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 ;)
Right, but this is perfect for those of us who only need Adobe CS 1 or 2 months of the year--pay the monthly fee, add a little to our hourly rate to cover it, and voila!
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...
I think maybe an even larger use case is shops whose number of asses-in-seats might fluctuate with projects. Being able to bring in four designers for a month-long project without breaking the bank on licenses would be pretty handy.
Or if you can't fork over $2600 ($1k+ more in Europe, because fuck you. Everybody else rapes us with prices, so why not) in one piece. I know a lot of freelancers can't. Or, suddenly out of nowhere, you have to raise temporarily your number of CS seats.
Unless you are that customer. Imagine going to a carpenter and then receiving an invoice for him renting a hammer. Wouldn't that look a bit odd?
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.
>In other words it is commonly expected that professionals come equipped with the tools of trade
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.
The same model applies in film production, where (literally) tons of very expensive equipment get used for brief amounts of time by people who are hired based on long-standing personal relationships, then equipped by rental shops that can afford to maintain the massive inventories of often peculiar parts that are needed on any given show.
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.
I worked for a big general contractor (top 100 in the US) for a number of years and they regularly had tools and equipment factored into their bids because about half of them walk of each job (not that you can fire union labor for that).
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.
It seems like a lot of overhead to have to work in/maintain/convert between multiple apps instead of just using "the good one". Especially when a version from several years ago would still work on a current OS and would still have "more features than you'd ever need."
I don't believe this is intended as a replacement for one-time purchases (though I'm sure Adobe would love to have you switch), but rather as an option for businesses whose production needs fluctuate. I can easily see a company with a seasonal crunch time, such as an annual 300-page catalog, that hires on contractors for a couple of months, taking advantage of this.
Adobe has two types of customers: individual designers and big companies. The individual designers might want a subscription so they can "rent" the applications only when they need and then bill their clients.
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.
I didn't run the numbers, but at that point it looks to me like it's cheaper to put it on a credit card and pay it off in small monthly increments, even including the interest.
and then after you've been paying for a subscription for 3 years and you decide you are happy with version X for the time being, you won't be able to continue using it if you stop paying. From the Subscription FAQ:
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.
Pirates will still pirate regardless of having a lower initial cost subscription option - they're mostly not folks who would be paying customers anyway.
Have you seen the obscene prices adobe charges? For my rather light usage of image editing software there's no way I'm paying that. I know plenty of people who have hacked versions including businesses as they consider the price extreme. Yet they pay for other software.
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.
It sounds like you're not really using Photoshop for all of its features, especially if you're just using it for light image editing. Check out Photoshop Elements for $80.
Exactly - It's great that there are a growing list of viable alternatives to Photoshop. Their products are seen as the default requirements, but they're not at all.
Unfortunately, for serious professional work, there really aren't any serious competitors to Creative Suite today. That is how Adobe can charge sky-high prices and yet still ship products with crash bugs and silly inconsistencies between different applications' UIs.
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.
It's not true to say that a pirated copy always equates to a lost sale, but neither is it true that a pirated copy never results in a lost sale at any price. Some people would prefer to have legit software but simply can't afford it.
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.
That might be very logical when we talk about things that cost less than $100 and kids but this is another thing, we are talking about people who actually work on it but find more than $2000 to be a lot, think small starting companies or freelancers. I remember when I was younger my dream was to one day be able to pay for it because they really deserve it. This new model surely helps.
Yup - honestly, it's the truth. Most freelancers DON'T pay for Photoshop. They don't have to - because they don't work in a corporate office, where software piracy can easily be enforced by BSA.
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.
I needed to use Photoshop exactly twice (essentially to import existing photoshop files) in the past 3 years. Mind you, I didn't buy it. However, I would probably have bought a one month subscription.
You can not upgrade only for the first version the second one is not available for upgrade like you can upgrade from CS1 to CS2 but you are not going to be able to upgrade to CS3 as far as I remember.
Software suites like this cost huge amounts of money for bundles of tools that generally follow the 80/20 rule for any given user.
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?
We've got a great interoperable format already, that's being used by billions of people throughout the world, it's called HTML. The future of creative tools will be those that can both read and write HTML + whatever additional standards work with it.
I am continuely surprised that someone hasn't come to undercut this market (besides pirating which might be a huge factor here). But can Adobe's offerings be so far and above others that people think $95 a month is a great deal?
Note: I obviously don't use this suite so I don't know the true benefits of the software.
raises hand
I'm planning on undercutting them with a subscription web app for the niche of web design and web animation. Maybe not such a niche, but as has been discussed in the community, Photoshop is overkill for laying out web pages, and not ideal in terms of workflow integration with developers, the folks who actually do the coding for web sites.
No doubt, but for 90 percent of the needs to build effective web communications (aka web sites), colored boxes, images, and text will do just fine... Especially with robust CSS3 support.
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...
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 :)
I'm a web developer, not a designer, but I work for a very small software company, so end up doing a lot of the ui design work myself. I think for this type of work Adobe Fireworks has a lot of the right tools. There are vector tools that are really useful for building ui elements (rectangles with rounded corners, triangles, etc.). Then there are effects that can be applied to layers like stroke (line around the edge), drop shadow, glow etc. Fireworks also has a pretty decent way of organizing your work using a hierarchy of "folders" that can contain different pieces of the image. It sort of falls somewhere between Photoshop and Illustrator and at least in concept is a great tool for building ui mock-ups and actual ui elements.
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.
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.
> This stuff is all free, and is all fully capable of allowing you to do work.
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.
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.
I think it really depends on your background. I'm a much better artist using pencils or even brushes than I am on a computer, but I have been doing some work on a tablet and I find I'm adapting fairly well.
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.
Hence Sketchbook, I use Sketchbook with my Bamboo tablet (I've heard good thinks about ArtRage). I'm no artist, but Sketchbook feels much more like real drawing than Photoshop/Pixelmator.
I've never used Sketchbook, but after reading your post I googled it and it looks really good. Does it support all the standard bamboo productivity features (e.g. the eraser, clicking the lower pencil button to drag, zooming and rotating w/ multi-touch, etc..)?
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.
Adobe's suite is the standard for the creative industry: anything from publishing (Indesign) to ad agencies to web design shops to (landscape) architects uses it. Often they do seem to use older versions than the latest: there's a significant cost involved in continually upgrading for a few so/so features.
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.
30%? There's nothing that comes close to matching 10% of Photoshop's features, and InDesign's closest competitor is Quark -- so don't hold your breath for cavalry from that direction.
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 think Adobe pirating is pretty rife, although they do also offer heavily discounted student editions for junior designers. My understanding is that the people that buy Adobe software at the commercial price are design studios, and this is one of the most essential tools to their profession. It's comparable to asking why .NET shops pay the similar prices for Visual Studio.
I own and love pixelmator, especially given the price, but I think it bears mentioning that it doesn't have full PSD support. While understandable, not being able to edit a type layer within a PSD (type is rasterized upon import) can be problematic when working with others or updating a file.
There's lots of cute tools that attempt to cut out a niche at the low end of the difficulty curve - minor editing/creation for web but Photoshop has an incredibly sophisticated engine for handling the complexities and complications of professional colour space and printing work, the investment needed to recreate that code would be millions.
Lots of people here think nothing of paying $10-30 per month for a whole variety of services. To have photo/print/vector editing, video & effects, flash etc etc doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch. I'd wager than most people who used these tools professionally could cover the rental price with their first hour's work.
Designers are only part of the design product pipeline. Their clients provide legacy content in Adobe formats. Print shops demand certain file formats for their print workflow. The ends of the pipeline are reluctant to invest in new or different software for the designer's convenience.
I've wondered this myself as well, as I do not use it myself either. However, my girlfriend does animation with Flash and some Photoshop and she uses it because that's what she learned with, so I think part of it is vendor lock-in.
This is great for someone like me. It's silly to spend the full amount for a programmer like me who wants to use Photoshop for touching up images and website graphics, but I'd gladly pay on a month to month basis.
More likely you will soon be able to get a subscription web app that just does what you need for web layout and image touchups - you can already almost do all of it now, and don't have to fork over any $$ to Adobe.
I've noticed that Aviary has recently started offering an embeddable editor which could be useful for having customers upload/do small edits.
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.
I'm interested to see how the international pricing will look for this. Here in Australia the CS5 Master Collection costs $4,344.00 compared to $2,599.00 in the US. Given that the AUD is now worth more than the USD it's rather a slap in the face.
After comparing the subscription price to the full price for Photoshop (~$200 discount off full price), it seems like the service may be viable for one-off users. The occasional photographer, designer, etc. should jump on this. Of course, there's no replacement for a one-time purchase if these tools are for daily/frequent use. In response to the price, though, for a subscription service, it does seem a bit high. Sure the suite packs in a lot of features, but I'm not sure if $35/month is justifiable (let alone $49); especially for one-off users. It really depends on how much value the software contributes to your business.
A bit high but the future, I really hope Autodesk will do this as I need 3dsmax and maya about 3 months out of the year. Pricing is too high but this is a good direction to fight piracy.
If this was their main business model, maybe Adobe would focus on quality vs quantity? this urgency to add new features and force users to purchase more sluggish versions after each OS upgrade is not doing it for me. Fireworks used to be an amazing piece of software. Now it's ridiculously sluggish, with no visible benefits. I would gladly pay adobe to own a fast version of Fireworks on my current OS, I don't care if the feature set is from 2005.
Several years ago, I bought the cut-down version of Sony Vegasfor about £50, having briefly considered buying the £300 version instead.
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.
A big factor is expense vs. purchase for companies. Purchase requires a timely permission process that can takes weeks. With subscriptions, they can now get the software quickly and move on, expensing when it's convenient.
This is great. Some people may only need to use the products every now and then, so they cant justify the high price tag. This opens up the market to folks who may be casual users. Kudos Adobe...
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 ;)