I'm looking forward to switching to Creative Cloud at work - I'll never have to make the case for upgrading again, always getting new features as they're released, and I'm sure my employer will be as happy to smooth out one more expenditure timeline as Adobe will be to smooth out its revenue timeline. Going CC-only makes sense for business.
However, this totally kills my hobbyist usage at home about three to five years from now. I only ever use Photoshop, Illustrator, and occasionally After Effects for my independent design projects, and was finally able to justify upgrading from CS4 to CS6 a few months ago. A few hundred dollars every few years is worth it to pursue my own experimental work.
But I'm not going to justify $50 per month for that, and I have a hard time imagining others justifying it. I think Adobe just priced themselves solidly out of the prosumer market.
(Just to add a little math to this: A $700 upgrade every three years comes to $20/month. If Adobe can offer an a-la-carte Creative Cloud where I can get three or so apps when CS6 finally no longer cuts it, I suppose this will ultimately be a non-issue.)
Yes, this is exactly the situation I find myself in. I'm not really much of a designer, but I bought Creative Suite when it was called Design Collection when I started my first company, did my own flyers and booklets in InDesign, business cards in Illustrator and earned money doing Photoshop and Illustrator work even though I'm really a software engineer.
Now I'm a nearly-40 year old software engineer with enough disposable income to flatter myself by upgrading Creative Suite on the trailing edge, but hell will freeze over before I pay for Creative Cloud at those prices.
Adobe have also screwed over Audition in the later versions to the point where I'll just use Cubase in preference; so much for the fast, elegant, simple workflow they inherited from CoolEdit.
"I think Adobe just priced themselves solidly out of the prosumer market." I think what they did, or at least what they wanted to do, was find a fix for the rampant theft of their products. What this now does is open up the domestic image processing market, while businesses can be milked for all they're worth. I'll stick with Photoshop CS3 until it stops working.
And by "fixed the rampant copyright violation" you mean "closed the top of the funnel to newcomers". I don't know a single college student or new home experimenter who paid for Photoshop, but I also don't know a single professional user who didn't pay for it.
Photoshop has always been way too expensive for hobbyists or people just dipping their toes in the water. The people who pirated it and got serious about it eventually bought a copy, but the people who said "that's nice" and uninstalled it never would have paid for a copy anyway.
This will make their numbers look good in the near future, but I'd stake cash money that it's going to screw with their long-term user base.
> The people who pirated it and got serious about it eventually bought a copy, but the people who said "that's nice" and uninstalled it never would have paid for a copy anyway.
Except the entire industry claims that the number of people that would have bought it if they could not have pirated it is GREATER than the number of people that pirated it, used it as some kind of month or year long trial-ware, and eventually paid for it.
My own experience - the day a warez copy came out on Google's front page results for my software, was the day sales got cut in half, and stayed cut.
People pirate because it's easy to do, and fewer people will buy it if it's being given away for free by some site that generates its revenue from stealing other peoples work and showing you ads in the process.
businesses are different from people. They are "much" more likely to get caught through auditing or the like. Never mind the fact that companies have budgets allocated for this sort of thing, so there's no real incentive to pirate it unless it's actually a big time-saver.
I really dislike the "it brings new users" argument for piracy. If it made business sense to provide a free entry to their product they would. Pirates aren't somehow doing them a favor and its moral acrobatics to pretend like they are.
For students they have heavily discounted licenses and I know a few low-quality(I don't know anyone worth their salt who pirates it), professional graphic designers who use pirated copies. It is lost revenue and if they wanted to provide demos that should be up to them not the pirates.
It's a mistake to use the "if it made business sense ... they would" line of thinking when interpreting the decision-making of any organization, especially large established ones.
As Marc Andreessen has noted:
"The behavior of any big company is largely inexplicable when viewed from the outside. I always laugh when someone says, "Microsoft is going to do X", or "Google is going to do Y", or "Yahoo is going to do Z". Odds are, nobody inside Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo knows what Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo is going to do in any given circumstance on any given issue.
...
"The inside of any big company is a very, very complex system consisting of many thousands of people, of whom at least hundreds and probably thousands are executives who think they have some level of decision-making authority. On any given issue, many people inside the company are going to get some kind of vote on what happens -- maybe 8 people, maybe 10, 15, 20, sometimes many more.
...
"You can count on there being a whole host of impinging forces that will affect the dynamic of decision-making on any issue at a big company.
...
"You can't possibly even identify all the factors that will come to bear on a big company's decision, much less try to understand them, much less try to influence them very much at all."
Anecdotes are not data, but here's some anecdata to support the "it brings new users" piracy argument:
I've been using Illustrator for about ten years. It's my main artistic medium; I'm currently engaged in drawing a comic book entirely in it. I'm at the point where I can pretty confidently say I've mastered it.
I've been paying for Illustrator for about five or six years. When I started using it, I was not a student, and there was no way I could afford a full-price legal copy.
If I hadn't pirated it, I would have not learnt it to the point where I could make enough money using it to buy it and keep it up to date. I would have used some other program, or gone with physical media. And I would not have been buying the thing for the past several years.
The piracy amounted to blocking a few urls in the hosts file, between versions they never changed these urls, not even between updates. I'm going to draw the conclusion that making it so easy is at least a tacit acknowledgement of Adobe being OK with having such an effective funnel.
It is up to them, but the parent is arguing that it's a bad business decision, and I agree. Even their "student" versions are wayyy too expensive for people to dabble with (especially penny-pinching students).
but I also don't know a single professional user who didn't pay for it.
I suppose it depends on your definition of 'professional' but I know a few. Maybe not in the AE realm but among web designers and graphic artists, and especially freelancers and small business owners...
Cloud pricing provides some interesting alternative remedies for his problem. For example, it might make it easier to offer schools discount pricing so all their students get CC. More creatively, if they could offer "student" pricing for say 5-10/mo, I think you enter the territory where it's easier to pay than to steal. If you imagine an ideal in the future where photoshop was just a website you loaded, this pricing model is how it would work probably.
Oh for God's sake! The "piracy is a gateway to purchase" argument is asinine and only believed by people trying to justify their own thieving. Any "backlash" to Adobe's move will come from the thieves, who were never going to be customers anyway.
As I said, what is good is that the lower end of the market may have been opened up.
It might be that rampant piracy of Photoshop is part of the reason it is so dominant though.
Every kid who had some desire to edit images pirated Photoshop, and thus they get used to using that particular tool.
If they actually end up working in a real business doing this for a job then they will demand the use of Photoshop because it's what they already know and few businesses pirate their software.
"I think what they did, or at least what they wanted to do, was find a fix for the rampant theft of their products."
I don't see how this accomplishes that. The programs still get downloaded to people's desktops where they'll be able to be cracked in a way that allows for unauthorized installations. The whole "cloud" terminology with their Creative Suite doesn't require any sort of always-connected status to use their apps. You literally just download and install like any other application.
If that was their goal, they are doing it about as wrong as could be possibly done. The Cloud stuff doesn't run in a browser, it's just digital distribution. You download a helper app which lists the apps you have access to, and you download and install them from there.
If anyone thinks that when whatever CS7 equivalent comes out that there won't be cracks in the usual places just like CS6, they're sorely mistaken.
“I'm not going to justify $50 per month for [hobby usage at home], [...] A $700 upgrade every three years comes to $20/month.”
“upgrading from CS4 to CS6 [...] A few hundred dollars every few years”
As you use Photoshop, Illustrator, and AfterEffects, that means you probably have the Production Premium or Master Collection bundle. Upgrades for those bundles did not come cheap.
Adobe releases a new major version of CS every year, and has done so since CS3. CS4 is 5 years old. If Adobe kept its perpetual upgrade plans, you would have to first upgrade to CS6 to be able to upgrade to this year’s version (‘CS7’) – having to buy two upgrades would’ve cost way more than $700. Instead, Adobe gives users of CS3 or newer a discount to Creative Cloud, all Adobe apps for $30 a month.
Adobe has always allowed for 1 skipped major version. For instance, if you had Photoshop 5, you could skip version 6 and you would still be eligible for upgrade pricing for version 7.
If GP were to upgrade now from CS4 to CS6, he would also have to upgrade to CS8 next year (if Adobe still offered perpetual upgrades). That would be more expensive than Creative Cloud, he would get less apps, and fewer updates.
Adobe used to allow upgrades fron any version to the latest for the same upgrade price. That changed somewhere around the time of CS1 to only allow upgrades from 2 versions back, then down to 1. As a longtime Illustrator (v88) and Photoshop (v2.5) user, this is the end of my Adobe purchases.
I started using Photoshop at version 2.5 and Illustrator at version 5, but I had forgotten that the upgrade policy used to be more liberal and that Adobe’s installers weren’t atrocious. It’s all coming back to me now. On the flipside: stupid ATM and screen fonts, buggy QuarkXpress, monitors with thousands of colors, and having to do preflight – ugh.
Some things really have improved. The Creative Cloud application installer is a delight. Updates are released often and the updating process is painless. No more hassle dealing with DVDs and serial numbers. Also, international pricing used to be way out of whack with US prices, the difference is a lot smaller now.
The upgrade path used to be pretty liberal, until last year you could skip two releases and still catch an upgrade. I think I've spent about $1800 total over 11 years: Macromedia MX Studio (2002) > CS3 Web Premium (2007) > CS6 (2012). That's a just over $13 a month. Not cheap when time comes to upgrade or lose eligibility, yes, but much cheaper than $50 per month in the long run. It really depends on the user's upgrade cycle.
Agreed, but it did mean that most of the time you were working with an outdated version. Also, you had less than half of the apps that are available in the Creative Cloud.
For folks like me, who bought the Master Collection once, and then upgraded every year, the Creative Cloud is way, way cheaper.
Your case, buying the most expensive product Adobe offers and then upgrading with the greatest frequency possible, is about the only thing Creative Cloud is cheaper than.
At $600/year, it's roughly competitive with upgrading to a new version of one of the Premium collections every 18 months. It's more expensive than upgrading to the latest Design Standard has been on that timeframe.
Right, the annual price you pay for Creative Cloud is comparable to buying Adobe’s upgrades in the past (a major release every 18 months). New users never have to ‘buy in’, so they save $1300 (Design Standard) to $2600 (Master Collection). Customers who bought the boxed versions don’t save as much. They get a discount of $240 to $360 in the first year.
Working with an outdated version is frequently not a problem.
I'm a professional animated filmmaker, and I've spent most of my career using versions of Adobe products that were two or three versions behind the cutting edge. Aside from the DeBlur tool, for example, I don't even know what's in CS6.
If you only use the software occasionally you can pay $75/month only in the months that you use the software. (The individual app subscription can work out as well if you only use one or two apps, but by the time you get to 3 it's cheaper to get the whole suite).
I don't know if that'll work out for these sorts of prosumer scenarios. Speaking for myself, I use Photoshop several times a week for photo editing, but total usage per week is probably only a couple hours max. Generously, if I use Photoshop 10 hours a month, I'm paying $7.50 an hour for the privilege.
The question we have to beg is: "What's in it for them?"
Is the market big enough for people who aren't willing to spill $50 for the full suite? Will those of us who just drop using the apps because of price balance out to those who have now picked it up for the exact same reason?
I think that the reason they are doing this is that VDI and application virtualization is reducing the enterprise licensing count.
There are many casual Adobe CS users within companies, and it's cheap and effective to virtualize the app and provide it to employees for limited periods.
Creative Cloud basically delivers this functionality to everyone, with a licensing model that makes it more challenging to cheat.
These apps serve me well for basic Web/App Art, my resume, and the occasional flier. The only thing I do miss is the Illustrator XAML export plugin for when I work on WPF/Silverlight stuff.
Pixelmator1 was nice because it was a bug-for-bug clone of Photoshop 5 (not CS5, v5) including shortcut keys. Pixelmator2 was a step backward, IMO, without adding many new features except stability.
I'll second Acorn. It is weird compared to other image editing interfaces, but it's actually quite usable for most people's needs (or at least what I imagine are most people's needs) and it has really nice polyglot plugin support that should please developers.
I'd also recommend Acorn[4]. It's a phenomenal app, has recently received a major update (early bird pricing until end of May) and is, in my opinion, much more "Mac-like" and pleasant to use compared to Pixelmator.
It's my go-to app for fast tasks while still being powerful enough to do more serious things. Not to mention it has rock solid scripting support too.
Gimp is really one of the most incredible pieces of open-source/free software I have used.
But, it's primary advantages (open source, powerful) are what have led to its limited use. Like many open source projects, the interface is designed pragmatically, like emacs or vi, but this is a problem -- no professional has the time or the money to learn a complex UI.
The same goes for LibreOffice. Extremely powerful with a ton of untapped potential, but untapped nevertheless due to a dated and unintuitive UI. Inkscape and Scribus are better in this regard, and I've seen many professionals use them with outstanding results.
I've been able to create vectors with Inkscape without much difficulty. I can't say the same about Gimp. If someone really had the time and the dedication, they could re-engineer the entire frontend of Gimp from scratch for each platform, while leaving the excellent backend in place, but I doubt any sane individual would be able to do so without the help of the original developers due to the lack of full documentation available.
Still, it's worth trying. It's got 90% of the features of Ps but with 100% fewer dollars paid for it.
It's that godawful UI that kills it for me. It's plenty powerful and since I don't do print anymore, having or not having CMYK doesn't really matter as much. But I'm not going to waste the time learning a UI that's not native to any platform when platform alternatives are available.
One might be able to say the same thing of PS, but it has the weight of history and industry acceptance behind it.
Also, the name is not liable to cause embarrassment in some circles. At least PS is a marketable name.
The UI is native to Linux based Operating Systems using a GTK based Desktop Environment (Gnome Shell, Ubuntu Unity and a few others).
Honestly, I've used both for about as long as each other, I find both to be equally annoying to use. Much prefer to use Inkscape or Fireworks, but fireworks doesn't come installable as a Deb and doesn't work natively on a Linux based Operating System so I don't care for it.
I had to use Gimp professionally once (long story short, a sudden web banner EMERGENCY came up and Gimp was all I had available) and it was terrible. I don't doubt it would've been easier and less painful had I been familiar with the UI but it just seemed so poorly designed. It is the best free graphics software out there, maybe, but it's hardly a worthy replacement for photoshop yet (although it is getting better.)
I think that it is more of an issue with conditioning. As you and others have mentioned, one could indeed learn Gimp's UI with enough practice. However, I'd say that someone who picked up Photoshop, or MS Word, or any complex piece of software for the first time, then it would be a horrible UI.
The education system (at least here in Australia) heavily focuses on Adobe and Microsoft products, so high school kids are familiar with them from a youngish age. If they were taught general principles of word processing or photo editing, perhaps with a few different programs, then I feel that everybody would be better able to cope with different UI's much more easily.
Incidentally, (as a non-professional) I found Gimp much easier to grok than Inkscape or Scribus (coming from a Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign education/background).
It's probably the same in other countries but to provide some perspective on the situation: A teacher will say "Microsoft Word" and not "Word Processor". When and if you refer to the software as "Word Processor" and not "Microsoft Word" said teacher generally gets upset or confused. Same goes for Spreadsheet, Presentation and Database.
It's not just a UI issues. Gimp is missing features I use in Photoshop all the time. live real time Layer Effects are one of my most used features in Photoshop. Without them I can't get work done. AFAIK gIMP has no similar feature.
I feel like Krita is unfairly overshadowed by Gimp; Gimp is probably more powerful for advanced use cases, but Krita has a much more familiar UI and I've found it perfectly adequate for home use.
Pixelmator is a bitmap graphics program (like Photoshop and Acorn), while Sketch is a vector graphics program (like Illustrator and Inkscape). Both have different uses.
I used Fireworks for half my career, and when it became obvious that Adobe was letting Fw rot, I went looking for alternatives. It took a little while, but Sketch has finally gotten there. Sketch a purely vector app, whereas Fireworks was a strange but workable hybrid of bitmap and vector. When I need to throw down some raster graphics, I fire up Pixelmator.
I also like Sketch -- it's a very powerful app and very polished, though I find I use it a lot less than I thought I would since it seems to occupy an uneasy place between OmniGraffle and Acorn in my workflow. I wouldn't be surprised if I use it a lot more after another few versions...
I like Sketch, but it has really poor performance on my MacBook Air. A file of comparable size is way smoother in Illustrator than it is in Sketch from my experience.
Sadly the XAML export plugin no longer works in Illustrator CS6, I've spoken to the dev, Mike Swanson and apparently it'd be a nightmare to upgrade. I keep a copy of CS5 installed just for this reason.
I wouldn't bet on it soon. It was designed as a Mac app from the ground up. Porting to Windows would be a pretty big endeavor not much smaller than building the app in the first place, and they're currently doing pretty well as the big fish in the Mac pond.
I love Adobe CC. I would consider it the first thing Adobe has done right in a long time.
A year's subscription is less than what I bill per day and I have access to every app that they produce. I can run it on my laptop, my other laptop, as well as my desktop machine that just gathers dust these days.
As someone who has used Photoshop since Version 3.0, I can say, with some authority I guess, that the current version is really, really good. Except for the crop tool. The crop tool sucks. It sucks so bad I had to write a replacement stand alone app. All they need to do to fix it is put the image resizing step back in, instead of having to do that separately.
Their other apps are also improving in quality from a low point of a few years ago. Premiere is solid, After Effects is way faster than the previous version, Prelude and SpeedGrade are a little inaccessible but once you learn the non-standard UIs are useful tools. Illustrator is still a bit of a drag though. I don't touch InDesign unless I'm designing a photo book for Blurb.
And then there is the whole extensibility of the suite that most people don't get too involved in, but I do. We started out writing some pretty heavy javascript extendscript stuff to do asset prep but have since moved on to Flex + Adobe Creative Suite Extension SDK. Was kind of gnarly to get going, but once going has allowed us to extend Photoshop into a full blown authoring tool for the kind of retail iPad apps we build for clients. What once took us about 2-3 weeks to build, now takes about a day thanks to that.
> I can run it on my laptop, my other laptop, as well
> as my desktop machine that just gathers dust these days.
I'm not sure how you're doing this - a killer problem for me with CC is that there's a two-machine limit for product activations. I used to own two Photoshop licences so I could run it on three machines, but you can't get multiple Creative Cloud subs under one Adobe account.
This two activation nonsense has to end. That was fine before when we all had one desktop. I have been harping Adobe and Unity to allow 3 activations by default. I don't know one developer that doesn't have at least a mac, windows and laptop for testing. It's a silly game to keep moving the activations around when they are below the common threshold. 3-5 activations, one user per use is needed, maybe no activations required on that (isn't that what the cloud is really?). I have no problem having the app shut down on the other machine if I use on another device/computer but being blocked from using if you leave it open on two machines at work is annoying.
An awful lot of us asked for an awful lot of years to have the crop and resize separated so that we could specify an aspect ratio without committing to pixels (or fully committing to the crop, for that matter). It finally works right for me, even you if you think it's broken now, and it only took a decade of nagging.
This is quite radical in my mind and very greedy on Adobe's part. How is abandoning the pay once per version of software a benefit to anyone other than Adobe?
I get weary of software that I have to bind to an active account indefinitely.
There are use-cases that are no longer possible.
1) What if I wanted to get my 14 yo artistic niece Photoshop/Illustrator for her birthday? Now I would have to either pay $50 a month (for her), in the assumption she would get value out of it. At what point would I then transfer the subscription over to her should she want to become professional in it?
2) Let's say I bought After Effects with a retina mac and then in a year decide to sell it all on craigslist? Maybe I had a dream of becoming a movie director only to be put on hold because my father went into the hospital and I needed to be there for my mother?
3) A high school with older macs from 5 or 6 years ago has a small lab with Adobe Photoshop that was donated to them through an art grant. It's meant to be used to teach kids about photo retouching and color blending (things that have been in Photoshop for a decade if not more).
I never minded when Adobe adopted strict licensing DRM because it didn't remove use-cases. Maybe someone from Adobe can shed light on how switching to a subscription only model will benefit anyone other than them? Is that not taking a step backwards?
>1) What if I wanted to get my 14 yo artistic niece Photoshop/Illustrator for her birthday? Now I would have to either pay $50 a month (for her), in the assumption she would get value out of it. At what point would I then transfer the subscription over to her should she want to become professional in it?
For just one app, it's $20/month. So you would pay $240 per year. You'd have to pay triple that and more to buy it -- and the "artistic niece" might not even use it that much at all. At least this way you can cancel.
The main difference is instead of getting him a box, you get him a one or two year subscription. And also that it's cheaper.
>2) Let's say I bought After Effects with a retina mac and then in a year decide to sell it all on craigslist? Maybe I had a dream of becoming a movie director only to be put on hold because my father went into the hospital and I needed to be there for my mother?
Then CC is great! You only pay for as long as you use it. No need to pay a fortune beforehand and then have to put it up on Craigslist.
>Maybe someone from Adobe can shed light on how switching to a subscription only model will benefit anyone other than them? Is that not taking a step backwards?
Me for example. I can now get all those apps for $50 per month AND be constantly updated. No need to fork $2500 now (which is how much the Ultimate version costs), and like $1000 every 18 months to get the newer version.
People pay $20 or $100 dollars for their VPS per month, $20 for Basecamp, $10 for Dropbox and such. How is $50 that much more?
Same here. I use the Creative Cloud for a year now and I wouldn't change back. The pricing model is perfect for me as it is way easier to claim taxes on smaller, monthly installments. Plus, I really prefer cloud downloads to disks. No lost keys, no scratched disks.
The value proposition for Adobe's software-as-a-service offering is lacking for people who only use one of their products, or who don't already stay on the bleeding edge by paying for upgrades every 2-3 years.
Photoshop is the only Adobe product I use as a web developer, and I've been using it less and less as I do more backend and client architecture and less design implementation. For my needs, Creative Cloud is a really bad deal.
Creative Cloud might be a great value to people who use lots of Adobe products, and good for them. But even if this were a good value to me, I still wouldn't buy it. I do not trust software as a service, at least for software that runs solely on my own workstation. Unless Adobe wants to subsidize the cost of my own hardware, I don't believe that their subscription model benefits me as a consumer.
I think Creative Cloud will present an interesting challenge to the Open Source community. Open Source alternatives to Photoshop have kind of languished in recent years, and I wonder if Adobe abandoning traditional software licensing will spur new free software development.
Then pay $20/mo (with year subscription) for just Photoshop. If you need another tool occasionally, pay the monthly fee for it for a single month.
$20 a month it's all that much money for a business product. You may be paying close to that for reliable hosting with all the perks or for some virtual servers for testing.
Only if it doesn't provide that much value. In the cases where you use it, if you can't do without it or use another tool, or you view the one time cost of learning another tool too high, then it's worth it. If this pricing makes you re-examine whether you really need to use Photoshop and switch to something cheaper, all the better, since you will probably be happier with something that accomplishes your needs that you feel isn't costing too much (and I imagine whatever you do in Photoshop so infrequently isn't hard to accomplish in many other programs).
Don't commit to the full year, then. You at no point are stuck buying $240 a year save for some deals, you can start and cancel CC to your heart's content.
You can always use gimp, although I am not sure what a design software has to do with a political system. Adobe probably doesn't get a lot of your taxes.
I've been using CC since it came out - the killer feature for me is that you can install CC on all your computers - PC & mac with the same license key. As someone who hops platforms and computers all the time, it's fantastic.
I always used to pirate Adobe software, but the monthly pricing is very reasonable and you get all the Adobe software for the price, rather than web/print/video bundles like they used to. They've really turned around and made this pirate into a customer.
I have to admit, the subscription model is way more attractive to me than the one-time model. I'm not someone who uses Photoshop every day, so if I sit down and think "it'd be really handy to use it right now, just this once, for this one thing" ... I'm not going to shell out hundreds to do it. I'm just not. I'll use GIMP if I can or I'll pirate Photoshop if I can't.
I might shell out $50, though, and if I find I'm using it often, great. If not, I'll cancel and I'll have only spent $50 for a legitimate use case.
That depends on the use case. The subscription model will be significantly more expensive for people who don't need the newest features. At about $50 per month the $1200 for CS Design Standard are payed off after 2 years. Whereas I'm still using the 6 year old InDesign CS3. And a nearby t-shirt printing shop is using Illustrator 10, from 2001.
This is absolutely a fair point regarding the total cost over time, but I'm referring to the first cost, where I don't have the product and am considering purchasing it.
A one-time $1200 fee is a non-starter. There's no way I'm paying that much money for a product that I'm not even sure I'll use next month.
$50 (or, as I've been corrected by others -- thanks) $20 to try it out? That's a much easier decision.
I know I'm "supposed" to be against this, but if my livelihood depended on Photoshop, I know I can easily generate more than $50/mo of value from using one of the apps. (Hell, even as a hobbyist, I can justify the cost if one considers how much a hobby or typical weekend night out with friends cost)
It's a better deal than paying $1000 all at once and you can stop paying at any time. From an accounting perspective, nothing really changes because the subscriptions are basically equivalent to depreciating a boxed copy of CS.
Where this model doesn't make sense is for businesses that don't upgrade CS every 2 years. In that case, the subscription model is more expensive.
My problem is the 1 year commitments. I don't feel like I'm "saving" enough to make them worth it. The "introductory" pricing is classic bait-and-switch and I don't feel like I'm getting my money's worth each month when I only launch the apps a couple times a week. I guess I'd feel better about buying it if things really felt like a cloud service -- but the apps don't feel as speedy and well-made as Google, they lean more towards the Apple side of the Cloud: It works, just not quite well enough to be fast.
learc83 is referring to the "annual commitment" plan (see the drop down) of the "complete" package, which includes all software: https://creative.adobe.com/plans
But you are correct that if someone only wants Photoshop, they only pay $19.99/month with no annual commitment.
The cost of Creative Suite bundled in losses from piracy. A Creative Cloud subscription costs pretty much exactly what Creative Suite does--without having to compensate for losses to piracy.
Adobe should have provided incentive to switch by dropping the price. If they can truly eliminate piracy then their profits wouldn't be hurt by dropping the price substantially. Doing so would also generate a lot of good will among users.
Keeping prices high with no other option will just encourage new forms of piracy that much sooner. Until now, pirates could just ignore Creative Cloud. No more. I expect we'll see cracked activation proxies within a few months.
This is really bad for artists. Many folks I know picked up copies of CS5 when they were in collage for $400 and have been using them for the last 5 years. Now they will need to pay more per month than a cellphone with a data contract. With Adobe posting massive profits, this is an act of greed and I hope antitrust regulators will look at Adobe with more scrutiny.
Yeah as joelhooks said, if these people are using their educational versions to produce products for sale, they are committing fraud. EDIT: Seems to depend which educational version they have installed ... some are ok for commercial use, some are not.
This is really good for artists. Many folks I know wouldn't be able to justify $1200 laid out all at once, but would still like to be able to use the most up to date version of creative suite. Now they can pay less than the price their morning coffee every day. Plenty of others I know really only use Photoshop, which will come out to $0.65/day, even the starving artists I know can afford that.
This is the story of a dominate company in a market were it's users feel it can't go anywhere else, if they wanted to. It turns to be a good thing.
I think this is going to put a big dent in piracy of adobe products going forward, provide a large window for competitors to provide products to people that don't want a subscription, and give the users some really great benefits of using cloud products.
It's one example of a company moving forward and doing good because it has a mostly captive audience and it's a win,win,win.
How does this put a dent in piracy exactly? I think I've heard this sentiment before, but the pirates always figure out a way. Even the article somewhat casually throws away a line that says pirated apps will continue to exist. I'm just saying, if piracy isn't eliminated completely it's wishful thinking to say it will somehow happen less.
I have not researched this thoroughly so I am not one hundred percent sure. But I assume the application side of this software will live on a server somewhere and you may only access via a web browser or some kind of client application. This implies that a user will have to authenticate when using the software and that this authentication will be tied to them as a person.
So if their account is being using for wide spread piracy it will be shut down quickly and that individual will personally be out money and not have access to the service. This still allows for small scale sharing --onsies twosies kind of stuff.
However this won't stop piracy of old software only the software going forward.
This makes a lot of assumptions, but I think it's basically correct.
> But I assume the application side of this software will live on a server somewhere and you may only access via a web browser or some kind of client application. This implies that a user will have to authenticate when using the software and that this authentication will be tied to them as a person.
That's not how it works. You have the binaries on your machine and then it phones home periodically to auth (at minimum once per month or six months, the FAQ is confusing).
> You will need to be online when you install and license your software. If you have an annual membership, you'll be asked to connect to the web to validate your software licenses every 30 days. However, you'll be able to use products for 180 days even if you're offline.
Not all features are installed locally and available as a stand-alone. Downloading the binaries that are installed locally is not zero-cost/zero-time; anyone whose primary access is, say, 3G is going to waste the better part of a month's allotment on installation and upgrades. And >180 days disconnected (or only having hyper-expensive satellite access) is not as far-fetched as you might think; many of the fine-art landscape photographers I know pretty much make their livings on that kind of a schedule. You can almost always find enough electricity to charge/run a laptop (even if that means carting solar panels around); internet access has a few more requirements.
> Not all features are installed locally and available as a stand-alone.
Yes they are. Obviously online storage/sharing features require network access to function, but otherwise all features are available without network access.
> Downloading the binaries that are installed locally is not zero-cost/zero-time; anyone whose primary access is, say, 3G is going to waste the better part of a month's allotment on installation and upgrades.
I agree they should have a physical purchase option for people without appropriate internet access (Apple had to do the same thing with their last update that was download only at first). Updates would be the same in either case, no matter what version you have currently you don't get mailed DVDs containing new camera profiles when they are released...
> And >180 days disconnected (or only having hyper-expensive satellite access) is not as far-fetched as you might think; many of the fine-art landscape photographers I know pretty much make their livings on that kind of a schedule.
I completely agree and apparently Adobe is willing to work with you if you are off network for long periods of time (by calling customer service). It seems like a pain, but this is the future of software so if this is your work schedule you should prepare for lots of headaches.
The pricing seems off to me for a suite where most people only use a few of the apps (personally a 2-app package would be ideal, I could care less about 90% of Adobe's apps). Despite the name, Adobe doesn't get the "cloud" and I am hoping a competitor who does pops up.
Also armchair speculating here, but its hard to imagine a program as resource intensive and as large as photoshop, living behind a web browser or server.
At best, I'm assuming it will be an auto updating login, and the cracks will revolve around jumping the login screen.
> But I assume the application side of this software will live on a server somewhere and you may only access via a web browser or some kind of client application.
I'd argue that's not as simple a change to turn around - not without doing a lot of fundamental plumbing into a very heterogenous set of grody old codebases - even if they do successfully end up booting out the cobwebs in PS and AI, what about replicating that effort in the ever-so-slightly different ID? And then for the Macromedia products? So I don't suspect they'll do anything radically different with this implementation of cloud software - they'll just push the Adobe Updater to the fore. (Although I shouldn't be expecting it: if they do something else that's more invasive then I'll have brought it on myself...)
The more interesting question is whether the pirates'll bother to keep up with the updates at all - and if they can't, what that could possibly mean for Adobe.
Artistic careers usually aren't extremely stable, revenue-wise.
Before Creative Cloud, it was possible for an artist to buy all the tools they needed in a boom period, and then keep using them no matter how pear-shaped their income situation got. (Bear in mind that in the film world, for example, clients simply not paying at all is close to routine.)
Now, if your revenue stream dries up, your tools go away, and you're completely fucked.
That artists will keep their tools at the latest version at all times - they don't. Often, they're still using a version of Photoshop three upgrades old. At that point, Creative Cloud is a lot more expensive.
That they get paid in advance. They don't, always. Particularly if you're creating something for consumers, you get paid after creation. However, if your tools have gone away, you can't create, which means you can't get paid, which means you can't buy the tools, which means... Yep, you're screwed.
That all artists are really good with money and financial planning. They aren't. I know you'll probably say "well then, they deserve to have no tools". Sadly, I've never seen that artistic ability directly correlates to business sense, and I'd rather that brilliant artists don't end up stopping producing work I enjoy, regardless.
On that note, that dry periods never go on for longer than the old purchase price of Photoshop / duration of dry spell * monthly cost of Creative Cloud. If a dry spell does go on for that long, even if you saved up the purchase price of Photoshop and dilligently pay it month after month, you're screwed.
> That artists will keep their tools at the latest version at all times - they don't. Often, they're still using a version of Photoshop three upgrades old. At that point, Creative Cloud is a lot more expensive.
Not true:
Amazon list price for CS6 Photoshop today: £631. CC price for 3 years: £632. With no upfront outlay.
> That they get paid in advance.
Surely if they have a problem with cash flow, it is advantageous to not have to outlay capital? So "pay as you go" makes much more sense. This is why start-ups use the cloud.
> That all artists are really good with money and financial planning.
This is true - but part of making a living by being an artist is also having a decent head for business.
I don't get it - am I not going to be able to get an install of Photoshop anymore? If so, then that sounds like a HORRIBLE strategy, since by far not every person is always connected to the internet, never mind high-quality internet.
CC is an install. Instead of just buying the product you pay per month. Forget to pay one month? Then the software won't work. So long as you're paying each month you can use it offline.
I'm curious how it can tell if you've paid up if you are using it offline? I would assume if it isn't able to phone home to check your subscription, it would fail.
Yes, which means that unless you're willing to expose your money-making machines to the internet (studio workstations generally are not) or are in a position to connect (which is not always the case on deep projects) you don't have a stand-alone app.
Education pricing requires an annual commitment, which is a real shame. When I need an Adobe program there's often no substitute, but I only need it very rarely. If they did it month-to-month I'd be happy to buy it just for that month... Since they don't, I guess it's good for me they do 30-day product demos.
Wow, I can't believe how many people are against this.
I think it's a great move and will benefit independent designers and creators hugely.
First: the price keeps coming down. Now you can get Photoshop or Premiere for $10/month. That is much cheaper than buying a copy every two years.
Next: I know indie film-makers who have pirated Premiere. They simply don't have any money to pay for it, but have sworn to buy a copy if they ever make any money from it. This complete ends this argument - even those working short bar shifts can afford a copy. So they contribute in the short-term, and we all get a fuzzy warm feeling knowing that programmers at Adobe are getting some of our cash.
The educational discounts are huge. I've always wanted to use Premiere and Photoshop, but have never been able to afford the capital outlay (being a lowly post-doc), and am not a big fan of pirating things. I'm going to sign up today for CC.
I think this business model is a lot more sustainable. It gives Adobe a solid stream of revenue and we all get to use the latest versions.
The only improvement I'd like to see now is perhaps one more drop in price, and then a condition whereby those who have been subscribed for a certain amount of time (say, 18 months or 2 years) and cancel their subscription can keep the suite - perhaps with some limitations, e.g. they're limited to the version that was available when they first subscribed, or only a subset of tools are available...
This is not photoshop in a browser. It still runs locally, your files are saved locally, etc. The only real difference is the monthly pricing instead of having to purchase the software upfront. (There are some additional cloud features for saving your files in the cloud if you want but you can ignore those)
Yes, and the car you rent is continuously upgraded to the newest model, and for one price you get a whole range of cars, and the total cost of ownership over a few years is cheaper than buying them.
I never use Photoshop, but sometimes I work with graphic designers who like preparing everything as one huge PSD with lots of layer groups, and it feels like an absurd waste of energy to keep subscribing to Photoshop just to export all layers as PNG, since that is all I ever use it for. Photoshop itself can barely do this, HOURS on moderately complex documents.
Maybe this would be a good time to ask, does anyone know of a 100% compatible way to do PSD -> any open layered format, without Photoshop? Maybe this is a business opportunity, to run a web service whose sole purpose is to open PSD files in photoshop with a custom export script, and then export the layers.
According to some comments above, GIMP does support PSD files, and I know for a fact that GIMP supports scripting, so you could just write a script to export the layers for you.
Gimp absolutely does not support 100% correct conversion from psd. Layer effects are particularly broken. I have not seen any third party tool that properly handles psd files containing non-rasterized layers.
I suspect Adobe will hurt themselves in two ways here — first, their apps are becoming increasingly dispensable, and this will push users to less capable but far cheaper and often more nimble alternatives (perhaps renting CC apps when occasionally needed) and second it will eliminate over-licensing (e.g. In some workplaces Adobe CS was pretty much site-licensed).
It may help with piracy, but I suspect that's a two-edged sword as well.
Personally, I was an "upgrade every two or three versions" user, which let me use CS for significantly less money, so this will probably just cause me to wait Adobe out.
It was a similar pricing strategy which in part convinced me to switch from work involving a set of proprietary tools to pursuing opportunities which largely made use of freely available, free software tools I could download and experiment with myself.
The cost for the tools I'd previously been using ranged from hundreds to several thousand dollars. Annually. In addition to the expense, additional and advanced features were only available at a significant additional annual cost.
The vendor was also increasingly focusing its efforts on systems I had little interest in using. Despite a multi-platform legacy, much present use is on Windows systems (I've not used these as my principle environment for over a decade now).
I understand why Adobe would do this, and to a certain extent, subscription-based software models offer benefits: upgrades are already paid-in, and you can move users to the current level with fewer constraints (or with no alternative in the case of web-hosted software).
Operating in multiple markets, with multiple propensities to pay, and freely-available competing products suitable to at least some users, this sets up Adobe for a difficult situation.
This may not be a good idea for their video products - Final Cut X has over the last two or three updates just got back pretty much all the features that professional editors had been missing and is only $300 on the App Store. DaVinci Resolve is better than SpeedGrade and has a free option. Audio editing has always been in the domain of Pro Tools and Logic so I'm not going to miss Audition. The only thing I would miss is After Effects but CS6 should keep me going for a few years.
I have a feeling I'm not a customer that matters for Adobe. I'm a programmer who uses Photoshop only a few times a month, sometimes less. I've personally owned every other version since Photoshop 3 paying ~$199 to upgrade every ~4 years or so. I don't mind paying ~$199 every ~4 years for every other version. I do mind paying $240 every year for a subscription.
So, CS5 will be the last version of Photoshop I purchase. I will not subscribe. I will keep using CS5 until I can't and then I'll start looking for alternatives.
If the price comes down so it matches what I was spending before I'll consider the subscription. Or, if the subscription is on a per use basis so if I don't use it for a month or 2 I'm not charged I might consider it but otherwise no thank you.
I'm also leery of subscriptions in that Adobe can basically kill me anytime they want (or anytime they screw up). In other words, I don't like the idea that if their servers go down, if they are hacked, if I'm travelling abroad with a bad internet connection, if they make a mistake, if they just don't like me, whatever, they can stop me from getting work done.
The subscription probably makes sense for pros that use it every day and always upgrade and stay put in one place. It doesn't make sense for me with my usage patterns. (No, PS Elements is not a substitute, nor is gIMP unfortunately).
I'm trying the free trial of CC, but I can't work out how to actually run any of the apps. I click the "Apps" tab at the top but it just says "Learn More" next to everything?
I think everybody knew it was eventually inevitable. Though the conceit in that blog post about "increasing amount of overlap" is decent PR-speak, it's really disingenuous and dances around the fact that there was always a large overlap between Fireworks and both Illustrator and Photoshop.
The big issue was whether Adobe was ever going to be really genuinely willing to address a fundamental tension:
* on one hand, Photoshop has always been a fundamentally flawed tool for screen design (I'd even go so far as to speculate that by now it's cost as much in designer and developer productivity as IE6 ever did).
* on the other hand, it's one of the biggest brands ever and its status as a verb is gives a lot to its owner
I guess today is the day they've announced the other hand wins permanently.
The sad thing is if Fireworks ever had a chance, the creative cloud setup where professionals could play with it extensively at no additional cost might have been the best setup.
The subscription model works for many, but I personally hate the idea of not owning my software. Especially when it's mission-critical software like Photoshop. It's the same reason I don't subscribe to all-you-can-eat music services and instead buy my albums one by one on Amazon. Yes I know it costs me more on average, but I like what I buy to be mine.
Also, does this make it much harder to pirate Adobe products since they require constant activation? If so, I'm not sure if that is a good idea. Photoshop has had a strangle hold on image editing because so many amateurs pirate it at home and then force their boss to buy it at work. It was rumored that Adobe recognized this and actually had no problem with the piracy, realizing that they could make up for it with the high sticker price that legit customers paid. Now that a 14 year old can't pirate PS to muck around with, he might find that other image editors fit his needs and never become a paying Adobe customer.
Mixed thoughts on this. I'm primarily a developer, and maybe once every couple of months I need to dive in to do some graphics work or pick apart a PSD from a designer I've worked with.
I paid $700 for Photoshop CS3 on Windows back in 2007, and in 2010 I paid $200 to upgrade to CS5 and switch my license over to Mac. I'll have been using it for 6 years at a total cost of $900, or $12.50/mo. Assuming I don't upgrade for another 2 years, that's $9.38/mo.
With this new system, I'd be paying nearly twice as much without getting all that much more value. Of course I can keep using CS5 for several more years, but my next upgrade becomes a $240/yr decision instead of a $200/3yr decision. It's unlikely that I would pay for it unless no other software can read new PSDs.
Now, Photoshop with rolling updates for $10/mo? I would heavily consider it, although it seems awkward that if I cancel, I'd have to go re-install CS5.
If it's turned off, you can't use the software, right? If I had to do that every time I was pretty sure I wouldn't use it for a while, I'd probably find different software..
I have been digging the Creative Cloud for a while in terms of availability not price. If you tried to actually buy Creative Suite you would have a hard time the last year or so even finding that on their site. This was inevitable.
What sucks is them killing apps individually, I thought the creative cloud would allow more obscure apps to be tried without the need to have it supported by it's own sales right away, or some overlap. Fireworks losing out in this does suck. It didn't make sense for Adobe with Photoshop but too bad a competitor doesn't have it.
I think the price is still high for CC, the upgrade price for a year is $30/month but the full price is $50/month after that year, definitely premium pricing. They have to come down or I will bail after this year.
The article is misleading. Adobe is not abandoning the Creative Suite at all.
What they did is:
- rename the suite from "Creative Suite" to "Creative Cloud"
- dropped one-time purchases of their software
- added monthly subscription to the software
Except the payment change of their products they didnt really change anything...
If anyone is looking for an alternate photo editor, do check out the open sourced project, Lightzone - http://lightzoneproject.org/
For raw images, it wraps around DCRaw.
Lightzone was formally a commercial product, but was open sourced recently. The original author is currently an Apple employee.
It'd be interesting to see if Google do something in this space, especially after their acquisition of the image editor - Snapseed, and its' creator, Nik Software. Nik from what I'm aware, developed/maintained Nikon's raw editor - Capture NX 2.
I think there is definitely room for something disruptive in this space. Looking over some photography forums, people there are certainly looking and talking about what alternatives to Photoshop are out there.
Adobe's Creative Cloud scheme is anti-consumer and anti-competitive. Adobe is essentially attempting to leverage the monopoly that Photoshop has in the professional market to lock customers into the whole suite of Adobe products. A lot of people who have to use Photoshop are going to use the rest of the CC products because they are bundled not because they want to. It's quite a burden to thing of 600.00 in adobe charges and then piling on a Media Composer purchase or upgrade. The move to CC calls into question the long term viability of the DNG format and leaves photographers with few good choices for archival storage of RAW files.
Oh well, New Coke was a big hit so why not Creative Cloud.
In theory: Brilliant. The software has suddenly become cheaper and I don't have to worry about what computer I install it on. I'm also not having to shell out huge amounts of money for upgrades.
In practice: There is just something I can't deal with when it comes to moving these kinds of tools to the cloud. What happens if Adobe decides to cut the cord 4-5 years down the line? What if they go bust? With CS6, it wouldn't bother me that much. I still have the tool I purchased but I know it just won't be updated. But with this model, I'm suddenly stripped of all my tools and unable to do work until Adobe sorts out the situation or an open-source alternative comes along. Uh-oh
This is interesting. My parents had no problem with me saving up for and purchasing CS5 design standard, but they'd almost certainly expect me to give up a Creative Cloud subscription before giving me any financial assistance in college.
Why is it that financial difficulty makes us feel obligated to give up small, frequent purchases rather than sell large items, even when the cost is the same? Like why is it irresponsible to buy Starbucks coffee while in debt but perfectly okay to continue driving a modern car?
On that note, what if Starbucks sold a year's worth of coffee all at once? Would people's consumption be less subject to the economy?
There's a part of me that's saying that I don't need to continue to pirate Photoshop/Fireworks (I'm not a designer, but I do handle some graphic content for our company), and the other part of me is saying I should still go pirate Photoshop 7 (super lightweight compared to any other PS version.) And, what I mean by that is, not everyone needs to upgrade every version. What happens when shit hits the fan with a version of Photoshop and all the CC customers are forced to upgrade?
The copy protection Adobe currently uses in Photoshop is almost non existant, and I can't imagine the CC suite will be any different. It seems to be more of a token effort to prevent easy piracy than any real attempt.
The whole Creative Cloud nonsense is just a way to get people paying subscriptions. None of the "cloud" features are at all usable or useful in any design workflow that I've seen. I attempted to use them on the release of CS6, and there's just nothing there. I would love to see even one person using their 20GB of "cloud storage".
He just described a scenario where he needs to pirate PS 7.0 because Adobe doesn't offer it anymore and modern versions are inferior.
Unless GIMP somehow covers all his use cases and can read his PSD files without problems? Unless it's changed since I used it last week, that's false.
Basically, there are scenarios where legit customers are stuck pirating. I own licenses for multiple pieces of software that I can now only acquire through torrents because the original vendor doesn't offer the installers anymore (or wants to force you to paid upgrade to a newer version).
I always thought that part of Adobes dominance in this market was to allow some piracy of their product because that's how teenagers learned how to use it.
Adobe then made their money from actual business users who MAKE money from the tools and therefor must have legit licenses. And those businesses use Adobe because their workforce learned it already, and it became the defacto-standard because of that.
Also: Some of those teenagers will grow up and eventually purchased the product. I (allegedly) pirated Dreamweaver (haha), Flash and Photoshop when I was still learning because I was broke (unless you count £10 a month pocket money as steady income...) After spending a lot of time with those tools, I eventually purchased CS3 and have upgraded to both CS4 and CS6 since then. Not to mention the various licenses I've had to buy for employment.
I wonder how often companies are actually charged with this though? How would they get proof that you had an old pirate version of PS on a PC in the office somewhere, it's not like adobe has the right to come in and start rummaging around.
I think the subscription model is far superior. It's great knowing I have a set cost each month for the software and I'll receive all of the updates as part of the subscription.
However, it's too bad the updates are still incredibly slow. I joined when CC started and it's taken almost an entire year just to get Retina Macbook support, and there are still a number of apps that don't have it, like Bridge.
I'm glad to see them focusing on the service even more.
Whereas I'm old fashioned enough to think that the right way to handle things is to buy some software that meets your requirements and use it for as long as it meets those requirements and not give a damn that the company would like you to upgrade to a version that does little new that you want.
>and it's taken almost an entire year just to get Retina Macbook support, and there are still a number of apps that don't have it, like Bridge.
Well, it's not like updates come out of thin air, or that shoving more engineers and money at them makes them come out faster. Especially more so for complex software.
Ya good point. I guess I would expect more considering this is basically the most popular software in the world for creative work. The sad part that I didn't mention above is that not one piece of the software is optimized for Retina. It's runs like a dog and is easily the worst performing piece of software on my Retina, which I find to be crazy.
All they did was simply update the interface to support it...
For me, it seems like the upper management is incompetent. They just read IT news about the cloud and other buzzwords without knowing what Cloud means in that context. For example, Microsoft does not offer Visual Studio on the cloud, they offer Azure that is a complement for their offerings.
PS: I am not arguing that Microsoft is right on all their offerings, only using them as an example.
1. Does this apply only to the Creative Suite, or all of the suites (e.g. E-Learning Suite)?
2. Where does that leave current customers who are on the 2-year upgrade plans? Are we shit out of luck, or can the cost of that plan be applied as credit toward Creative Cloud?
I know this isn't the Adobe Support forum, but just thought I'd throw this out there in case anyone here knows.
I wonder how much effort they will put into making it hard to crack -- if they put most of the logic in the cloud, they could do a great job (you'd have to fully re-create the software, or do some crazy proxy service to multiplex a bunch of users to one legitimate account.
I'm most interested to know if CS apps on CC are still available via COM. Does anyone know? I've gotten into the habit of driving CS apps from Python via win32com for publishing workflow purposes.
$50p/m, OK I might have considered this, however as a UK citizen the equivalent is $72p/m which irks me greatly, why does the UK get this unfair pricing, do the bits cost more to send?
> I guess it's more of a perception thing than anything.
Yes, I think this must just be a backlash against the renting model. But people renting cloud servers don't seem too bothered that they don't own the physical machines... perhaps just a cultural shift is required? We fear change.
No, there's a number of small businesses that are doing CS plugins, including myself with http://thimbleup.com .
If anything this makes plugin development easier in the same way developing an iOS app is easier with nearly forced updates. When interviewing design shops, many of them stuck to an 'every other year' upgrade path, so many of them still used CS5 - which meant I also have to buy multiple revisions of CS to support/test everyone.
I'm a bit concerned personally though since this also kills the used market for Adobe products going forward (CS6 sells for only $700 if you look for just used licenses), although I'm hoping the reduced support costs of going cloud will make their products maybe cheaper in the long run.
My only possible concern would be the cloud-based plugins like layervault competing with Creative Cloud's features, but they could serve support for the non-Adobe crowd and support pixelmator/acorn users.
Adobe is going to lose plenty of money and customers over this. I don't want to deal with trying to upload large files on 512 kbps upload. It's a truly stupid idea.
I'm currently working on a 3GB PSD, with the fastest connection I could purchase, that will take 11 hours for me to upload. It would also consume 15% of my storage capacity on their Creative Cloud with one document.
Suffice to say I won't ever be using the "cloud save" crap.
Yep, until we all get fiber-quality uploading, we will never have true cloud performance for design files. 9 megabits a second means it would take about 51 minutes to upload that on a decent cable connection. And that's still way too long. A fibre 250/250 would be done in a minute and a half.
Personally I want streaming documents and live changes. At least some kind of collaboration features to go with my "cloud" ;-)
Look at Business Catalyst. That's hardly a coder or creative friendly platform. There (seems to be - it may have changed) no way to reliably archive your sites unless you spend a grand to become partner, and the templating system is so arbitrary and chaotic as to make it almost impossible (at the very least, impractical) to move a site from BC to another platform (I tried to make a general purpose PHP framework to run a basic site, stitch together the templates, mock up the 'webapps' which are not at all webapps and gave up in frustration.) And look at Muse, the WYSIWYG editor they want people to use with Business Catalyst -- it 'compiles' the html into a proprietary format.
The last thing Adobe are likely to do is something that looks like open source. At the very least, it won't be free.
There is no requirement to use some kind of cloud storage. You can use the programs like you always have. Most designers sync with tools like Dropbox anyway, so large uploads aren't uncommon already.
Using dropbox is different than working on something live. Like if I want to work on something right now, there is no way in hell I am waiting even 5 minutes for it upload. That's a total motivation and productivity killer right there. Total fail. Not to mention network connectivity issues, etc, etc.
However, this totally kills my hobbyist usage at home about three to five years from now. I only ever use Photoshop, Illustrator, and occasionally After Effects for my independent design projects, and was finally able to justify upgrading from CS4 to CS6 a few months ago. A few hundred dollars every few years is worth it to pursue my own experimental work.
But I'm not going to justify $50 per month for that, and I have a hard time imagining others justifying it. I think Adobe just priced themselves solidly out of the prosumer market.
(Just to add a little math to this: A $700 upgrade every three years comes to $20/month. If Adobe can offer an a-la-carte Creative Cloud where I can get three or so apps when CS6 finally no longer cuts it, I suppose this will ultimately be a non-issue.)