Mind you, I'm not sure about this. I'm just throwing this out there. But, what if we DID pay for a year. Then, cancel... and wait two more years. Yeah, sure, we don't get ALL of the latest and greatest for that time... but, THEN, we renew for a year and update all they have to offer. Then, live with THAT for another two or three years before renewing again. I'm just saying... I can make sense in my head and pocketbook with, say $200 a year... but not their obnoxious $600+ a year. Just throwing out this 'pricing model' for those of us who've had enough of Adobe's pretentious pricing structures.
See that was the beauty of the old system. You could weigh up each release—the benefits of improved features, the cost of upgrading—and then decide whether to upgrade straight away or perhaps skip a version, taking into account your current financial situation. But with Creative Cloud, you're locked in to subscribing each and every year. If you cancel, it's back to an old version you go, and the file incompatibility issues we've been discussing. And the problem is only going to get worse the longer Adobe holds out with this subscription-only model.
If you ALWAYS upgraded under the old system, and plan to keep doing so for the rest of your professional life, then Creative Cloud will save you money (last time I checked). But for most of us, I agree with the commenter that said this move is about helping Adobe, not the customer. If Adobe really cared about its customers, it would make BOTH options available, and we could choose the one that suits us best. There's absolutely no technical reason why they couldn't do this, because (as another commenter pointed out), it's not actually software hosted in the cloud. It's just desktop software with a remote kill switch that gets triggered if we don't keep paying our regular subscription fees.
IMO, if we're not happy with being forced down this path, we should realise that we have the power to influence change simply by NOT going along with it. If no one had subscribed to Creative Cloud, guess what… Adobe would have been forced to give us other options. But if enough people go along with it (and perhaps they have), Adobe will keep digging its heels in, and the losers are all the customers who no longer have a choice.
My prediction is that viable alternatives for all Adobe's apps will come. In fact, alternatives to most of their apps are already out there, but InDesign remains a problem for me (I don't want to go back to Quark XPress) and of course, there's no one company that is offering such a comprehensive suite of programs as Adobe. But if Adobe thinks it will remain that way forever, then they clearly haven't learnt the lessons from their own history, where they came from behind to knock the arrogant Quark off its perch all those years ago.
