Will you be joining the Adobe Creative Cloud options?

[jammiefreerider]

Has the hype caught you? Or are you seeing this as a bad way for us to pay Adobe?

Me, I think its a trap. Once your in, you can't get out and we don't know how quickly Adobe are going to ramp up the monthly price. My guess is that its going to creep up every year till our eyes start watering.

 

[mackmgg]

If they start ramping up the price, I'll stop and just buy CS(whatever they're up to). The way I see it, upgrading every other year is about the same price as subscribing to Creative Cloud with the student discount, or ever four years without it. If you subscribe for two years and then cancel and buy it, you're not really down any money compared to if you just bought it at the beginning, then upgraded after two years.

 

[someoldguy]

Can't see it . At least for an individual . At 50 bucks a month , in less than 2. months you're out the cost of a copy of PSE which does 90% of what the average non commercial user needs , in a year you've spent close to the cost of a copy of cs6. If you stop paying the monthly , you're cut off . Maybe there are tax advantages for a small pro to go on cloud , but I'd want to take a real close look before I leapt .
The real advantage , IMHO , would be for larger businesses , not necessarily photography , but maybe graphic design oriented ones , who need to add a couple of seats on a short term basis .

 

[chaosbunny]

I'm thinking about it. The one thing I like is that you can download it for both Windows and Mac OS. Buying the regular version ties you to one OS or the other. I want to switch to a Windows based laptop when I upgrade my 2008 MacBook Pro, but keep my Mac Pro for another couple of years.

 

[firedept]

Not a chance. I already have CS5.5 MC so no use. It is cheaper for me to upgrade at $525. Would cost me $600 going that route.

 

[codymac]

I'm considering it.

At $50/mo. it's ~4 years to equal the cost of Master Collection.

My rough math tells me that if Adobe keeps upgrading on roughly the same timeline, I'd be ahead (since that $2500 boxed copy only nets two years worth of use before they want more money to upgrade and/or abandon the previous version).

Potentially getting locked out is the biggest issue I'm trying to wrap my head around.

If they allowed for more installs or offered it at a lower price I'd probably have already bitten down on the hook.

Premiere, Speedgrade, Photoshop, & Lightroom ain't cheap.

 

[sireShonBohn]

No

Adobe sure made some nice software. And I say "made" because, "makes" would imply they still make software. No, what they do now is restyle their UI's and iconography then throw some ugly slop on the loading screen for users to woo at, hoping we'll miss the fact that nothing significant was added to the software for the $600 it cost.

And don't be fooled by their new .5 upgrade scheme. Its a trick designed to make you think you're paying for a new version every year. In reality, AI, PS, and other major apps were still v5.0 in the 5.5 suite. The truth is that you will be paying $1200 per upgrade since the major apps will be upgraded on a 2 year schedule.

 

[jeremyshaw]

I still use CS3. No incentive to upgrade, for what I use it for (mostly texturing for 3D models).

 

[Comeagain?]

I have it. I love that I can have pc a Mac versions and download/install is much easier. But I'm paying the student price.

 

[-hh]

Has the hype caught you? Or are you seeing this as a bad way for us to pay Adobe?

Me, I think its a trap. Once your in, you can't get out and we don't know how quickly Adobe are going to ramp up the monthly price. My guess is that its going to creep up every year till our eyes start watering.

It is YA example of Software vendors trying to promote "SAAS" (Software As A Service". It might make sense for a large Enterprise to make their IT management easier, but that's shortsighted because once they've bought in, the question is how much more difficult ($$) has it then become for a customer to break away from a Supplier to go to a competitor.

If they start ramping up the price, I'll stop and just buy CS(whatever they're up to).

Except that they'll continue to jack up the price for CS ... also.

...If you subscribe for two years and then cancel and buy it, you're not really down any money compared to if you just bought it at the beginning, then upgraded after two years.

Except that if you buy, at the end of whatever time period, you still own the licence which you can resell.

Adobe sure made some nice software. And I say "made" because, "makes" would imply they still make software. No, what they do now is restyle their UI's and iconography then throw some ugly slop on the loading screen for users to woo at, hoping we'll miss the fact that nothing significant was added to the software for the $600 it cost.

And don't be fooled by their new .5 upgrade scheme. Its a trick designed to make you think you're paying for a new version every year. In reality, AI, PS, and other major apps were still v5.0 in the 5.5 suite. The truth is that you will be paying $1200 per upgrade since the major apps will be upgraded on a 2 year schedule.

And Adobe has caught on to the buying patterns of their more descriminating and value-oriented customers by Adobe now more stringiently limiting just how old your license can be and still get upgrade pricing. IMO, their 5.5 bit is simply part of a strategy to shorten the 'permissible' revision cycle even further.

On the one hand, I'd not mind pay the bucks if Adobe were to still be making great software ... I used to buy every revision.

But when various filters, Photomerge / Photo stitching in Photoshop still doesn't exploit multi-core CPUs very well, let alone GPUs under Grand Central Dispatch, it is painfully obvious that they're writing to a lowest-development-cost "lowest common denominator" to maximize profits, and not to maximize their product's quality (performance) from the customer's perspective.


-hh

 

[TonyK]

My version of Photoshop is 5.0 (12.0.4... build). It does what I want/need. Not sure about version 6 but not going to the CC monthly paid version. Renting software is not good for the end user, IMHO.

 

[fcortese]

Probably not. I'm on the verge of getting CS6 (via education discount), so I'll most likely go that route. I really do not need all of the full Adobe package. I can see that for some the monthly access makes a lot of sense from a financial standpoint.