Creative Cloud Open Letter

strypes Wrote:
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> Mike, Joey's issue is that the new update has some
> pretty kickass features so Joey will want it.

Some of the changes are kickass, others are essential features that were missing from CS6.

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...

...sound like you need to reduce your blood pressure Micheal . Strypes is right. I just want a CHOICE on how to pay. For a hippie zenmaster, you are pretty closeminded about people's opinions like mine. There are a lot of them. VERY high-end users blogging about it as well. FWIW, the petition is over 5700 signatures and climbing.

You have to remember something about me - I am an Adobe grafix guy who edits...not an editor who uses Adobe to make grafix. BIG difference as 99.99% of my projects pass through Adobe software everyday. This is no big deal to most of you who mainly use FCS...but for lifelong Adobe people like myself, who have been putting money in the kitty for 16-plus years, it's a friggin outrage. I Am not saying I am any more special than anyone else. I like the way I work - it works for me and my clients.

So YES...it's a big deal.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Quote
The cloud was already an option for people who wanted it. Nothing has been gained by this decision, only lost.

Exactly.

BEFORE: You want it? Subscribe. You don't? Keep your individual licenses.
NOW: You want it? Subscribe. You don't? Stay on CS6 until it dies...then Goodbye.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Last I heard, single apps were US$20.00. They've gone up?

Jon writes-
[I'm going to have to disagree with you there. The rental model has existed for a year now but it was never a problem before they made it compulsory.]

That's precisely the point; my fevered rants about cloud technology aside, CHOICE IS GOOD.

This is no longer choice. That is likely why the petition will succeed and Adobe will return to a 2-way strategy, CC and/or CS, as they should.

Best, as always,
Loren S. Miller
www.neotrondesign.com
Home of KeyGuide Central

10,354 sigs & climbing...

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I think a good compromise would be that if you finish paying the $50 per month for a years time, and then you stop paying. You get to keep using software version where you stopped at. You will not be able to get any new versions that come out until you start a new contract for a year. I think that is one of the biggest sticking points with most user.

What if you had to pay the equivalent of a CS license (about $2K) and you get free subs for a year. Second year you start paying subs at a discounted rate, and if you don't subscribe, you get to use the software for another 3- 4 years with no updates. If you re-sub you pay 80% of what you were expected to pay if you had been subscribing since you stopped (similar to structured upgrade pricing). After 4 years of non subscription, you have to re-subscribe again. This is similar to the pricing on CS6.



www.strypesinpost.com

I thought Aharon Rabinowitz wrote a great article on this...

[allbetsareoff.com]

It's a pretty well written article, but here are a couple of points:

>Many people have stated that one of the reasons they hate the Cloud business model is that they
>are being forced to upgrade – when they usually only upgrade every 2-3 versions of the Creative
>Suite.

You couldn't get around this in the previous pricing model. It was $375 for a .5 upgrade (approximately a year), $749 for a 1.0 upgrade (approximately 2 years).

BUT...

There is a case which can be compared to copyright. When I cut something, the edit is my work, it belongs to me. If I have to pay to continually access that work, effectively what copyright do I own? This is where the argument gets a little murky.



www.strypesinpost.com

Here's John Nack from Adobe..

"You should never lose access to your work. Period."

[blogs.adobe.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

Interesting how the comments are mainly complaints from Photoshop users, who IMO are impacted least by this because PSDs are backwards-compatible and supported in other applications. But then again, I suppose our industry does have a few more options than theirs if you don't want to use Adobe.

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...

20,081 sigs and climbing...

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

The complaints on that page is largely from PS users because they probably don't want to go back to GIMP, but more likely because John Nack is a PS guy. Adobe probably know the issues by now. Would be interesting to see their reaction to it, if any.



www.strypesinpost.com

Most of the complaints are coming from Photoshop users because there are a lot of Photoshop users that don't make a living using Photoshop. They tend to skip an upgrade or two along the way. Now if they want the latest and greatest, they have to subscribe and payout every month. Those users are not going to persuade Adobe to change their policies. Sorry for being so blunt about it but I've been going through a lot of Photoshop message boards and it seems like most of the Photoshop users do not use, or don't make enough income from using Photoshop.

FWIW - Photoshop is the #1 most pirated software in the industry currently (I heard that from some Guru at a show). This CC could backfire on Adobe and increase piracy 10-fold across the board.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Yeah, you can download all the software and use it for 30 days for free. Once you have it on your computer, what's going to stop someone from finding a hack that will probably be flooding the internet.

You could have done that anyway with the 30-day trial of CS6 or even the version of CC that has existed for the past year. But it may well lead to increased piracy from people who want a perpetual license that Adobe won't sell them. Piracy stems from a lack of consumer choice.

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'm not going to defend pirating. I see lots of folks using pirated wares not because of lack of consumer choice, but because they want to save a buck.



www.strypesinpost.com

Signed up a few days ago and absolutely love it. As a CS6 Production Premium user, I'm paying € 20 a month for the "complete" payment plan here in Europe. No more expensive than what I used to pay per year for upgrades, plus access to the entire realm of Adobe apps plus other services and tools which in total is worth far more than I could have even justified the expense for in the past. No problems whatsoever.

Otherwise, Adobe is a business like any other and makes decisions as they see fit to achieve their goals, as does each and everyone of us with our own businesses. They're enabling us an entire world of excellent apps and services that we could have only dreamed of a short time ago, and at a price point that is more than fair. I've no problem with that either.

And yes, let's be very honest, piracy has always been a big problem with Adobe products. There are too many people out there charging clients money for jobs produced with stolen software. This is true through all levels of the creative industry, not just with a couple of nerds. There's nothing hip or cool about it. Adobe has taken a major step here to finally address this, and it well could be that companies like Autodesk, Maxon and others are watching with interest and will take similar steps soon.

There is a graphic design school here in the USA that has campuses in many states. They use to encourage their students to use Limewire to download all of the software they needed for their personal computers to use while they were in school. I know this first hand. Apparently many of the software companies like Adobe didn't care as long as if they were students. Not sure how they tracked them or even if they could, or bothered to. I think the idea was that after the students got a real job they would eventually buy the software. Limewire is pretty much dead now so not sure how students are getting free software to use.

I've been on the Adobe Cloud for two months now. Can't wait till Monday!