Adobe Creative Suite now in subscription form
adobe.com
adobe.com
Adobe has released a Creative Suite package every ~20 months (Wikipedia).
CS1 - 09/2003
CS2 - 04/2005 - 19 Months
CS3 - 03/2007 - 23 Months
CS4 - 10/2008 - 19 Months
CS5 - 04/2010 - 18 Months
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If we bought the first premium suite (based off current prices in the Adobe Store) it would have cost us around $1900. Add in upgrades at $400 each, and we get a total lifetime cost of $3500.
If subscription pricing was around since day one and we went with the new subscription pricing monthly rate of $95 (with one year contract) we would end up paying ~ $8650 to date or about 2.5x of buying it over that period (91 Months).
I don't find it surprising that they're going down this route. It surely is an interesting way to charge for downloaded software as we've really only seen this on the web front thus far.
I'm a bit interested to see how many total subscriptions we'll sign up for in a couple years. Reoccurring billing is certainly a nice stream of cash - and a bit of a trojan horse for additional revenue ;)
I know a lot of people 'want' to pay for the software, because they feel it's the right thing to do. A system like this will help them to do the right thing.
Personally I go open source as I don't want to pay that amount for an image editor. On principal I paid for software from the day I could afford it, given that I make money from software. I find it makes me wince slightly when friends and clients ask me where they can get office, photoshop and cs5 for free. Would they pirate my work if they could?
So I don't use adobe on principal as I see their stuff as a total ripoff. Not very good either, I tried the trial version 6 months back, while better than GIMP/Paint.Net it's still got a pretty awful UI.
The only annoying thing is that a lot of people send you PSD files, so I sometime have to fire up another trial just to export certain layers easily. There are some plugins available for this but they are a bit cumbersome last I checked.
I'm always a bit surprised that none of the major software vendors with the muscle to put a few hundred developers on a new project for a couple of years have tried to break into the graphics/DTP market that Adobe dominates today. Given their reputation for poor quality and usability, it's not the most defensible position for Adobe to hold against a competitor with good developers and talented project management/vision people.
In the case of Photoshop you're going from $1300 up front to $50/$35 per month. That's a huge difference in affordability, so I'd be surprised if that wouldn't make a dent in piracy, particularly in small businesses.
Instead of ~$3500, you're looking at < $400 / year, which sounds just about right for me and the web dev / basic design work I'm doing.
I can use Gimp or Inkscape or Scribus for basic mockups, and than for the final client prints/work, I switch to the Adobe CS suite for standards compatibility, etc...
In other words it is commonly expected that professionals come equipped with the tools of trade. Not that this is set in stone, but that's the state of affairs and trying to do it differently is an uphill battle.
Not always. Construction firms hire a lot of what they need for each job, because it is not economical for them to store and maintain the enormous variety of tools/machines that they need over the course of a year. They'd need a huge warehouse and a whole team of people to manage and maintain all the equipment, and at that point you may as well start running a hire company.
They don't invoice you for each rental fee in an itemised fashion, for the same reason they dont invoice you for each screw, each nail, the fuel for their vehicles etc: you don't give a shit.
Actually, it's not the parts that are peculiar, it's the amounts and configurations that tend to vary. In any case, it makes good economic sense for everyone involved to handle labor and kit separately.
Sometimes heavy equipment is added on by contractors. For instance, I can dig this ditch with a shovel, or we can rent a backhoe, and have it done in a few hours.
If I cancel my subscription, does that mean I can still use my software, and that I just won’t receive updates for the most current version?
No. When you cancel your subscription you will no longer have access to any version of your Creative Suite subscription software.
Big companies' are often adverse to big cash outlays to buy expensive product licenses. They might prefer to subscribe month-to-month to expand or shrink their license pool and also avoid a big up front expense. Plus tax laws may induce "irrational" behavior because a company may be taxed differently for purchasing an product versus renting it.
The problem is, any given user might need a different 20% than the next person. It makes it difficult for lighter versions of the software to compete, because there's always that one thing that they need, and is only in the high-cost package.
This is a prime example of why a model like the Canon Cat or Apple's abandoned OpenDoc approach should be reconsidered, in my opinion.
In those models (I think it's called a component model?), users buy interoperable tools instead of complete applications. Rather than opening a program, you open a document, and select which tools you want to use on it.
The operating system contains the ability to open file formats, rather than individual programs. Programs are replaced by tools which can manipulate data once the file format has been read by the OS.
For example, you might open a photo, and decide to use a magic wand selector by Adobe, but apply a filter from SumoPaint, a resize tool from Panic Software, and manipulate the text with a Microsoft tool.
All of your tools would be in a "toolbox" that you could customize on the fly, much like you'd deal with a toolbox on a workbench.
You don't go into your kitchen and turn on every appliance in the room when you just want a piece of toast - why should your computer act that way?
Of course, the operating system itself would have to be built with that in mind in the first place - but is that such a crazy idea?
I'm not a programmer, I'm a UX guy, so please tell me if I'm missing something here.
Note: I obviously don't use this suite so I don't know the true benefits of the software.
Care to list what a web design application really needs? It would be a big help. I've kind of referenced Jason Santa Maria's "A Real Web Design Application" article (http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/a-real-web-design-applic...) for some of my goals with my app...
Link: http://www.edit-room.com/
Maybe it will take some time to get there, but it's good to have goals, and incremental improvement is the way to go, at least for a solo developer effort :)
Fireworks does seem expensive, but my main complaint is how bloated it is. There are tons of tools I don't need and some operations take longer than you would think they should. For example on the OS X version of Fireworks, clicking the close file button makes the whole app lockup for about a second while it tries to bring up the dialog to ask if you want to save or not. Not a huge deal on it's own
Basically I would love to see a tool that competes with Fireworks for the ui design. Preferably it would be a bit cheaper, but I am much more concerned that it has a more targeted feature set and doesn't feel sluggish while using it.
Summary: It's probably not that any given customer actually uses even a third of the features, but that for any customer there is a feature that is very important to them, and those "I need X" features span the whole set of creative suite functionality.
Adobe and Autodesk have both effectively monopolized their niches. When Adobe acquired Macromedia that was pretty much it for viable competitors. When Autodesk got both Maya and Softimage, likewise.
There is simply no credible replacement for Flash, if you need to author Flash. I hope that Apple has dented Flash enough to make it irrelevant moving forward.
Photoshop has so many deep features that it's hard to imagine anyone seriously shaking it in the next few years. (Photoshop Elements has more functionality than Photoshop's high profile "competitors" and is given away free with scanners).
As for the rest of Adobe's empire -- it's pretty brittle. Illustrator is actually pretty dated. Dreamweaver -- well some folks like it. Fireworks -- it's the rotting carcass of XRes, an unsuccessful Photoshop competitor. After Effects has tons of competition, and its killer feature is CS integration. Premiere ditto (not even sure it has good CS integration). Acrobat is a joke -- it should be Adobe's crown jewel but it seems like almost anyone can write a better Acrobat clone than Adobe.
I tend to use Autodesk Sketchbook + Pixelmator for most of my graphic work.
For someone like me, Pixelmator has some serious drawbacks. For one thing the pressure sensitivity curve isn't quite right for the pens. Worse yet, it often interprets rapidly drawn curves as straight lines! It also had some serious UI problems which I understand have improved somewhat in the most recent version. If I had to chose, I'd take Pixelmator over GIMP for simple everyday tasks, but seriously, the only reasonable replacement I've seen for what I want out of Photoshp would be Corel Painter.
I don't think it's an accident that Wacom has worked out a deal with both companies and ships PSE and Painter Essentials with their Bamboo tablets.
So far, I've been really pleased with the software wacom bundled in, but if there is a weakness it would be a good pencil sketching interface, as opposed to painting. Especially the smudge feature on PSE feels like it's for paints, not pencil.
Unfortunately, it looks like Sketchbook licenses are only usable in a single country, which doesn't work for me. Pretty much anything on my laptop is going to get used in China, Taiwan and the US.
GIMP: http://gimp.org - Gimp is for doing photo editing work. People hate on the gimp for not have 16 bit color support, but this point should be moot for the overwhelming majority of users. I've used GIMP to edit photos, then sold them on iStockphoto where they have been used in advertising.
I've been using gimp for ~10 years and I've never come across something that I can't do with it. (Including the "content aware fill" thing from about a year ago: http://newslily.com/blogs/96). I'm a pretty big GIMP fan.
People also hate on it's interface. If you've grown up on photoshop, sure, but I can work faster in GIMP than I can in anything (including photoshop).
Inkscape: http://inkscape.org/ - I use inkscape every single day for doing advertising materials at my job. I've done ads that have been published in nationally-syndicated magazines with this, and have done work for enormous, internationally-recognized brands with this. Inkscape is a fantastic piece of software.
Scribus: http://scribus.org - Scribus is for doing page layouts. While I don't use it extensively anymore, I have used it for publishing work in the past. It is a fantastic, very complete piece of software that will do everything that you want to do with it.
This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work. The only things you're going to get with Adobe's products is support for their proprietary formats.
Actually, the one thing i think most people are paying for when it comes to indesign is adobe's type engine, which behaves predictably and also supports the kitchen sink of opentype features. It's easy to dismiss ot support as a convenience function (it is at some level), but it's the killer feature for any typographic application where you want to use the full range of type available to you in the font (family?) you paid oh so much money for.
I once designed using a version of futura that had the small caps & osfs in the glyphs menu (untagged!) and was livid when i had to set nearly a paragraph of text by inserting each one at a time. Since the last time i checked when i was in grad school [1], this was still an outstanding issue in scribus (shaky opentype smcp/dlig/salt support) and it's really the one that kept me from ditching indesign. As it was, i would probably have jumped ship and used latex/xetex had i not been trying to individually rag each line.
It's not like you can't make nice work in scribus, but it may also be more convenient to do it in a program that has solid support (and mostly tuned ui) for the features that many typographers use.
That depends on the work you need to do. I don't pirate software on principle, so I used to use exactly those three applications, along with OpenOffice, for my everyday needs. However, when I started needing tools to do real work for real money, my perspective changed: the glaring weaknesses in the OSS software compared to the serious professional tools made it easily worth dropping £1,000+ on things like CS5.
In the interests of fairness, since "glaring weaknesses" is a somewhat strong term, I will list a few of the more obvious ones:
- No serious typography support (e.g., using OpenType features; flexible antialiasing for screen graphics; flexible H&J settings).
- No serious colour support (e.g., integrating Pantone spot colours).
- No layer styles.
The Adobe apps have their problems, to be sure, but on even these basic points the "competition" is lagging many years behind.
And it's not just cheaper, it's less buggy and faster.
Adobe CS isn't just unpopular because of its pricing, it's really inconsistent, painful software.
To anybody reading this: I highly recommend Pixelmator. It has a free trial, check it out.
Other than that, webapps make zero sense in this space. I don't see why I would upload my images to a server and edit them in a browser with major overhead, when I can edit them locally in a 10x more powerful application.
Illustrator, month-to-month: $45. UK: $65 pre-tax, $77 after tax.
A few years later, I buy a new video camera that saves files in H264 and my older version of Vegas won't load the files. I had to upgrade it.
I'm glad I didn't spend £300 getting the more expensive version, but if there was a reasonable subscription plan, I could have just switched to the new version that supported H264 without a new big payment.