“Adobe customers could previously upgrade their Creative Suite from three versions back. So customers could upgrade to Create Suite (CS) 5, from CS 4, CS 3, and CS 2,” Karl Johnson reports for T-GAAP.
“Many customers either can’t afford or don’t want to spend the extra cash to upgrade every version,” Johnson reports. “These customers usually upgrade CS every other or every third update. That will all change with Creative Suite 6.”
Johnson reports, “In a recent blog post, Adobe added a CS subscription service for the Creative Suite called Adobe Creative Cloud and changed its upgrade policy. The subscription price will cost $49.99 per month for individuals. For customers who want to remain on the current system, which Adobe calls ‘perpetual licenses,’ they will need to upgrade much more frequently. Customers will only be able to upgrade from the previous significant release… Adobe is looking to stabilize their income by forcing people to switch to a subscription service.”
Read more in the full article here.
When will this company die.
Well and simply put. Never has a software company been so successful at making the piracy, hacking and counterfeiting of its products more virtuous than rescuing a drowning child.
You’re obviously too young to remember Quark.
The hell I am. Quark was awful. Photoshop, and its relatives, are unarguably the best products of their kind, administered by what is unquestionably the worst company of its kind on the planet. Note to Apple: please buy Adobe, destroy what is left of Flash, and rebuild the rest into a company with Apple-class customer service and fairly priced products.
With luck this will persuade people to use alternatives and we can get rid of the Adobe leach.
It already has.
Goodbye Adobe… and thanks for all the rotting fish.
Ha F-That!
A Quark-style slow death spiral into irrelevance awaits Adobe. All it takes is one competing product to beef up and gain traction and they are history.
I’ll never pay subscription for software.
They really expect individuals to pay $600 per year? Every year? And what happens if you stop paying? Is it like music rental services? If you stop paying you can no longer use the software? This can’t be a good idea for Adobe.
Wow, this sounds like as good an idea as what Netflix tried to pull.
I like the idea of a subscription. I’m not willing to hand over $700 for a software purchase in one shot, but I will happily pay for that over several months. That said, their prices are still too high.
I think you like it because you got it wrong. Adobe is not talking about installment plans, but subscription.
Dude, you don’t get it.
What happens when you stop paying?
The pro crowd that uses this for their livelihood might disagree with you. If you’re only using Photoshop for 3 months at a time, you’re not part of Adobe’s core user base.
Typical Adobe.
Any suggestions to replace Flash Professional??? Working in office of creatives that would love to use something different? Any suggestion would be appreciated.
What a joke, this company continues to go the wrong way. The only one of their applications I have not been able to replace is Illustrator. 2 years and they will be gone or bought and tossed out to the trash by Microsoft.
What did you replace Adobe InDesign with? Please don’t say Quark! Looking for other prepress alternatives that don’t necessarily break the bank!
ABA – Anything But Adobe
All of you people are quick to trash Adobe.
I guess not many make a living by using their industry standard software.
In the creative world Indesign, PhotoShop and Illustrator rule.
If anyone could provide comparable alternatives I would be more than happy to listen.
QuarkXpress 9 is a viable alternative to InDesign. Just watch how people start switching in droves now that Quark offers much more accessible upgrade pricing.
You didn’t mention a worthy alternative to Illustrator or Photoshop.
True professionals rely on this and unfortunately, there is nothing close to compete.
Sucks that Adobe continues to muck things up. People that can’t afford it simply won’t upgrade at all.
And Quark cut their throat with the creative pros years ago. Plus their software in clunky these days. Adobe has done a good job of integrating PS, InDesign and Illy.
All the Adobe trashers evidently are ignorant of what Creative Suite does and how well it does it.
I work in prepress at a sheetfed litho printing operation and am buried in CS all day every day. Haven’t seen anything on the horizon that will challenge it. Sorry mates but Adobe will be here for a while.
If anyone thinks MS can challenge them with a functional design/drawing/photo suite just take a look at Publisher and you’ll get a dose of reality.
I could not get by without Photoshop, Illustrator, Frame Maker and InDesign. Quark and Pixelmator are not viable alternatives for daily professional use and there are no alternatives to Illustrator and Frame Maker. Although my company is happy to pay for upgrades and even fresh installs of the complete suite, I think we’ll be staying with CS5 for quite a while. The subscription concept is ridiculous for everyone except Adobe’s finance department. Looks like they’ve finally let the sales guy run the company!
It is stock market analysts reports versus satisfying customers. When in doubt, Adobe should always provide truly productive benefits for users every time they have an upgrade. Don’t piss off your base.
Adobe is following the lead of REALLY expensive software packages that typically cost $10k-20k and up in the 3D CAD and FEA arena that are truly high end and with no low cost solutions right now.
Adobe and other software makers are on a yearly stock market evaluation cycle.
Users are on a “usability & productivity cycle”. All users recognize the upset when they have to do a major upgrade in time loss to install, keep the old versions running for fall-back uses and then time to learn new features. You can lose many days of productivity each year dealing with a major upgrade. That is a real income loss unless the upgrade yields truly great productivity and feature increases in income.
If they would only charge less for upgrades they would get more people doing it – like $99 or $149. These people are living in a Dream World, especially in this economy. Wishing for revenue through draconian means won’t make it happen so much as expedite the opposite.
it’s not the price that keeps people from upgrading, it’s compatibility within the industry and inconvenience of having their well-learned workflow uprooted with each upgrade. it’s also that every major release is filled with bugs that take many revision cycles to stabilize. if it were possible, i’d still be using illustrator 8. that baby was rock solid.
Agreed. We always skip a version or two (you need time to get comfortable with your tools). And we always wait a year for them to fix stuff before rolling out the new version. Sadly they always leave a few glaring bugs anyway, and tell you that it will be fixed in the next version. True, but they introduce a bunch of new ones.
This is greed at it’s best.
I bet that if they lower the price of PS down to $99 full/$49 upg, their sales would go through the roof. I would upgrade to each version.
Death to Tyrants!
Adobe Board meeting:
“Looks like customers finally got fed up with being over charged and will not upgrade. What are we going to do?”
“Let’s make it look cheaper by getting them to pay monthly. That will help cash flow and lock them into upgrading without noticing”
The problem with the above is that their customers are likely to be able to do simple arithmetic and will soon realise this is hardly a good deal.
Photoshop has a huge marketshare in its own niche but the door is wide open for a small innovator – Pixelmator?
Start adding some of the professional tools like CMYK file handling and even if Pixelmator doubled its price for the Pro version they would still be less than half the cost for Photoshop.
I need to open Dicom image files. Pixelmator can do this but if I buy a version of Photoshop to open the files it costs twenty times the price of Pixelmator!!!
No chance I am going to pay the “Adobe Tax”
For at least ten years now I have been hoping that Apple was secretly developing a viable alternative to Photoshop and Illustrator in a skunk works lab, to be unveiled should Adobe ever threaten to drop Mac support or just to offer consumers a better option. If so this would be a tempting time to release it.
Adobe. The new Microsoft.
Oh well, looks I am going to stay on CS4 for while.
That’s OK, it does what I want it to do. I have a feeling a lot of people are going to do the same.
These idiots will only stimulate the distribution of the cracked version that people will download for free. This is a really good opportunity for Quark to switch the tables on Adobe.
$50/month? $600/year!?! for a SINGLE license? WTF?!? Are they nuts?
$600 a year for a suite that costs $1800+ …is that such a big deal???? the $49/month is for a whole suite not just one software…
PIXELMATOR….
Enough with Pixelmator. It is a reasonable sub for Photoshop. Not as good, but decent. There is no sub for Illustrator and InDesign. And don’t say Quark. But give it up on Pixelmator. The Adobe Suite is more than Photoshop.
What’s wrong with Quirk? It’s a great alternative and people will move after hearing awful news by the great adobe (sarcasm)
If you have to ask what’s wrong with Quark, I’ll assume you’re new to the design, print, production business.
For those of us who lived through the days of when Quark “thought” they ruled the world; we wouldn’t throw a glass of piss on Quark if they were on fire…
Looks like Adobe didn’t learn from Quark’s mistakes.
Forcing designers who freelance & small design studios to pay $49 a month for the rest of their lifetime, will be Adobe’s demise. RIP Adobe, I remember when you were a decent company that cared about the industry & developed great products. Incompatibility has become your middle name. This latest move proves you are just digging your own grave.
Adobe’s name is mud.
Very good 🙂
Adobe is a natural building material made from sand, clay, water, and some kind of fibrous or organic material (sticks, straw, and/or manure)… (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe )
So in part, Adobe’s name is crap… among other things.
Greed will kill off HP’s ink business and it will not help Adobe either.
Adobe is teetering on being cast as a monopolist in creative design software. Not only have they mange to scheme their users into paying for exorbitant upgrade fees every 18 months; they’ve bought worthy competitors products and left them to whither or not bothered to upgrade or sell off the product to another company who might be able to do something with it (Freehand, PhotoStyler, Fireworks, GoLive, PageMaker, FrameMaker come to mind)
I dont like Adobe any more than most of you here. However, I dont think you haters can see what is really happening. I dont agree with it but the article never states that for 49 a month you get access to the entire Adobe suite of products. ALL of them.
Here is what I found. I hate them but lets be more honest. This si what is going to play out by this: They will lose period. It is a bit more compelling to see the entire package available. though.
When the Creative Cloud launches in full in the US in the first half of 2012, US$49.99 per month will get customers access to the full suite — Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Flash Pro, After Effects, Dreamweaver. It’ll also cover new web-standards development tools, Edge and Muse. And it’ll include the Adobe Touch apps for tablets, a collection of six pro-oriented programs that just were launched for Android tablets. It may not be a great deal for Photoshop-only customers, but the more apps a person uses, the more compelling the offer becomes.
Quirk
Guess we know what Adobe’s plan is for replacing the revenue lost from ditching Flash.
I won’t pay for subscription software or subscription music. We like to “own” our own stuff. Adobe is ridiculously over-priced- if they weren’t they’d have more customers, and happier ones. Yes, they must die.
Wow, that’s horrible! Hopefully they will reconsider. I like Adobe’s apps, but this profiteering scheme is gut-wrenching. Prices should come down over time, not escalate. And not only that, but instead of increasing their income, this will almost surely reduce it, since instead of upgrading every other time, people will probably choose to upgrade even less often.
Yet another reason to NOT to upgrade to Lion. I’m sticking with CS3 and Snow Leopard. Apple & Adobe can pound sand.
I can remember years ago when Quark had similar contempt for its customers that forced most of them to jump ship to InDesign.
My wife and I do a lot of graphic design as a sideline, mostly for non-profit organizations on limited budgets. we couldn’t really afford to drop $7-8 hundred bucks to update from CS3 to 5.5. We cringed again when Adobe decided to charge for minor updates.
Apparently, we are not the only ones in this position. No one was caving to Adobe’s greed. So, now they have come up with this new plan that virtually forces everyone to update to CS5.5 before the hammer drops. I guess we’ll all be sticking with 5.5 for a looong time!
No one except the big design houses can afford the new monthly “extortion plan”.
The best solution for this whole mess is for Apple to purchase Adobe, clean house, ditch crappy products (trash Flash. . .), and totally rewrite worthwhile programs in order to unify the user interfaces and get rid of 25 years of spaghetti code. This would give all of us content creators the tools that we need, at a reasonable cost, in order to concentrate on what we do best.
Go to He!!, Adobe!
Microsoft tried this with Windows and now years later we still have 50% of PCs on XP.
I haven’t upgraded my Adobe apps since CS2.
Partly because I am still on PowerPC architecture and mainly because of the outrageous upgrade pricing of their apps alongside the outrageous cost of purchasing their full (non-upgrade)versions.
I wish there were cheaper, capable options for their products, but there aren’t. I do not know why there aren’t anymore developers of affordable graphics/prepress software is beyond me, at this point. Adobe needs competition. Quark isn’t a bargain anymore, either.
Pixelmator is good, but I can’t use the recent versions and with no CMYK support, what good is it. You still need PS to do the conversions!
Is Apple Pages app a reasonable substitute for InDesign?
Anything for pro graphics side for a good page layout and vector app on UniX? I have used Gimp for X11 on OS X and it’s a pretty good substitute for PS, but still lacks some features.
I wish either Adobe smarten up and realize that their draconian pricing is driving customers away or making it much more expensive for them to do business, or we get some real competitive, cheaper alternatives, soon!
I really can’t believe there is no competing companies out there after all of this time 🙁
I print 4-color stuff every single day, and it’s been almost a decade since I’ve felt compelled to use CMYK files for anything. Color managed RGB files are smaller, faster to work with, and more consistent from device to device.
Another reason not to use Lion. I’m sticking with CS3 and Snow Leopard. Apple & Adobe can both pound sand.
Confused… I use CS3 and Lion? Why another reason?
I thought this site MacDailyNews. Apparently, they’ve learned nothing from Steve Jobs. Success/greatness lies in what you leave out.
Better idea. Don’t upgrade at all. Find alternatives and support those.
Calling Adobe directly would clarify but based on the link below it seems they will still offer purchase software and discounted upgrades too where you can download and save on shipping or pay a little more and have the software mailed to you.
http://ProDesignTools.com/new-adobe-upgrade-policy-cs5-cs6-poll.html (see below)
“First off, for anybody currently running the latest major release, Creative Suite 5 (either 5.0, 5.1, or 5.5), you’re fine. You will not be affected by this revision, and will be eligible for the discounted pricing on upgrades when CS6 comes out.
For everyone else, if you’re still running older versions – like CS2, CS3, or CS4 – when CS6 releases, you wouldn’t qualify for that upgrade price break. And customer reaction on this point has been understandibly unfavorable.
Adobe is trying to mitigate the impact of this change by offering an extra 20% off all CS5.5 upgrades worldwide until the end of the year (see banner). Note that the size of this discount increases to 30% during Black Friday & Cyber Monday.
So if Adobe continues as they anticipate, anybody who is running CS5 (or CS5.5) right now will be able to get low upgrade pricing to CS6 (or CS6.5) until that cycle completes in mid-2014. That’s over two years from now.
In other words, it’s likely that part of Adobe’s reasoning for moving from “three versions back” to a “one version back” upgrade policy is that the major releases are now spaced out to once every two years – so that someone who bought CS5.0 the moment it came out in 2010 could still qualify for discounted upgrade pricing to CS6.5 nearly four years later in 2014.
But for “version skippers” and other folks still running prior releases, what are your options?
Here are what the choices look to be:
Upgrade to CS5.5 now so you’re current, taking advantage of the additional 20% or 30% off – and then revisit the question again before CS7 comes out in 2014.
Wait now, and then pay full price for a new copy of CS6, CS7, or a subsequent release.
Keep using the older software that you own now.
Convert to the “Creative Cloud” rental model, with access included to more applications and services so long as you’re paying the per-month subscription fee.”
I think I’ll be upgrading to 5.5 with the 30% off.
And just to think, I was actually going to buy CS6. Not anymore.
Why should I pay $600/year just to be forced to upgrade to Adobe’s newest version of cpu-stalling, program-freezing bloatware, which really only changes how I interface with the software, rather than adding any new functionality, when I can buy Pixelmator for $29.99, which does everything Photoshop can do, only better, faster, easier…, oh and cheaper?
remember this day adobe, when you wonder WHY your company went broke and out of business. you simply ignore your customers and then keep asking for more and more money for less and less of a product.
let’s look at your products that are left and matter to you:
photoshop – you got bitched slapped by pixelmator for WAY less money, plus aperture exists.
illustrator – your only software that doesn’t have a great competitor YET
dreamweaver – what a terrible editor for designers.. you killed golive and everyone is pissed, then you think the subscription ‘muse’ will save you.. have you read the posts of how many of YOUR customers are pissed off and unhappy? of corse not, you are too arrogant to care about customers.
flash – um, where the graveyard? that technology is dean.. the people have spoken and you lost.. html 5 wins, again why? because you ignored your CUSTOMERS!
indesign – not the best.. there’s many other good layout editors that are less than $50,000
premiere – final cut pro & avid are better
after effects – motion
soundbooth – pro tools or even soundtrack
so good luck to you and your TERRIBLE idea of subscriptions..
it’s so obvious that your customers are looked at like dollar signs and the QUALITY of your products have gone WAY down…
i have an idea… make something worth buying and you won’t have to jerk around with pointless ideas of subscriptions and you can make money again, like you did when someone in charge there gave a crap…
if i was a unfortunate investor, i would fire the current leadership at that unfocused playground called adobe
*facepalm*
I can’t wait to see & hear my company’s reaction to this BS. We’re already still on CS3 because of Adobe’s pricing/bloat/bugs. I’ve already got our IT guy buying Macs for seats that in the past would have been shackled with a hand-me-down PC. I sent him a link to Pixelmator recently and let him know that if they add CMYK, we might be able to start considering dumping Photoshop. If another company would come along with a good professional Illustrator alternative at a decent price, Adobe would have to fix their crapware or die.
Pixelmator will NOT replace Photoshop in the near future.
If you’re playing on a Mac. at home then Pixelmator will do the job for a little post ‘click’ fun. It’s very cool and it’s fun and it’s really cheap. It ain’t ‘pro’. Maybe one day, but not today.
Like it or not Adobe software is what people who actually make a living from this stuff use.
If you work in the pro end of image making or prepress etc you will NOT be replacing Photoshop and other aligned Adobe products soon.
I’ve spent a great deal of money setting up my network to run nicely with Photoshop/Lightroom/InDesign. Now my little network is an old G4 for batch scanning with my Nikon Coolscan – old but it does the job – A couple of flatbed scanners on my desk, with my iMac a large Canon iPF5000 for prints and a server at the centre of it all. Next month I upgrade my printer/monitor calibration to tie in with the bureau round the corner that has a really big Canon 60″ printer when I want the big stuff.
I’ve got a lot of cameras & a lot of lenses. This aint gonna all come together with Pixelmator. Not today anyway.
I beta test for Adobe so in the 19 years I’ve been using Photoshop I’ve never paid for any of it. They give it to me – because I’m really good at using it. (Not my words)
I’m pretty much retired these days. This is me not having to please clients & finally pleasing myself, so this is just one old guys career leftover toys, not a pro end bureau’s financial commitment.
If this IS what you do and not what you play at
Adobe is around for a while yet.
“Like it or not Adobe software is what people who actually make a living from this stuff use.”
— Adobe makes me happy to *not* be in that line of work…