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.
I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cloud" storage. And I'm not going to pay for it.
creative clouds... an oximoron (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:creative clouds... an oximoron (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, if I store my work in the cloud and the subscription expires, will Adobe "just" hold my work ransom until I pay again ... or will they even delete my data?
No Shit, Sherlock - (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what cloud computing is all about. It's not about providing a service to customers that's better than what they can get at their own desktops. It's about returning us to the mainframe days when computing was a service and time on the machine was rented out to users. By refusing to publish popular consumer software and moving it onto the cloud where it can be accessed for a fee, software makers can collect rents from their users forever without even having to improve their software. They can also strictly control what users do with the program, what kinds of files they make and how often, and even monitor what they do, all such activities having their own business case.
The push toward cloud computing, more accurately called centralized computing, is about taking as much control away from the user as possible and selling their computing experience back to them piecemeal at a greatly elevated price. Very few enterprises will actually benefit from this model and most of them are the ones selling, not buying, the software.
Something Microsoft got mostly right w/ Office365 (Score:5, Insightful)
We have our full time employees and thus we know we need X seats of Microsoft Office split between Windows & Mac users. Well we're coming up on summer where we will have 3 - 5 interns working for us and bringing their own computers. Office365 gives us the ability to add an extra 3 seats for 4 months costing ~ $150 vs. $1500 to go buy extra seats. Actually one of the interns is a graphics arts major and instead of spending nearly $2k for software to be used by one person for a couple months it's going to cost us around $200 for Adobe Cloud. Usually we sub the graphics design stuff out, but we have a project the students will be working on over the summer. So for us, it gives us great flexibility being able to price things per project as opposed to having to sink large sums of money into software that we may only need for one project.
Now to those like the graphics artist we hire to do most of our graphics work, yeah I can see where they'd be pissed. Many of them I know generally spend $2k and get about 4 years out of the software before upgrading. I still know a lot of professionals still using CS2 because it does all they need and see no reason to upgrade until they absolutely have to.
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cloud" storage. And I'm not going to pay for it.
Why would you? "Clouds" can easily disintegrate in a matter of minutes, leaving nothing but blue sky behind.
Re:The Obvious Question (Score:4, Insightful)
None. There are lots that get about 80% of the way there. But as anyone who has developed a complex product can tell you, the first 20% of the cost and effort gets you 90% of the functionality, the remaining 10% functionality takes the remaining 80% of the investment. The odds are against F/OSS products ever being a total replacement for the products in Adobe's portfolio.
Fantastic chance for free software (Score:4, Insightful)
While the concept of freedom which lies at the base of the term 'free software' still continues to be misunderstood by many, these nebulous moves by all those entrenched purveyors of proprietary software should make it clear to even the most bone-headed sub-species of manager. Free software means you get to run it the way you want, when you want, however often you want, without any risk of the software suddenly disappearing because you missed a payment or the vendor went out of business or or or...
In short, if the cloud gets so nebulous you can't even see your wallet in your hands any more, just follow the beacon to dot.org which has been shining for years now without you even noticing.
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
This will be the divergence in Adobe customers. Large corporations, who see benefit in a 100% tax deductible monthly subscription expense as opposed to an asset purchase that depreciates over time, plus don't really give two hoots about software price, will happily upgrade. Smaller companies and most independent graphic artists will likely continue to use the final desktop version. When retail prices soar too high because of scarcity in legitimately licensed copies, these users will move to pirated versions of the software. Adobe will then change something in file formats to make the cloud files incompatible with desktop versions of the software.
Re:CS6 costs WAY more than $599.99 (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, those numbers are crap. That said, the conclusion isn't wrong, only the numbers. A typical non-corporate user:
A Creative Cloud user:
So it's on the order of 6 times as expensive for your typical Photoshop-only user. For a multi-app user, it's $600 per year, so for new users, it is cheaper initially, but unless you are the sort of person who buys an upgrade at least every two years, it ends up being more expensive. Existing users are badly screwed.
But the biggest problem I have with this arrangement is that it leaves me completely dependent upon Adobe's good graces. At any time, they can decide to crank the price to $100 per month, and I can either pay it or I lose access to all my files. They can decide to drop Mac support, and I either buy a Windows box or I lose access to all my files. They can lose so many customers over this idiotic rental plan that they file for Chapter 7, and thirty days later, my files are no longer readable. And so on. It's a lack of permanence that I would have a very hard time swallowing, even as a corporate user, much less as a home user.
In other words, this has all of the problems of a free Google App, only I'd be paying a quarter of a grand per year for the privilege of putting my faith in Adobe. And yet, this is a company whose management has so consistently proven themselves incompetent beyond measure that I have no faith that they will still be around in ten years.
My prediction is that a sizable percentage of users will treat the Creative Cloud a stopgap measure, to allow them to get by until they can fully migrate away from Adobe products to a competing solution. Now would be an excellent time to short Adobe's stock. I fully expect it to go down to somewhere around $15 (just above their book value per share) in short order.
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
By which time all the small shops will have been pouring money into competing products long enough that Adobe will no longer hold a viable monopoly on the industry, and at that point, you'll see the bigger shops having to maintain both the incompatible Adobe product and the competing product. Within a few years after that, the big companies will ask, "Why are we paying these clowns, again?" and Adobe will be dead and buried shortly thereafter.
Holy grail: software subscriptions (Score:2, Insightful)
Software subscriptions have been the Holy Grail for decades now. Consumers have generally - so far - been wise enough to reject it in general, but like IP legislation the potential gains are so enormous that corporations will never stop trying to reinvent it in a palatable fashion. Here we go again....
Re:No Shit, Sherlock - (Score:4, Insightful)
This is what cloud computing is all about. It's not about providing a service to customers that's better than what they can get at their own desktops.
No, it is not. Cloud computing is things like Amazon's EC2 cloud; Which provides people who host content on the internet the valuable service of being able to add extra capacity on demand. It eliminates the slashdot effect on websites. It's also useful for a variety of other functions, like video encoding/decoding, load balancing, etc. Cloud computing is a Good Thing.
You've confused cloud computing with profiteering asshat corporations who are using it to effectively create a new kind of DRM. And like all forms of DRM, it isn't wanted, causes a wide range of problems, and screws over the paying customers. Which, from the article summary, is pretty much what everyone's predicting will happen.
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
20GB is about 20 minutes of HD footage. Even for stills that's only a few hundred images if you are working in RAW. Can't imagine Adobe exects anyone to use it other than as a demo.
Not to mention the time it would take to upload/download 20GB of data to the cloud. This will also wreak havoc on people with ISPs that have monthly bandwidth caps.
Re:The cost comparison is off (Score:5, Insightful)
The comparison should be made to Adobe CS6 Master Collection which is going for $2,100 on Amazon right now, not the smaller package of CS6 goes for $403.99. Adobe also announced the monthly cost for a single app will be $10/mo. for the first year, not the current $19.99/mo. Similarly, if you are an existing CS3 or higher owner, you can get the first year of everything for $39.99/mo. for the first year. Now I'm not saying whether this is a good or bad change, just pointing out that the summary's numbers aren't accurate.
Yes, and it omits an important number: People who are going to run away screaming from the idea of paying a monthly subscription fee and will turn to software piracy instead. Adobe is basically walling off the consumer market and then pouring concrete over it to kill it off, while telling it's corporate buyers that subscriptions are the way to go. Well, businesses don't care... it's just another line item to them. Of course they'll sign on.
And so it goes that Adobe becomes the enemy of self-employed graphic designers everywhere, attempting to destroy the artist who's barely scraping by.
Re: I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
That's sort of how InDesign got popular.
Adobe will lose (Score:4, Insightful)
"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."
Not really. Adobe stands to lose a lot of customers. There are alternatives to all of their software. Adobe's move just makes look more closely to the competition.
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I imagine piracy is a major reason why Adobe would do this. Photoshop is probably the most pirated app of all time. Gimp will probably have a windfall of new users soon.
I'm extremely pissed off. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've spent a lot of money, and a lot of time learning Adobe products--and this is how that corporation treats me.
I've got to run the numbers, but I think that I am done with Adobe. Microsoft is Jesus compared to them.
Re:Less is more. (Score:1, Insightful)
The big problem is relearning things.
Good people can easily retrain on a similar tool or technology, so a switch from Photoshop to Gimp (or vice veras) isn't a big deal.
Good people are extremely rare.
Re:Less is more. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Less is more. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would you use the obviously inferior GIMP, when you already own CS3,4,5 or 6?
The real answer is to stop upgrading until something better comes along. Now whether that option is Adobe Cloud (which I highly doubt) or another competitor is to be seen.
But it's not GIMP and it never will be.
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
"Cloud" storage. And I'm not going to pay for it.
Even if you do want 'cloud' storage(it certainly has its uses), the trend of getting little tiny bits of it bundled under a zillion different credentials and EULAs and TOSes, from a bunch of different outfits that you are just trying to buy some other product from(and, excitingly, often hooked to specific applications, rather than some reasonably normal network file transfer mechanism) is totally fucked.
Yeah, I really want 5GB over here on dropbox, with one set of credentials, security issues, and iDevice applications that can sorta-kinda treat that 5GB as their filesystem; then another few GB over here on Skydrive, so that they work properly with MS' hotmail file attachment features, and then 20GB over here with Adobe that only 'Creative Cloud' applications can see...
It's a loss is basically every important respect: the credential soup is a pain in the ass and a likely security hazard, the fragmentation means that you need to manually shuffle around and/or duplicate files to support workflows that attempt to cross the ghastly little vendor silos, and the fact that the first-hit-is-free size limits are generally low creates an incentive for the vendor to gouge you on upgrades(If 'Creative cloud' only works with magic Adobe cloud storage, do you think that their per-GB overage prices will necessarily adhere to market norms for commodity cloud storage?).
It's as though a substantial fraction of your applications refused to use the OS's filesystem APIs and instead demanded their own partitions that they could format in their own weird way and store data in a way accessible only to themselves. Only better, because you have to remember a bunch of passwords, the files can go *poof* at any time, and the EULAs and TOSes are likely to be abusive!
Re:I don't want (Score:1, Insightful)
This will be the divergence in Adobe customers. Large corporations, who see benefit in a 100% tax deductible monthly subscription expense as opposed to an asset purchase that depreciates over time, plus don't really give two hoots about software price, will happily upgrade.
Accountant here. If you're not an accountant, you should probably shut up since you don't know what you're talking about.. If you are an accountant, you're an incompetent retard. And you should probably shut up since you don't know what you're talking about.
Re:I don't want (Score:4, Insightful)
20GB is about 20 minutes of HD footage. Even for stills that's only a few hundred images if you are working in RAW. Can't imagine Adobe exects anyone to use it other than as a demo.
The first hit is free, kid, and since this 'cloud storage' only interacts with Adobe CS applications, and Adobe CS applications only interact with Adobe cloud storage or cloud storage that emulates a local filesystem, you'll have to buy expansion hits from us!
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine the only real "cloud" part to this will be some sort of encryption key exchange that amounts to "if(productexpired) extort(money);"
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, I imagine piracy is a major reason why Adobe would do this. Photoshop is probably the most pirated app of all time. Gimp will probably have a windfall of new users soon.
Which is a very stupid logic.
Eliminating a pirate doesn't mean you are transforming him into a customer. It almost never happen.
My guess is Adobe is targeting those legitimate customers who buy their software and use the same version, without paying for upgrades, for 4+ years. With the Cloud model, you are forcing them to (re)pay full price every year.
Re:I don't want (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I don't want (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that GIMP is a mess that makes creative types want to claw their own eyeballs out to escape. It has all the mass market appeal of a poo on a stick. I know, every time someone points out that it's a train wreck, a couple people come out and say that they use GIMP all the time (usually meaning, a couple times a week) and are really happy with it. In most cases it turns out that these are people who enjoy the Linux user experience, or who enjoy DOM manipulation via JavaScript, or have built the most epic thing ever out of [PIC microcontroller and LEDs | Minecraft | LEGOs]. What they are not, however, is a professional graphic designer who sits being paid to use Photoshop for at least half his/her day every day of the week.
I am glad there are people who like GIMP and I'm sure they will continue to use it. Unfortunately it's pretty much a nonstarter for most of the people whose livelihoods depend on image editing, and there are few indications this will change anytime soon.
I also doubt that most casual image editors who are not already infatuated with Linux are going to take two glances at GIMP, especially if they've previously experienced Photoshop. It just too weird, in the miserable way not the quirky hip way, even if it's not quite as bad as it was several years ago.
Still topical. [slashdot.org]
No need to innovate (Score:3, Insightful)
With a guaranteed income from locked-in design professionals, Adobe can finally stop worrying about innovating with each new release. They can continue to sell the same version for years to come, month by month, with no expectation of adding new features, capabilities, etc.
Sadly, Adobe also owns a boatload of patents when it comes to computer-based graphic design, so the threat of serious competition from new upstarts is almost nil, too.
Don't speak ill of your new owners.
12 year cost analysis (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is Adobe is targeting those legitimate customers who buy their software and use the same version, without paying for upgrades, for 4+ years. With the Cloud model, you are forcing them to (re)pay full price every year.
BINGO! It's my understanding that most Photoshop users surveyed a few years ago said they skip 1 or 2 upgrades. Their upgrade income is dictated by the addition of new features. The cloud removes that pressure.
Notice Adobe compares the cost of the cloud with full retail price. But in the real world, skipping 1 or 2 upgrades save a lot of money. Based on $699 initial price, and $199 upgrades, a 12-year cost is:
$3087 - Upgrade every year
$1893 - Upgrade every 2 years
$1495 - Upgrade every 3 years
$2879 - Cloud @$19.99/month
So the Cloud looks OK if you already upgrade every year. But if a new version is bad, you don't have the previous disks to downgrade. But for those of us who skip upgrades, it can double our cost. And anytime Adobe needs a boost in income, they just raise the price. If we don't pay, we have no software to use.
This is an opening for Adobe competitors. This makes Microsoft look like really nice people - quite a feat!