Creative Cloud Open Letter

Adobe posted an open letter to the creative community about the future with Creative Cloud.

[www.adobe.com]

I've been on the CC for nearly a year now and I have to say I actually like it, but there's a lot of fear and doubt out there about it. Most of the stuff I've seen seems to be unfounded, but wow, people get scared or angry really quickly.

Just wanted to say, its not that scary.

Been using it a year myself with no issues. Like it. Don't quite understand peoples concerns myself. Guess it's like anything. Try it and and you wont fear it.

Michael Horton
-------------------

After a day of "The Sky Is Falling" I had to write up my thoughts.

[walterbiscardi.com]

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
biscardicreative.com

Just to add that the machine doesn't need to go online every 30 days. If you're on a yearly subscription, the machine only checks in 180 days, at least according to Adobe.



www.strypesinpost.com

Here's the CC FAQ.

[www.adobe.com]

I've been on the Creative Cloud for about a month now. That was before myself or anyone knew that Adobe was going to a subscription base only. I took advantage of the the discount of $29.99 a month for a year. I've been looking at videos showing the features. They look pretty good, if not great. Photoshop's new features are killer! I wish I had it now. I read different forums and message boards. Take Photoshop. A lot people are saying they will go else where. I want to know, where is where? Photoshop is Photoshop. What are you going to use. CorelDRAW! Painter! They will probably go subscription base soon also. So you're just waiting your money running away from the inevitable.

I just heard about it today...still on the fence (nice write-up Walter). I have had my head buried so deep in the weeds since January that I missed all the shows / details and the first peek I take, I get hit in the face with a lynch mob of angry Artists / Editors weilding pitch forks and torches cursing Adobe. I just found out why. I was pi$$ed at first when I heard...because I upgrade every 2 years ($699 usually). Now, I have to spend $600 a year to keep it active and get access to a lot of software and storage I will never use.

I am gonna join & pay it because it's my "bread & buttah"...but being forced to do it has a psychological aspect that I do not feel good about. They tried the CC subscription service and I guess they didn't get enough subs...so they are forcing everyone to sub who uses Adobe products. It feels like when my Mom would say "time to come in" and I would say "oh, why?" and she said "BECAUSE I SAID SO!!" ...and it is just universally understood by all kids everywhere that "BECAUSE I SAID SO!!" is a good enough reason to do what she says. It's really not such a free country. We just do what we are told if we want to be part of something good...and Adobe is definitely something good. They could have kept the regular licensing for grandfathered licensed users and made new users join the CC IMHO.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

>They tried the CC subscription service and I guess they didn't get enough subs

They had close to half a million subscribers for CS6 CC. The cloud opened up a lot of options for folks who do not want to have to worry about buying that hefty one off licenses. It also freed up some businesses from having to worry about having a CS license sitting around when they do not have a project. I mean, seriously, you may not be able to pay off a Production Premium license on a single job, but you can definitely offset software cloud payment onto projects.

But I understand where you're coming from as well. The tone is a little authoritative like the computer in 2001 Space Odyssey.



www.strypesinpost.com

ive been a subscriber for about 6 months now. and it has its ups and downs. and if i had it to do again i probably would NOT.

here's why:

now i have the problem of being too far ahead of the curve and many colleagues and service bureaus dont have the newest versions and cant open my files.

some of the features require newer hardware. so unless you update your computer AT LEAST every two years you WILL find features you cant use.

just last week i missed a deadline because after effects CS6 (for some reason) wouldnt render formats with alpha channels. so after a few hours of trying to address the erroneous error message diagnosis. i simply had to reinstall my CS4 version from the CD and all was immediately fine again.

They will be putting up a repository of older versions for backward compatibility.



www.strypesinpost.com

Here's my take:
[www.digitalrebellion.com]

I think the problem is that people are getting too confused with terminology. The cloud is not the problem, the forced rental policy is.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

Well written. I agree and disagree with that line about shifting the sceptre of power.

Yes, I agree with the Adobe's pricing model on the cloud and have always believed it to be overall a good thing on many levels. It frees Adobe away from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act so they no longer have to wait for a yearly release cycle to issue new features while spending a year fixing bugs. For the end user, it does away with the initial hefty license fees, making the software more affordable. The current pricing system is also nicely done and is comparable with their existing perpetual license fee and structured upgrade fees. I only wished they had this when I was a student.

About that sceptre of power shifting onto Adobe, yes, they no longer have to wow users with yearly show of new features to entice users to upgrade. With constantly paying users, who pay because they need to use the software, the ball is in Adobe's court as to what Adobe wants to do with both the software and the subscription model.

But the truth is the sceptre of power has always been in their courts. They have always decided the upgrade pricing, they have always decided the new feature set in every release. With a structured upgrade pricing, users who skip a version or two, end up having to pay the same upgrade pricing as those who upgrade every year anyway, and eventually everyone has to upgrade to stay current and to make sure their softwares run optimally on their machines, and to ensure compatibility with the rest of the industry and the camera formats they work with. It all evens out in the long run.

As far as consumer rights go... Who reads every single ToS they encounter? And what can end users do about it? Microsoft removed the rights of users to file a class action suit in one of their latest major releases. And they do not need a subscription model to do that. When you buy a new computer, you will find it hard not to agree with your ToS. It's long, it's complex, and it's covered with legal speak. And you have only one choice- agree or not touch your new computer and most people do not choose their hardware by comparing ToS's. H.264 itself has a heavily complex licensing scheme. But when the network asks for H.264 do you tell them that WebM is better because the licensing is less complex?

The problem isn't about forced subscription vs perpetual licenses the problem is something greater that will not end even if we go back to perpetual licenses. This "power shift" is merely a finger poke.



www.strypesinpost.com

Quote
strypes
Yes, I agree with the Adobe's pricing model on the cloud and have always believed it to be overall a good thing on many levels. It frees Adobe away from the Sarbanes-Oxley Act so they no longer have to wait for a yearly release cycle to issue new features while spending a year fixing bugs. For the end user, it does away with the initial hefty license fees, making the software more affordable. The current pricing system is also nicely done and is comparable with their existing perpetual license fee and structured upgrade fees. I only wished they had this when I was a student.

Just to clarify my position, in many ways it is a good thing and I have reason to believe we will see much quicker release cycles for Premiere. I also have no issues with Creative Cloud as a service. My objection is solely to being forced into a rental model without a choice.

I see it as a power shift because if Adobe does something we don't like, we can no longer vote with our wallets. We have to buy into whatever they do in future just to access existing projects.

Quote
strypes
Who reads every single ToS they encounter? And what can end users do about it?

Companies do, believe me. Some companies will have their legal departments scrutinize our EULAs in detail before making a purchase, and some companies even do it for our free apps too. And if a really big controversial change was made, I'm sure some enterprising journalist would make everyone aware of it even if they didn't bother to read it.

What can end users do about it? Not buy it. Except now they have no choice. And I think companies will be reluctant to get into the cloud because if they want to get out again in future it's going to be difficult.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

>I see it as a power shift because if Adobe does something we don't like, we can no longer vote with our wallets. We have to buy into whatever they
>do in future just to access existing projects.

I agree with your point on this. It gives Adobe marginally more power over the users than they currently have. On the other hand, Premiere Pro is quite an open platform and supports many interchange formats. Embracing an open interchange format was the saving grace when FCP7 was EOL'd. That same support for interchange format exists largely with Premiere Pro. Yes it will be a hassle, and it certainly raises the stakes such that if there is a future change that users disagree with, they will be unlikely to return.

My faith has rarely been in big corp but rather in free market and competition. One of my concerns over the years is that there isn't a mograph tool to replace After Effects.



www.strypesinpost.com

I think we're lucky compared to some people. There is lots of competition in the editing market right now and Premiere has only recently become a viable player so it is not entrenched. It is a much bigger problem for After Effects and Photoshop users, which have larger shares of their respective markets and fewer alternatives, not to mention all the plugins and other add-ons that have been developed for them.

It's great that Premiere supports FCP XML but it seems like the industry adoption happened by accident. Premiere doesn't support it very well (for example, try to go back and forth with titles) so I really wish there was an industry-standard XML format that was flexible enough to be able to account for the differences in NLEs within one format.

As I mentioned in the article, I'm still on board even though I'm unhappy. I have been using Premiere on small projects for a while with no problems and was considering possibly using it for larger projects in future. I'll still use it for small things but for the moment I won't be considering it for larger projects until its future and overall industry adoption become clearer. I can walk away from the small projects once they're complete but I can't do that with the large ones.

My software:
Pro Maintenance Tools - Tools to keep Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Pro X, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Premiere Pro running smoothly and fix problems when they arise
Pro Media Tools - Edit QuickTime chapters and metadata, detect gamma shifts, edit markers, watch renders and more
More tools...

>It's great that Premiere supports FCP XML but it seems like the industry adoption happened by accident. Premiere doesn't support it very well (for
>example, try to go back and forth with titles)

That's Premiere's own problem. Those titles don't even make it to After Effects!



www.strypesinpost.com

Meanwhile, on the web, Hitler learns of the CC model.







www.strypesinpost.com

If anyone's interested, a petition is out there to eliminate the forced subscription model:

[www.change.org]

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

although i'm not a big supporter of adobe's decision. some of the things people are saying on that page are just outright ********.
one of my favorites is:

"$600+ a year...forever. and you don't get to keep it if you decide to stop using it?"

i guess that guy doesn't have internet service or a mobile phone? hell. i pay upwards of $600 a MONTH for our family's at&t family plan and uverse.
and i have exactly **** to show for it.

Hitler coming back for more raving about digital - most excellent!

Jon writes-

[The cloud is not the problem, the forced rental policy is.]

They're both the problem; subscription doesn't work without superduper auto-download of gigabyte files and monthly phone home of Big Brother Are We Licensed Today? Oh, we are not? Seig! You are now on Cloudless Demo only!

The problem with a bunch a servers linked together through switchers and routers in different facilities communicating from differents part of the world is of course the fallibility factor. The air conditioning failure factor. The earthquake factor. The terrorist factor, the cyber or brainwashed human factor. Adobe's offer of 20GB storage? Not in your sweet life would I place 1K of personal data or creative work of any kind up there. But that's the least of concerns about Creative Cloud subscription service. I'm waiting for the various clouds to part. Meanwhile, it rains bullsh*t.

Mein Fuhrer! I...can..walk!

Best, as always,
Loren S. Miller
www.neotrondesign.com
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