Adobe's Creative Cloud Illustrates How the Cloud Costs You More 403
Nerval's Lobster writes "As we discussed yesterday, Adobe plans on focusing the bulk of its software-development efforts on its Creative Cloud offering, with no plans to further update its 'boxed' Creative Suite products. The move isn't surprising, considering the tech industry's general movement toward the cloud over the past few years. Creative Cloud will cost $19.99 per month for a 'single app' version that features the full version of 'selected apps,' 20GB of cloud storage, and limited access to services. Those who opt for the 'complete' version will pay $49.99 per month for every Creative Cloud app, 20GB of cloud storage, and full access to services; it also requires an annual commitment. At that price, it would take a little over two years for a customer spending $49.99 per month to exceed the full retail cost of box-based Adobe Creative Suite 6, which currently retails for $1299.99 at Staples and $1100-1200 on Amazon. In a recent interview with Mashable, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen insisted that the Creative Cloud's cost to customers is lower, especially since they won't have to pay for cloud storage and other services — never mind that 20GB doesn't carry anyone far when it comes to visual design. However much customers stand to benefit from the cloud, it's easy to see that, over a long enough timeline, and with the right financial model in place, the companies providing those services stand to benefit even more than they did with boxed software. That's liable to make just as many people angry as happy, no?"
Update: 05/08 03:29 GMT by S :Changed prices involved to reflect standard versions of Creative Suite, rather than the discounted Student & Teacher editions.
Re:No Shit, Sherlock - (Score:4, Funny)
Not really. The cloud part here is only about storage - and you have the relatively slow ISP link in between. Mainframes were doing the actual computing work. And in the meantime, data requirements growth have outstipped network speed growth.
We're now thinking of 20 GB as a smallish amount of data. Some 20-25 years ago, 20 MB was a smallish amount. My current download is 8 Mb/s, about 4,000 times the 2.4 kb modem back then. However my upload is a mere 640 kb/s- just 30 times modem speed. So sending data to the cloud takes longer for modern upload speeds, and modern data needs, compared to the mainframe era.
Also most of those mainframes were accessed over LANs, which were much faster of course than modems. Not as fast as modern LAN but again data demand growth has outstripped network speed growth there as well.
Well then it sounds like what we need to do is move to an architecture where the bulk of the processing is on the local machine and that the bulk of the data is on the local machine as well. Sounds good to me.