Adobe after your money - again

[lefty]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22432171

It seems they are determined to put Photoshop as far out of the reach of the amateur as possible - I wonder why ? I foresee even more pirating then ever......

[wombat666]

Adobe are presently in trouble with a Government backed enquiry into their marketing and pricing policies here in Oz.
Shame another company can't come up with competitive package at a reasonable price.

[Tako_Kichi]

I have been a Photoshop user since v1.0 way back in 1990 when it was only available for the Macintosh Plus (the Mac Toaster) and only worked on grey-scale images.

Over the years I have used almost every version since then, either as an employee of a company that used Photoshop or with my own copy when I went freelance in 2002. I finally drew the line on upgrades with Photoshop 10/CS3 as I was no longer working (due to health issues) and could not afford the cost of upgrades every 18 months to two years. Even PS10/CS3, as old as it is, is still way more powerful than I ever need now so why pay for upgrades that provide no benefit.

Adobe have always had expensive products (with the exception of the Acrobat Reader which they provide for free) and had a dominant market share due to the fact that they were the 'industry standard' applications for a number of products (Photoshop, Illustrator, PageMaker, InDesign, Dreamweaver, etc.)

However, this new proposal just strikes me as wrong and I do not like the principles behind it at all. There is no way that I would pay a monthly fee just so that I could use a piece of software. Lockheed Martin do a similar thing if you are a developer for their P3D flight sim, you need to pay a monthly fee in order to access their 'tools'.

I also dislike the idea of everything being in 'the cloud'. I am on a bandwidth limited internet account and having to connect to the Adobe 'Creative Cloud' every time I wanted to use one of their products would eat into my monthly bandwidth allocation. I will NOT be buying anything from Adobe again if this goes through.

[JohnC]

Larry, I think you hit the nail on the head. If I can play a slight devil's advocate, Adobe is in a way a victim of it's own success. Each iteration would provide something novel and but probably a little less accessible/relevant and thus to a shrinking audience. At some point either the company has to shrink or they have to invent ways to generate cash to compensate for those less and less willing to spend the bucks for the new version. With that said, will I be upgrading to any new version of PS in the foreseeable future? Definitely not.

The universal nature of image formats at least makes it difficult to force upgrades through incompatibility, and thus necessitates some level of novelty with each new version. Nothing makes me balk like the Boeing standard CAD software package, CATIA. It's dragged on for years and years as one of the worst functioning software packages, and this has propagated because the aerospace giant insists that it and all it's vendors have a current license, to the tune of ~$30,000/year per engineer and semi-annual updates prevent any older version from talking with a newer build.

[Tako_Kichi]

Ah yes CATIA, what a PITA that was! A couple of my previous employers were 'forced' into setting up several CATIA stations when working on contracts for one of the big three US automakers (I forget which one now). The companies I worked for built the machinery that either made or conveyed car parts and in order to get accurate part data to use as a reference when designing our machinery we had to have CATIA as that was the only format the customer was willing to supply the data in.

[aeronca1]

My first contact with Adobe occurred when Aldus PageMaker became an Adobe product. It was never the same afterwards through various iterations. I had a problem with a Mac version and when I contacted Adobe, the answer was that I had to purchase the current product to have my problem addressed. I switched to QuarkXPress and never looked back. Similarly with PhotoShop, I went over to CorelDraw which still does all I want it to.

[hairyspin]

I just got a new Pentax dslr and found to my delight that Photoshop CS2 - which I still use constantly - reads .DNG files straight off the camera. Why upgrade?? :isadizzy:duh

btw, the P3D developer's subscription isn't the only way of building for P3D: $200 gets you a permanent licence and the sdk is a free download.

[jmig]

LightRoom will become the Photographer's tool. It already does most of what Photoshop will do. I see LightRoom and maybe a beefier version of Elements becoming the photographer's tools. Adobe has said that Lightroom will remain a packaged downloadable product.....for the foreseeable future, at least.

Another program that will do a lot of what PS does for a photographer is the Onone suite. It has a lot of PS's features and works with layers. I expect to see them add to the feature set. They are in a good position to grow with photographers. They are photographers.