We knew it was only a matter of time before Adobe made the switch to cloud-only software, but I was quite surprised that they did it so soon. The Creative Cloud was introduced about a year ago I believe, and yesterday at Adobe MAX, they announced new versions of their Creative Suite line is no more, and replaced by Creative Cloud. They will still support Creative Suite 6 with fixes and limited updates, but no new features or anything like that. If you want the latest and greatest, the cloud is where it is.
Read: Letter from Creative Cloud team
What Adobe showed off is quite impressive. You will be able to sync your settings across devices, get new features and updates continuously, get access to additional tools, and much more. There’s no doubt Adobe offers great tools for designers and artists, but the real issue here is the big change to pricing and purchasing.
Here’s the basics:
- Photoshop CC (or any single app) alone will cost $20 per month.
- Full subscription to the entire suite will cost $50 per month.
- Discounts are available for students/teachers, previous customers, etc.
- You pay each month, or can pre-purchase memberships from Amazon.
That’s it. You will no longer be able to purchase a boxed copy or download version as you maybe have done before and are used to. I’ve been using Adobe products for many years now, although my main app Lightroom will continue with traditional licensing – at least for now. I understand the benefits of having a subscription they are trying to push. Getting updates without “upgrading”, but not having access to the applications if I can’t pay one month is really a big problem. Not everyone wants or needs to upgrade to the newest version, and going full cloud only gives you the choice of subscribing, or finding an alternative. I have enough monthly bills as it is, I don’t want another just for software. I’d rather buy it and be done with it. Give me reasonable pricing and upgrade paths, and that will be more enticing to upgrade more than anything else.
Adobe has gone cloud-only, Microsoft Office is headed that way, and who knows who else will be next. Now I need a monthly budget for software that I use and need? Yeah, that’s not really appealing to myself and I think many other consumers would agree.
So tell me, what do you think about this move by Adobe?