In a bold move, Adobe Corporation has announced a phasing out of the Creative Suite software product. The Adobe Creative Suite, available as a physical media purchase for over a decade, now becomes Adobe Creative Cloud. This new bundle includes updated versions of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Premiere Pro, plus desktop access to Typekit, integration with Behance social features and more. Adobe is discontinuing the Fireworks product though.
Under the new business model, users become subscribers, with the software downloaded to a Mac or Windows PC using an Adobe installer modified to pull code over the internet, rather than from an installation CD or DVD. Standard pricing is $49.99 per month, although Adobe offers $29.99 per month discounted pricing for existing Adobe Creative Suite owners (of the CS3 version or later) for the first year. The company also offers a “Student and Teacher” edition of CC at the same discounted price (further discounted to only $19.99 per month for the first year, if purchased before June 25). All subscriptions require an annual commitment, but are billed monthly.
For business customers, Adobe offers Creative Cloud for Teams, which has centralized billing and administration for the licenses purchased and flexibility to reassign licenses to different computers in a business, as needed. Each of these subscriptions costs $69.99 per month, but Adobe includes 100 GB of cloud storage per user for file collaboration and sharing. (The other subscriptions only include 20 GB of storage per license.)
While this change is welcome with large corporate users (who were often frustrated by the need to decide which flavor of the Adobe retail bundles best suited their needs at a given point in time and wind up saving money over the purchase price of the Creative Suite every time it had an upgrade), many others aren’t so pleased. Freelancers using only two or three of the products in the suite often prefer to stick with older versions of the software, only upgrading semi-annually at most. It’s uncertain if a user can continue using, say, Creative Cloud 7 after Adobe releases version 8 or 9 — even if the individual prefers to keep working in an older version. Subscription-based software also means no chance of recouping any of the original purchase price of the software, should the buyer elect to stop using it. Used retail copies of the Adobe Creative Suite regularly fetch hundreds of dollars on eBay and other auction sites.
Of course, Adobe has always been concerned about piracy of its products, which the company gives as an alleged reason behind the push to the Cloud. While the subscription model doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility of piracy, it does create additional hurdles. A legally subscribed user could hack his/her downloaded copy of the software and redistribute it to unlicensed users, but those unlicensed copies wouldn’t be able to download any software patches or upgrades. Personally, I’m not convinced this move will result in a net increase in revenue for Adobe. For every former software pirate the subscription model forces to pay up to use the latest software, Adobe will have another user who elects to switch products rather than receive a monthly bill. Many Photoshop users, for example, could get work done just as well with the free, open-source, GIMP product. (A version called GIMPShop even mimics the Photoshop look and feel.)
Only time will tell if the cloud is in the cards for Adobe’s future success.
That’d be $600 annually. I can’t afford that, and I know innumerable other artists/cartoonists who can’t either. Simply for the ‘privilege’ of having regular patches and updates that shoulda been worked out before the newest release. They’re gonna end up advancing themselves into obscurity.
“$49.99 per month”
Goodbye.
I own a copy of the CS3, and I paid for the “pro” version in 2007. For what I do, it is fine, and I don’t need a newer version. But for professional artists I know, that’s a hell of an expensive package, and it assumes that all users have an immediate high-speed internet access at all times. I know one artist who lives way out in the countryside, has only one option for internet access, and that option limits the amount of bandwidth used. I can’t see cloud-based operations as being ideal under those circumstances.