Adobe Creative Cloud Is Back

As reported by TheNextWeb, the extended outage of the authentication mechanism of Adobe's Creative Cloud service has been resolved. From the story: 'According to a series of tweets: 'Adobe ID issue is resolved. We are bringing services back online. We will share more details once we confirm everything is working.' Adobe said further, 'We have restored Adobe login services and all services are now online. We will be sharing a complete update on the outage soon.' and 'We know we let you down. We apologize and are working to ensure it doesn't happen again."' A good time to revisit this prediction from last year about how going to an all-cloud, all-subscription model might hurt customers.

Re:Creative Suite Six will be Adobe's XP

[lurker412]

For me personally, you're quite right, though I'm on CS5 and will stay there for the foreseeable future. I'm an amateur photographer and have no need to keep up with the latest and greatest effects for graphic artists. There are a lot of Adobe customers like me, and many of us preferred the old model, where we could pay to upgrade when the new features seemed worth it. The new model makes sense for companies and design pros who (think they) always need the latest. They probably will save money. I'm not interested in the lock-in the new model imposes.

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the "cloudiness" of CC. The recent outage didn't take all the subscribers down, at least as long as they are using local storage for their work. The software runs locally. It would actually be a step forward if, say, they came up with some killer algorithms that require super-computer power to run and gave subscribers access to those cycles in the cloud. But currently, the cloud is mainly used for license validation (periodically) and software updates.

Adobe is leaving money on the table by not accommodating the customers who used to go for every other or every third update. I expect that within a couple of years they will realize this and come up with some sort of hybrid subscription/perpetual license scheme.