shills.... ya think?
I'm guessing that there are some Adobe paid shills in this thread.
maybe just a few, lol.
I have been a long-time user since pshop 1.0, and once had great affection for the company. This was inevitable, it is what happens when substantial innovation fails. It is what happens when your professional power users routinely version skip with little downside and great fiscal gain. Over the years there have some great productivity leaps, but mostly the changes in the latter years were akin to adding "more" speed buttons to a blender. Really. Refresh your memory here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Photoshop_version_history
Also, there was a move away from macs, and a move to appeal to the larger user base in the pc-world. No matter that at the time the power-users were largely mac based. Releases lagged behind for us mac-folks, and it was clear we were not as desired as customers. Interface shifts starting making the working environment more pc-like as well. The love affair hit the rocks for many of us.
Then Adobe started playing around with their suite package editions and their upgrade pricing. Suite packages never quite matched up any more, and as for upgrade discounts they were meager. It was clear that they were just seeking ways to extract annual amounts of revenue from its users, and that amount would be more (contra to how Apple has been pricing its software). Whereas Aperture was originally targeted to be around $499, it steadily went DOWN in price, and is now selling for $79 (much to the horror of Adobe). This is the track record for most of Apple's software pricing. Cost goes down, performance and features goes up.
Back to the feature creep approach of Adobe...
for all the new bells and whistles we got, how many did we really need or ask for? How much of a functional workflow change was there from the early days? (not much) I switched my imaging workflow from 100% photoshop to maybe 5% pshop. I use Aperture and the Nik/Google suite and my workflow is nothing like it was before (and for the better). Furthermore where it used to take 5-7 days to teach a professional the basics in pshop, I could do the same thing in 5-7 hours for Aperture & Nik. Yes, one still needs pshop for some things (layer compositing, type, cmyk conversion, sizing), but the essential workload is down outside photoshop. I can do things quickly that would be difficult or impossible to do using photoshop (or even harder to explain the process).
The notion of design studios & agencies having to have the most recent version of programs is largely a myth. Almost every ad file is provided as a flattened PDF these days. It used to be true, but it simply isn't anymore (and is why Adobe is making a greedy & desperate effort to extract more revenue from its customers). For everyone who thinks it is pennies a day and a bargain, good for you. For MOST of us, we do not need everything in the suite, and can get by with an older version here and there. I have been doing this for many, many years... I know an awful lot of professionals who are muddling by with CS2, CS3, CS4, CS5 and doing just fine.
When a company has to come up with convoluted matrixes that explain the suite packages, it is a bad sign. It looks more like Microsoft's approach to OS packages, than anything Apple would do.
So, some of you may grab the shiny apple of distraction and jump onto "its a great deal" bandwagon. Good luck to you. I find the concept a disturbing trend, much like the trend of some software packages/platforms wanting to charge on a per use basis (no thanks). Time will tell whether this gambit/scheme pays off for Adobe or not. I hope it fails in a spectacular fashion.
cheers.
