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Adobe CC is a sales experiment if you can extract subscription fees from tradition desktop software users.

As a user I hope they fail. As a traditional desktop software vendor I hope they succeed.




Other companies have proven that subscription models work when you get it right.

I pay a yearly subscription for my IDE so I can get major updates.

If I stop paying the software doesn't stop working.

Adobe is just doing what adobe does best - extracting the most amount of money with the worst possible product they can.


It is potentially relevant that Adobe are reportedly stopping selling traditional boxed versions of older CS versions in a few days, leaving CC the only option for new purchasers [but see edit below]. In the announcement, they claimed this was being done earlier than they had originally expected (implying in passing that they always intended to do this) and this was because CC had been so popular with their customers. However, they didn't seem to give any sort of data to back up that claim, which makes me rather skeptical about how much of this is driven by accounting and how much of it is driven by PR.

I agree CC is a sales experiment, and as both a user and a software developer it's an interesting one. I do wonder how much of any initial success has been a honeymoon period, though. Another interesting dichotomy was seeing that on the one hand there was a related statement from someone at Adobe about how customers had been worried that they would double their price once everyone is locked in but of course they'd never do that because it would be a betrayal of trust, while on the other hand anyone who signed up on the $30/month plan is about to hit the end of their first year's special offer and go up to the normal $50/month (but this is OK with Adobe because the offer was always advertised as limited up-front). That may all be true and legally above board, but I'm not sure how many people who did the maths at the $30 price point are still going to be as happy in their second year as they were in their first.

In other news, our existing installations of boxed CS products cost us nothing extra this month and didn't go down this week, and we're still waiting to meet either the client who we couldn't work with because we didn't have CC or the killer feature that Adobe have rolled out in a CC upgrade over the past year that would have made anything we do significantly more productive.

Ironically, there are plenty of ways Adobe could have got more money from us without going the subscription route. There are several features on our wish list that would have justified the cost of a traditional upgrade alone, even with no other changes. However, since Adobe don't seem to be going in any of those directions with CC, we're quite happy to exercise our choice not to pay them for the (worthless, to us) changes they are making instead.

Edit: It appears from other sources, including Adobe's own FAQ on their site, that CS6 will still be available to individual customers via download, just not in boxed media. It's the volume licensing programmes for perpetual purchases that are being discontinued on 30 May to push business and government users towards CC. There are some other interesting data points mentioned in this write-up:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/enterprise/387724/adobe-to-halt-...




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