The Creative Cloud Dilema
These programs and more will be available in Creative Cloud for $50.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that Adobe's creative suite is probably one of the most pirated software out there. So it's no surprise that Adobe desperately wants to find a way to change that. Enter Creative Cloud. Adobe just recently announced that they will no longer be offering physical versions of their creative software (for the most part). Now the only way to obtain the latest versions of programs, like Photoshop or Illustrator, you need to pay a monthly (or yearly) subscription fee. Now there's a lot of different opinions and some misinformation going around about what this entails, mostly negative. Price being a big part of it. Of course the need to verify your account by being connected at least once a month is another. Let's be honest though, how often are you not connected to the internet? I'm sure at least once a month you do, otherwise you won't be seeing this post for a while yet. I must say though, that the price is a bit disconcerting.
On a superficial level the price looks very tempting. The complete creative suite comes in at $50 a month or only $30 a month if you've already purchased previous versions of anything between CS3-CS6. Although, as we delve deeper you find that there are a multitude of people that this doesn't work out beneficially for. For example, let's say you're the type of person that only buys a new version of the software once every couple of years instead of creative suite being a yearly purchase. You're going to be paying a substantial amount of money more in the long run using this new method of subscription based payments then you otherwise would have. Maybe you didn't want every program Adobe makes (there's a lot of them) and you only needed one. Well, it is still possible to just buy one program for a smaller $20 a month. Granted the some quibbles still apply to that, if not more so. Personally, my problem isn't so much the monthly fee, so much as it is the potential in the future for Adobe to give the customers a royal butt-fucking. These prices are only this "low" at the moment. What happens a year from now (or more) when the inevitable justification of a price hike comes with new features that are supposed to incentivize you to buy the latest and greatest, except now users will no longer have a choice. If you want to keep using the software, well, fuck you, pay up.
Another thing is if you save a project, or start a new one, in the new creative cloud programs, those files are no longer backwards compatible with older versions in the creative suite. So if you can no longer afford to pay the monthly fee, too bad, you lose access to those files. Keeping in mind that you still have the files, just no way to open them now. You could always save the file in the older formats, but then you lose access to the latest improvements in these new versions, which completely negates the reason for upgrading in the first place. I'm still a bit distraught over my feelings on this whole thing. Granted, I'm not the biggest Adobe fan in the world, quite the opposite in fact. I don't know, what are your thoughts on Adobe's latest ploy to combat piracy? I feel like it's great they are trying to do something different. Now having access to applications I never had the chance to before due to cost restraints is a great side effect of this deal. If anything though, all this does is leave us hesitantly throwing our money into the "make Adobe a fuckton of money" pot. A year from now I wouldn't be surprised if we are talking about paying a lot more than we are now for their "cloud service".
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