all solution. There are tax advantages and budget advantages to one, but also issues of indebtedness, etc.
People who don't want a "cheap" subsidized phone, but pay upfront the full price aren't stupid either. Actually, they are smart, because they don't act like Politicians who put everything on a payment plan, and eventually notice that the payments to which they are obliged are higher than the revenue. That's how debt gets started. It's not about a single product, it's about what happens if this sort of things becomes the norm. How many dozens of software products do you have installed? All of them go subscription. Apple were to decide that they sell hardware as a service: you can't buy a Mac anymore, you only can rent them. Same with iPhone, etc.
The result is, that while money keeps coming in, you may have plenty of room in your budget, so you overcommit or overspend. Then comes a lull or an economic downturn, and you're stuck in contractual commitments for which you don't have the funds to cover them. You stop functioning as a business, and the lull turns into bankruptcy, because everything stops functioning.
If you pay up front, you can only do it, if you have the money (unless you're stupid enough to load up your credit cards, which is another curse released upon society). If the money stops coming in, you owe nobody anything, and you can continue doing your work, just as you had done before. Maybe you miss an update and a few more mostly irrelevant features, but if you could do your work before, you can continue doing it just fine. No, it's not shameful or crippling not to use the latest of everything. 5 year old computers and 5 year old software function just as well today as they did 5 years ago, unless some forced reliance on some sort of service kicks in that breaks the software (like OS X 10.6 was broken with the discontinuation of mobileMe)
If you go to business school, you'll have classes on how to decide if you should buy, rent something, or outsource the process that would require you to rent or buy something.
Adobe decided to make that choice for you, and you can be sure that since they are in the business of bleeding you to the max. they picked the option that's best for them, not the one that's best for the consumer, because if they wanted to save the consumer some money, they could have lowered their prices and put their apps into the Apple AppStore where with lower prices they would have sold a lot more copies. But they are not interested in selling a product, they are interested in milking you until you're dry.
Adobe is in essence levying a tax on your work tools, and once they get people to accept that model, you can bet the tax hikes will come, and there's nobody to vote out of office to prevent these tax hikes. So I don't care how cheap the monthly payments are, because there's no guarantee that they will not be randomly jacked up as time goes by to satisfy ever greedier shareholders. If you own a product, you can say: "No, this new version is too expensive, I stick with the old." and if enough people say that, they'll have to lower the price. With a subscription service, you lose that power, because if you refuse to pay what you consider to be too expensive, the tools are taken away from you and you're out of business.
Anyone who doesn't like Adobe's policy should make their voice heard here:
I don't know what the big deal is. Apple has a subscription iCloud service
Except that you don't have to pay for the basic service, only if you need more capacity than the default 5GB. And mail, calendar, etc. are not continuing costs in any case.
OK, at the suggestion of someone here, I looked up Pixelmator for the mac. I must say, for $15 I'm impressed. It honestly looks like I can use it to do everything I'm currently using Photoshop for and a bit more.
That being said, I'm mostly an InDesign and Illustrator guy, so until there are viable replacements that allow for advanced page layout, and logo design etc... I'm going to be stuck in Adobe's world. I realize that there are existing software replacements for those, but none that I prefer working in, or flow with the way that I design, and at the speed at which I'm known for. That's a huge deal for me too... the speed at which I can effectively communicate my visual creations for my clients didn't happen over night. It took years of working with the earlier software and learning as the feature sets grew. I started with Aldus Page Maker 3.0, Photoshop 2.0 and Altsys Freehand 3.1. It's not like I can just jump ship and seamlessly transition into new software without a learning curve that could affect my bottom line.
That's being too kind. We have to look at historic perspectives: At some point in time, land was everything. The people in control of land were the nobility, and they TAXED and exploited everyone else who needed land to grow food.
With the industrial revolution the means of productions became important, and he who had the capital and owned the factories gained power. This led to a democratization because the newly rich capitalists didn't feel like being controlled by anachronistic landed gentry. Exploitation moved from taxation to waring for price and wages. But at least ownership was available to everyone.
Now, say hello to intellectual property. Due to excessive lobbying, intellectual property rights, which were originally granted as a temporary privilege to encourage the creation of knowledge to benefit the common good, these property rights have morphed into something that's increasingly treated by legislature as if it were a natural right, when in fact our entire civilization is based upon the free sharing of knowledge.
Once you have the draconian laws like DMCA, etc. in place, now you can put on the tumb-screws. We're back to where a few entities (now corporations) control the means by which we make a living in an ever more virtualized world. Due to network effects they end up having near monopolies, and in terms of policy it doesn't matter if they do have a complete monopoly or not, because all the other actors are trying to follow suit (Microsoft is doing the same as Adobe and will turn their software into a service), and these near monopolies allow them, under the protection of copyright law, two assert ownership on know how the same way in a feudal system ownership was asserted over land.
Corporations have outstripped the importance of government, and increasingly act as such. Be that by limiting free speech "in private domains", or taxing people for the use of their products which they refuse to sell as products, and only rent out.
This will increasingly become undemocratic, because price levels can be changed arbitrarily without viable alternative for users as owned legacy software starts to disappear, and then prices will be adjusted to reflect the utility the financially most powerful can get, screw everyone else.
Our data, our work, it has been taken hostage. Pay up, or die.
If you want to call that a new form of government (corporatism) or a new form of mafia-like behavior doesn't really matter; the reality is the same, that you're up against a power that's hard to fight.
If you want to win this battle, you better send a message and get out now. I just culled all Adobe software from my iPhone and iPad, bought Acorn 4 while it's on sale, and will start investigating vector drawing programs and other photo editing software, especially those that don't use proprietary file formats.
I'm glad I use Aperture and not Lightroom. One item less to worry about.
Anyone who doesn't like Adobe's policy should make their voice heard here:
and will start investigating vector drawing programs and other photo editing software, especially those that don't use proprietary file formats.
You might want to check out Opacity. It isn't a replacement for Illustrator but it has some nice features. Ideal for creating web illustrations, logos, icons.
But I don't need EVERYTHING. How can I convince my boss to spend $50 a month for a bunch of apps when we only really use 4 of them? Why is it all or nothing? How hard is it to offer just the Design Standard apps for a lesser monthly fee?
A single app is $20/month. If you use more than 2 1/2, the $50/month saves money vs licensing them separately if that were an option. I don't think Adobe expects everyone to to use all of the apps. And your boss should prefer the small monthly fee vs the previous hefty upgrade fee. It's a lot easier to budget for.
And now if you some day have a need for one of the other apps beyond the 4 you currently use, they are effectively free.
Adobe isn't making this change to enhance its product or improve customer support, but to maximize its profits. They determined that they will lose customers, but this will be more than offset by fewer people being willing to pay the subscription fee that has a higher profit margin.
Adobe isn't making this change to enhance its product or improve customer support, but to maximize its profits. They determined that they will lose customers, but this will be more than offset by fewer people being willing to pay the subscription fee that has a higher profit margin.
They should end up with more (paying) customers per app, not less. Once people pay the $50, they can try out apps that you otherwise wouldn't have had access to.
For those who're wondering, the official release date for all these shiny new CC upgrades is June 17th. I'm planning to delay joining until just before that date to avoid a double-humped learning curve (old CS versions then the new versions). I've also upgraded my broadband service to take advantage of one of the side benefits of a subscription, 20 GB of off-side storage. I've needed that for a long time.
Personally, I'm hoping that Adobe dribbles those upgrades out over several days before and after the 17th. Otherwise, they're likely to have the mother of all server overloads.
A single app is $20/month. If you use more than 2 1/2, the $50/month saves money vs licensing them separately if that were an option. I don't think Adobe expects everyone to to use all of the apps. And your boss should prefer the small monthly fee vs the previous hefty upgrade fee. It's a lot easier to budget for.
And now if you some day have a need for one of the other apps beyond the 4 you currently use, they are effectively free.
And one day down the road my boss will have no choice but to accept that. But as it is right now we are a small printing company and basically I have no budget, much less $50 per month. The only reason why we've been allowed to upgrade in the past is because it was a one-time cost that would last a few years.
All I'm saying is why not offer a smaller cost for just what we use... InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and occasionally Acrobat - hey, that's the old Design Standard Suite! I'm pretty sure we'll have no use for Dreamweaver or Premiere etc. in our line of work.
If you actually are an existing customer, instead of a pirate like most of the whiners, the price is 29.99/mo. And you don't have to buy the Master Suite, you can also buy a license for a single app such as photoshop for 19.99.
I am an existing customer, but read the fine print, 30/mo is an introductory rate for the first year which is $360 for the year, it goes up to $50 following that which is $600 per year. I need Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat. Updates used to be about every 18 months, so $400 for an upgrade was $267 a year, and I didn't have to upgrade when I felt that CS4 wasn't worth it, so $400 for CS3 lasted me over 3 years. In the long run this costs a lot more.
Comments
I admit, when I subscribed I always thought I would eventually downgrade back to CS5, but I like having every Abobe product on both my Macs.
Here in Europe, Holland, i can get the subscription for 61,49 EURO. That is 80,59$ !
So, if you live in the US, i don't understand why people complain about the fee.
By the way; 61,49 Euro puts it out of my reach.
So Apple, i would suggest you buy that darn company and do the same thing with it as you did with FCP to FCPX. From 2000$ to a fraction of that price.
Originally Posted by MacMichiel
What are you guys complaining about ?
So, if you live in the US, i don't understand why people complain about the fee.
Stop being so vacuous.
no one is mentioning the fact that they have also just ditched a decent sized and very useful app from their collection - Fireworks, yet the price is the same
Quote:
Originally Posted by go4d1
All I use from Adobe is Dreamweaver. I really don't want to pay for the whole suite. Guess I'll be checking out WebStorm and other tools.
Me too. My main concern is that Apple will do something in an OS upgrade that prevents Dreamweaver 6 from running. (It happens a lot.) Then I'm screwed.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacMichiel
So Apple, i would suggest you buy that darn company and do the same thing with it as you did with FCP to FCPX. From 2000$ to a fraction of that price.
Apple buying Adobe would be amazing. They are two very successful companies and their business model and organization might be difficult to unify though.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MacMichiel
So Apple, i would suggest you buy that darn company and do the same thing with it as you did with FCP to FCPX. From 2000$ to a fraction of that price.
Yes, they should buy adobe, throw out the features that Pros need to use like MultiCam and Time Mapping, make it a nice simple application for average users and sell it for $300... these are professional apps, not consumer ones. If you want something cheap and easy to use there's Adobe's Elements line.
Quote:
Originally Posted by sdmacguy
Here is the way I look at it. Creative Suite Master was like $3K. Once purchased, as soon as I got used to the featured, another version came out and I upgrade for around $600-800. My first year of CC cost me $360 or about half of the upgrade. I can keep it for $600 year, or about the same as the upgrade I would have purchased anyhow. In addition, I received more products and always have the latest tools.
I admit, when I subscribed I always thought I would eventually downgrade back to CS5, but I like having every Abobe product on both my Macs.
Here's the way I look at it. I don't need the Master Suite. I was fine with the Design Premium edition I've been using for years. Upgrades cost me about $400. And I adobe didn't release upgrades every year, it was every 18months to 2 years. And I didn't have to buy every upgrade, I could skip versions. So now if I want Photoshop, Indesign, and Acrobat I need to pay $600 a year instead of paying $400 every 1.5 years (or 3 years if I didn't feel that CS4 gave me much for my money). For someone who purchases Master Collection (which is $2,300 new) and bought subsequent upgrades every time Adobe came out with a new version, and they bought upgrades to Lightroom as well. They will save some money. For one person who needs to use it on several computers, it's a great deal. But there are fewer options for those who don't need everything. And it also is problematic for larger companies because the rates are based on the number of full time employees. So if only 30% of your staff need it but Adobe's enterprise solution requires to pay for licenses for janitors and security guards... it's not a great deal.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kurt Heumiller
Here's the way I look at it. I don't need the Master Suite. I was fine with the Design Premium edition I've been using for years. Upgrades cost me about $400. And I adobe didn't release upgrades every year, it was every 18months to 2 years. And I didn't have to buy every upgrade, I could skip versions. So now if I want Photoshop, Indesign, and Acrobat I need to pay $600 a year instead of paying $400 every 1.5 years (or 3 years if I didn't feel that CS4 gave me much for my money). For someone who purchases Master Collection (which is $2,300 new) and bought subsequent upgrades every time Adobe came out with a new version, and they bought upgrades to Lightroom as well. They will save some money. For one person who needs to use it on several computers, it's a great deal. But there are fewer options for those who don't need everything. And it also is problematic for larger companies because the rates are based on the number of full time employees. So if only 30% of your staff need it but Adobe's enterprise solution requires to pay for licenses for janitors and security guards... it's not a great deal.
If you actually are an existing customer, instead of a pirate like most of the whiners, the price is 29.99/mo. And you don't have to buy the Master Suite, you can also buy a license for a single app such as photoshop for 19.99.
Several people here don't get it, at all.
The issues are very simple:
For one, Creative Suite for years now, hasn't really added much value from release to release, because the functions people really need have been implemented ages ago, and the new features are mostly special use tools that most users have no need for or that plug-ins could do just as well.
Yet at the same time, Adobe, despite the outrageous license fees it charges, hasn't even managed to make their apps properly compatible with OS X in more than a decade because they don't know proper coding techniques or are plain lazy (you take your pick over what proportion incompetence and laziness is to blame).
In other words, many many professionals really see no compelling reason to upgrade, and skip one or two versions, particularly since Adobe started these "for pay" .5 releases, i.e. started charging twice to go from e.g. CS5 to CS5.5 to CS6.
There was one reason to upgrade which was the PPC to intel shift, and there's now an other one, which is the shift to 64-bit processing, and each of these steps, despite well announced in advance by Apple, Adobe is the laggard when it comes to adoption, transitioning one app at a time, and each time charging a lot of money for close to the same app.
Adobe also hasn't managed to either have a UI that's platform compliant or consistent across all their apps. In short, their app suite is a mess, and people are less and less willing to pay the steep license fees that are about an order of magnitude higher than those of competing products. The reason people use them, is because they feel locked into an industry standard, which they can't shake.
So the people who claim anyone who isn't using the latest and greatest version isn't a true professional, don't understand these products and how little of true value is added with each version.
Which brings me to another issue people don't get: the differentiation between software and services. iCloud is a subscription. But what you pay for is not software, you pay for data centers running, using electricity continually, to host your files, receive your e-mail, sync your files, etc.
Creative Cloud contains some online features that most people could do just fine without, and which Adobe offer separately as a service for those who care about it, just like you can buy Pages without subscribing to iCloud. Adobe tries to pretend a software product is a service, and to make people continuously pay for a software that is extremely slow in evolving and to hide the true cost of the Adobe tax from its users.
Adobe tries to sell a software product as a service. That's like buying a couch at the furniture store, and each time you sit on it, a meter starts running and at the end of the month you have to pay a "sitting bill", in perpetuity, until the couch is busted. And if you don't pay, spikes shoot out, so you can't use the couch to sit on anymore.
The third thing some people here don't get is the buy-vs-rent decision. Just as you can lease cars or buy cars, different things make sense in different circumstances. There's no one fits all solution. There are tax advantages and budget advantages to one, but also issues of indebtedness, etc.
People who don't want a "cheap" subsidized phone, but pay upfront the full price aren't stupid either. Actually, they are smart, because they don't act like Politicians who put everything on a payment plan, and eventually notice that the payments to which they are obliged are higher than the revenue. That's how debt gets started. It's not about a single product, it's about what happens if this sort of things becomes the norm. How many dozens of software products do you have installed? All of them go subscription. Apple were to decide that they sell hardware as a service: you can't buy a Mac anymore, you only can rent them. Same with iPhone, etc.
The result is, that while money keeps coming in, you may have plenty of room in your budget, so you overcommit or overspend. Then comes a lull or an economic downturn, and you're stuck in contractual commitments for which you don't have the funds to cover them. You stop functioning as a business, and the lull turns into bankruptcy, because everything stops functioning.
If you pay up front, you can only do it, if you have the money (unless you're stupid enough to load up your credit cards, which is another curse released upon society). If the money stops coming in, you owe nobody anything, and you can continue doing your work, just as you had done before. Maybe you miss an update and a few more mostly irrelevant features, but if you could do your work before, you can continue doing it just fine. No, it's not shameful or crippling not to use the latest of everything. 5 year old computers and 5 year old software function just as well today as they did 5 years ago, unless some forced reliance on some sort of service kicks in that breaks the software (like OS X 10.6 was broken with the discontinuation of mobileMe)
If you go to business school, you'll have classes on how to decide if you should buy, rent something, or outsource the process that would require you to rent or buy something.
Adobe decided to make that choice for you, and you can be sure that since they are in the business of bleeding you to the max. they picked the option that's best for them, not the one that's best for the consumer, because if they wanted to save the consumer some money, they could have lowered their prices and put their apps into the Apple AppStore where with lower prices they would have sold a lot more copies. But they are not interested in selling a product, they are interested in milking you until you're dry.
Adobe is in essence levying a tax on your work tools, and once they get people to accept that model, you can bet the tax hikes will come, and there's nobody to vote out of office to prevent these tax hikes. So I don't care how cheap the monthly payments are, because there's no guarantee that they will not be randomly jacked up as time goes by to satisfy ever greedier shareholders. If you own a product, you can say: "No, this new version is too expensive, I stick with the old." and if enough people say that, they'll have to lower the price. With a subscription service, you lose that power, because if you refuse to pay what you consider to be too expensive, the tools are taken away from you and you're out of business.
Anyone who doesn't like Adobe's policy should make their voice heard here:
http://www.change.org/petitions/adobe-systems-incorporated-eliminate-the-mandatory-creative-cloud-subscription-model
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
I don't know what the big deal is. Apple has a subscription iCloud service
Except that you don't have to pay for the basic service, only if you need more capacity than the default 5GB. And mail, calendar, etc. are not continuing costs in any case.
OK, at the suggestion of someone here, I looked up Pixelmator for the mac. I must say, for $15 I'm impressed. It honestly looks like I can use it to do everything I'm currently using Photoshop for and a bit more.
That being said, I'm mostly an InDesign and Illustrator guy, so until there are viable replacements that allow for advanced page layout, and logo design etc... I'm going to be stuck in Adobe's world. I realize that there are existing software replacements for those, but none that I prefer working in, or flow with the way that I design, and at the speed at which I'm known for. That's a huge deal for me too... the speed at which I can effectively communicate my visual creations for my clients didn't happen over night. It took years of working with the earlier software and learning as the feature sets grew. I started with Aldus Page Maker 3.0, Photoshop 2.0 and Altsys Freehand 3.1. It's not like I can just jump ship and seamlessly transition into new software without a learning curve that could affect my bottom line.
Pay to Play is the new business model.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EcoMouse
Pay to Play is the new business model.
That's being too kind. We have to look at historic perspectives: At some point in time, land was everything. The people in control of land were the nobility, and they TAXED and exploited everyone else who needed land to grow food.
With the industrial revolution the means of productions became important, and he who had the capital and owned the factories gained power. This led to a democratization because the newly rich capitalists didn't feel like being controlled by anachronistic landed gentry. Exploitation moved from taxation to waring for price and wages. But at least ownership was available to everyone.
Now, say hello to intellectual property. Due to excessive lobbying, intellectual property rights, which were originally granted as a temporary privilege to encourage the creation of knowledge to benefit the common good, these property rights have morphed into something that's increasingly treated by legislature as if it were a natural right, when in fact our entire civilization is based upon the free sharing of knowledge.
Once you have the draconian laws like DMCA, etc. in place, now you can put on the tumb-screws. We're back to where a few entities (now corporations) control the means by which we make a living in an ever more virtualized world. Due to network effects they end up having near monopolies, and in terms of policy it doesn't matter if they do have a complete monopoly or not, because all the other actors are trying to follow suit (Microsoft is doing the same as Adobe and will turn their software into a service), and these near monopolies allow them, under the protection of copyright law, two assert ownership on know how the same way in a feudal system ownership was asserted over land.
Corporations have outstripped the importance of government, and increasingly act as such. Be that by limiting free speech "in private domains", or taxing people for the use of their products which they refuse to sell as products, and only rent out.
This will increasingly become undemocratic, because price levels can be changed arbitrarily without viable alternative for users as owned legacy software starts to disappear, and then prices will be adjusted to reflect the utility the financially most powerful can get, screw everyone else.
Our data, our work, it has been taken hostage. Pay up, or die.
If you want to call that a new form of government (corporatism) or a new form of mafia-like behavior doesn't really matter; the reality is the same, that you're up against a power that's hard to fight.
If you want to win this battle, you better send a message and get out now. I just culled all Adobe software from my iPhone and iPad, bought Acorn 4 while it's on sale, and will start investigating vector drawing programs and other photo editing software, especially those that don't use proprietary file formats.
I'm glad I use Aperture and not Lightroom. One item less to worry about.
Anyone who doesn't like Adobe's policy should make their voice heard here:
http://www.change.org/petitions/adobe-systems-incorporated-eliminate-the-mandatory-creative-cloud-subscription-model
Quote:
Originally Posted by rcfa
[...]
and will start investigating vector drawing programs and other photo editing software, especially those that don't use proprietary file formats.
You might want to check out Opacity. It isn't a replacement for Illustrator but it has some nice features. Ideal for creating web illustrations, logos, icons.
http://likethought.com/opacity/
Quote:
Originally Posted by jabohn
But I don't need EVERYTHING. How can I convince my boss to spend $50 a month for a bunch of apps when we only really use 4 of them? Why is it all or nothing? How hard is it to offer just the Design Standard apps for a lesser monthly fee?
A single app is $20/month. If you use more than 2 1/2, the $50/month saves money vs licensing them separately if that were an option. I don't think Adobe expects everyone to to use all of the apps. And your boss should prefer the small monthly fee vs the previous hefty upgrade fee. It's a lot easier to budget for.
And now if you some day have a need for one of the other apps beyond the 4 you currently use, they are effectively free.
Quote:
Originally Posted by gcv
Adobe isn't making this change to enhance its product or improve customer support, but to maximize its profits. They determined that they will lose customers, but this will be more than offset by fewer people being willing to pay the subscription fee that has a higher profit margin.
They should end up with more (paying) customers per app, not less. Once people pay the $50, they can try out apps that you otherwise wouldn't have had access to.
Personally, I'm hoping that Adobe dribbles those upgrades out over several days before and after the 17th. Otherwise, they're likely to have the mother of all server overloads.
Quote:
Originally Posted by alandail
A single app is $20/month. If you use more than 2 1/2, the $50/month saves money vs licensing them separately if that were an option. I don't think Adobe expects everyone to to use all of the apps. And your boss should prefer the small monthly fee vs the previous hefty upgrade fee. It's a lot easier to budget for.
And now if you some day have a need for one of the other apps beyond the 4 you currently use, they are effectively free.
And one day down the road my boss will have no choice but to accept that. But as it is right now we are a small printing company and basically I have no budget, much less $50 per month. The only reason why we've been allowed to upgrade in the past is because it was a one-time cost that would last a few years.
All I'm saying is why not offer a smaller cost for just what we use... InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop and occasionally Acrobat - hey, that's the old Design Standard Suite! I'm pretty sure we'll have no use for Dreamweaver or Premiere etc. in our line of work.
Quote:
Originally Posted by garbage
If you actually are an existing customer, instead of a pirate like most of the whiners, the price is 29.99/mo. And you don't have to buy the Master Suite, you can also buy a license for a single app such as photoshop for 19.99.
I am an existing customer, but read the fine print, 30/mo is an introductory rate for the first year which is $360 for the year, it goes up to $50 following that which is $600 per year. I need Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat. Updates used to be about every 18 months, so $400 for an upgrade was $267 a year, and I didn't have to upgrade when I felt that CS4 wasn't worth it, so $400 for CS3 lasted me over 3 years. In the long run this costs a lot more.