Adobe Officially Unveils CS6, $49/Month All-Inclusive Subscription Service

http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/22/adobe-officially-unveils-cs6-and-its-49month-all-inclusive-creative-cloud-subscription-service/

by driverdan • 14 years ago

64 80 14 years ago

techcrunch.com

ecubed• 14 years ago

I'm surprised they didn't come out with this sooner. Anybody savvy with details as to whether this will bring in more or less income per user than the traditional sales methods?

kylelibra3• 14 years ago

Would they go into this if they thought it would make less money? Probably trying to go after users who pirate the software and try to make it seem more appealing to subscribe so they at least get some revenue.

jonah6• 14 years ago

They still sell it in the traditional box too. That's how I'll be upgrading.

Dramatize• 14 years ago

$20 per month for just Photoshop seems like an easy sell for small businesses who would otherwise pirate a copy.

mey2• 14 years ago

Unrelated, but issues with Adobe's tool suites. http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/

panacea• 14 years ago

I love that tumblr and agree with the premise that adobe software has flaws, but it's kinda mean to post that link, even with the 'unrelated' signal, don't you think?

mey2• 14 years ago

I guess what do you perceive the value proposition of their software? Is it worth $49/mo?

twelvechairs2• 14 years ago

Simple maths: Subscription to new CS6 photoshop, $20/mo. Current cost of Photoshop CS5 standalone from amazon, $578. How much time do I have to use the standalone version for before it becomes more effective than the cloud one?

[EDIT] 28 months (original post said 28 weeks. apologies for my bad maths and thanks to all those who corrected me.) [/EDIT]

JoshTriplett• 14 years ago

> Simple maths: Subscription to new CS6 photoshop, $20/mo. Current cost of Photoshop CS5 standalone from amazon, $578. How many weeks do I have to use the standalone version for before it becomes more effective than the cloud one? 28.

Months, not weeks. You'd have to use the standalone version for 2 years and 4 months before it became more cost effective. And that assumes that a new version doesn't come out in that time.

runako2• 14 years ago

>> You'd have to use the standalone version for 2 years and 4 months before it became more cost effective.

You'd have to use it continuously for that time. If you use Photoshop less frequently, ownership makes even less sense. For example, I use Photoshop maybe every few months. It would take me a lot of years of $30/mo to get to $578. And I'd be happier with Adobe when I got there, because I'd be on a current version of the software.

I hope they don't mess this up with crappy DRM, like in their standalone CS editions.

twelvechairs2• 14 years ago

Oops. My bad. Thanks for the correction! :)

Looks like it could be a very sensible option then! At least, if you feel like you are going to need all the latest features of the newest version of photoshop and can't just 'make do' with CS5.

daeken4• 14 years ago

Err, you mixed up your units. It takes 28 months for the break-even point, not weeks. That's damn near two and a half years of use before it makes sense to buy it outright.

saturn• 14 years ago

I think you mixed up months and weeks. The period is actually 28.9 months, ie. almost two and a half years.

I think it's pretty attractive, especially considering updates will likely be automatically included in the subscription.

abrimo• 14 years ago

That's 28 months - not weeks. So assuming you would normally upgrade every 2.5 years then it's about the same cost. If they release a new version each year then the subscription service would win easily.

More importantly, creative suite is now affordable for a huge range of people. Freelancers, students and small businesses can now afford a legal and full version.

greggman• 14 years ago

The upgrade is usually $200 or less. So $20 a month is way more expensive than it is now. Assuming I upgrade every 2 years that's $200 to upgrade outright or $480 at $20 a month.

pg2• 14 years ago

This could be an opportunity for a startup. Adobe is going to lose what was previously their lowest tier of price discrimination: people using pirated copies. I don't know if this is the case, but if a significant number of young illustrators (high school students say) currently start out using pirated copies of Photoshop, then there is an opportunity for someone else to capture all those users, and potentially keep them as they start to have money.

daeken4• 14 years ago

While I'm sure there's still some (possibly even a lot -- it's a big market) opportunity there, Adobe is the 500lb gorilla in the space, and they're trying to capture the low end. It seems like the opportunities in this space for a startup just dropped significantly.

replax• 14 years ago

While I agree with you to some extend, there also was a student edition of PS for I think around 200bucks, which offered a reasonable alternative and was regularly subject to various discounts.

I think the subscription model may be good for businesses, because they could always be on the latest version without having to go through a new approval process etc.

However, for private users the barrier to entry will generally not be lowered I believe. At least not for the occasional amateur photographer/graphic designer/video guy. Many people buy PS once and are on e.g. version 'CS' and stay there for a rather long time. They might try the new thing out, but can always fall back because they "own" a copy and can use it as they please. People do not think as rational about it, the security to always have a fallback is worth a lot apparently.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

Are you suggesting people build alternatives to the Adobe suite? That's not something a startup can just do, there are alternatives that have been around for 5+ years and do not come close to the power of the Adobe suite, for anyone to compete they'll need to be better than all the current free alternatives which isn't something someone can do with 6 months of work.

There is definitely room for someone to compete with Adobe, but whether anyone ever can is what matters, there's a reason Photoshop is so widely used when there are free alternatives.

ssp• 14 years ago

Is there an identifiable set of users who use only a subset of what Creative Suite provides? If so, supporting that subset better than CS could be a possibility.

shuzchen• 14 years ago

I think it can still be done. Corel's options for vector and photo editors still get business, and quark express competed with indesign for a long time (assuming the reason it died was because they failed to keep innovating, not because indesign's position is insurmountable). There are yet tons of video editing software options to compete with Premiere.

When I look at the free/open source solutions (gimp, scribus, inkscape), what I see are tools made by engineers. I think if you injected in a good measure of input from designers and usability experts it'd go a long way towards being solid competition.

adrianhoward4• 14 years ago

You don't have to replace all of Adobe CS to compete with Adobe CS.

Not many of the folk I know with CS actually use the vast majority of it. For example I do almost no print work. All the stuff Adobe sweat over for the print folk - doesn't impact me in the slightest. In fact it gets in the way of the stuff I need to do since it adds complexity to the UI.

In the Mac land a bunch of folk are switching to paid tools like Pixelmator and Acorn as alternatives to Photoshop for some work. They don't replace everything that PS dues, but offer what a subset of the PS audience needs for a substantially cheaper price with some arguably better functionality in a few places. I know people who have CS and Pixelmator, and spend most of their time in the latter and just bring up CS when they need something "clever". Both Pixelmator and Acorn seem to be doing very well for themselves - and I think both are still single developer shops.

What nobody apart from Adobe seems to be really doing is the "suite" part - managing the integration well. For example - I would part with $200 in a heartbeat for a micro-suite that handled bitmap and vector work together to the same level that Pixelmator managed bitmap stuff, with some nice glue/plugins to support where I work (web apps, mobile apps, pushing out multiple resolution versions, etc.).

pg2• 14 years ago

(Incidentally, an idea with these types of objections to it tends to be a good startup idea.)

6ren• 14 years ago

They've turned a blind eye to piracy for years, not taking obvious steps to curb it. It's said to be for the reasons you state. Adobe has a solid track record over decades of knowing when to hold and when to let go, way back to the fonts for their first product, postscript. For flash, they adroitly opened it to foil open alternatives just as they started to get traction. Although the founders are gone, this is a essential issue across their stable of products - a little like J&J or Procter & Gamble or Nestle in this, they've demonstrated they know how to manage their franchises.

They will continue to offer a shrink-wrapped version according to the article. Even if this wasn't needed for customers who still want it (perhaps jacking up the price, for offline access, security, privacy), it would be worth keeping just for the reasons you state (for piracy).

reneherse2• 14 years ago

I think there might be more of an opportunity for software that facilitates what Adobe's graphics software is used for but was never designed for: The work flow from site mockup to finished graphics, fonts, markup, CSS, and JS.

The reality is that the work flow of developing an interactive screen kind of still sucks. The process is basically ad hoc, tools are unintuitive and unoptimized.

At one time, Fireworks may have been a step in the right direction, but it's the neglected stepchild of the Adobe line, and I anticipate its continual decline...

radley3• 14 years ago

The Creative Cloud is optional at this point - customers can still pay for a regular upgrade. As such, a file of some sort would get out.

inkaudio• 14 years ago

Adobe offers their software at a much lower rate to high schools, collges and their students. The liberal arts classes with computers have Adobe suite. Web design teachers teach almost exclusively using Adobe software. If you are a high school student majoring in art or design in the U.S more than likely you will have no cost access to Adobe software at your school. This business model has serve Adobe well for years.

lbotos• 14 years ago

Yeah, Adobe pushes CS like a drug; They get you hooked in high school when it's free and make you pony up a nice chunk of change when you're hooked and need it to make your livelihood.

J3L2404• 14 years ago

I think you have that backwards. Using a pirated copy of Photoshop means it is part of their toolset and if they get hired by a legitmate company that is what they will want to use. By the way does YCombinator encourage the use of pirated software?

bigphishy• 14 years ago

They can always use cs5 and below..

kylelibra3• 14 years ago

I'd like to believe there is a market need for a cheap Photoshop Light. $99 or something low for a version of Photoshop that has 90% of the features removed. Just the most basic ones for the average user left in. I get the sense that most people who pirate Photoshop and make the rest of us endure the terrible DRM are only pirating the $600 piece of software to rotate and crop images because nothing else is out there.

theallan• 14 years ago

That's the corner of the market that Photoshop Elements ( http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop-elements.html ) is targeting is it not? $99 as you suggest!

pkmays• 14 years ago

Photoshop Elements is actually a totally different product. Someone who's very comfortable with the Photoshop workflow might not like Elements at all.

There actually was a Photoshop Light: Photoshop LE. I got a free copy of Photoshop 5.5 LE along with a Wacom tablet. It really was a stripped down Photoshop. Imagine someone had sprinkled #ifdef PHOTOSHOP_LE everywhere and then said "Ship it!"

It was nearly the perfect product for me. The only really annoying limitation was working with a single step of undo/redo. I taught me to be very deliberate with my brush strokes. :D

TorbjornLunde• 14 years ago

Pixelmator, Acorn, GIMP and Paint.NET does pretty much this.

Pixelmator has a UI that rivals Photoshop in many areas.

mattmanser• 14 years ago

I haven't tried Pixelmator or Acorn, but GIMP and Paint.Net are not very good.

They're ok for totally free, but are a pain in the ass to use or missing some fairly obvious things (e.g. being able to set the radius of a rounded corner in Paint.Net).

And I say that as someone who rarely uses them, I can't imagine how annoying they are for proper designers.

tga2• 14 years ago

You rent music until iTunes shuts down, you rent books until Amazon decides to take them back, now it's heavy software that you only get to keep as long as Adobe says it's OK.

I still occasionally use a copy of Corel Draw/PhotoPaint 11 that came out in 2002. You know what? It works great and does 99% of what I'd use Illustrator/Photoshop for, and I don't have to keep forking money on it. In fact, I expect to be able to use it just as well 10 years from now.

I think Adobe is fighting their biggest competitor here: themselves (like Microsoft and other large software providers). There is little they can keep adding to justify the upgrade, so they are instead making sure you can't hang on to that old copy you're used to.

At least they're charging upfront for the same thing and not messing with the toolbars (ahem ribbon ahem) to claim they've added something worthwhile..

X-Istence• 14 years ago

I don't rent music from iTunes at all. Once I purchase it and the bits are on my hard drive I can back them up as I please, I can listen to them as I please and since they don't have DRM I can share them however I want.

If iTunes were to shut down tomorrow all of my music purchased from iTunes would continue to function.

tga2• 14 years ago

Good point, I'm a few years behind with that. Movies from iTunes are still protected though, right?

seanalltogether• 14 years ago

Does this mean Fireworks is dead? I've always preferred it over Photoshop for creating web/clientside assets.

RossM• 14 years ago

Fireworks is still listed as part of the suite (as is Flash).

cageface• 14 years ago

Fireworks is there but doesn't seem to have received a lot of attention.

It's a pity. I find it far more useful for the work I do than any of the other suite apps.

mbylstra• 14 years ago

neither photoshop nor fireworks are ideal for creating websites. Some features in fireworks are great but it's missing some important stuff that give photoshop the edge. it will be interesting to see how Adobe Muse turns out in practice.

Schlaefer• 14 years ago

It got a modest update. Nothing earth shattering, but quit useful:

http://www.adobe.com/content/dotcom/en/products/fireworks/fe...

http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks/buying-guide-version...

herf• 14 years ago

Photoshop upgrades usually cost <$200, and most people I know skip versions. I think at best Adobe has shipped a version each 18mo (sometimes 2 years).

So Photoshop "upgraders" have paid $10/mo in the past, and this is just $5 if you skip versions. $20 is quite a bit more. But I guess it's cheaper for the first year, so maybe new users will like that.

davidjade2• 14 years ago

Adobe is moving to a yearly release cycle going forward, with a major/minor tick-tok.

They've also made version skipping uneconomical going forward with the elimination of upgrade pricing for all those except the most recent version owners:

http://www.adobe.com/products/creativesuite/faq.html#upgrade...

SpaceDragon• 14 years ago

I use Dreamweaver practically everyday, it's industry leading software, but it's not irreplaceable.

I've tried Microsoft's Expression software and feel is a viable alternative for a one-time price of $79 smackers.

If I get an itch to upgrade, it won't be to rent Adobe software.

nopassrecover2• 14 years ago

Dreamweaver is an industry standard? I don't know of anyone working web dev using dreamweaver (I've always thought of it as a teaching/hobbyist tool akin to, though obviously better than, FrontPage).

jonah6• 14 years ago

It's the only visual web tool I've seen which generates clean HTML/CSS.

Dreamweaver sits right next to Sublime Text 2 in my toolbox and is great for visual layouts. (Saves a lot of typing.) I then switch over to Sublime or something else to hook them up.

astrodust2• 14 years ago

It's not $79/mo. if you have to pay annually. It's $948 per year. The $49/mo. price point should be the month-to-month price. That's a no brainer. Layout out $1000 in one hit is asking too much when the full purchase price is only a few hundred more.

adrianhoward4• 14 years ago

It's not a few hundred more if you want everything in the cloud offering.

Creative Cloud gives you many more applications than the CS Master suite - which is $2600. See http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/22/adobe-officially-unveils-cs...

If you just use The Design Standard suite it's a waste... if you use most of the Adobe products and upgrade regularly it's probably a saving.

astrodust2• 14 years ago

That's an interesting point. All I really want is Illustrator, Photoshop and maybe InDesign.

radley3• 14 years ago

The only critical benefit I see to CS6 is (hopefully) compatibility with OSX Lion's new app management scheme.

I'm curious to see if/how this catches on. Most creative professionals have already paid for CS so it's more cost effective to upgrade than subscribe, especially if they're doing the skip-every-other-version approach. The only market this works for are enterprise customers who need this kind of payment process.

Perhaps the next generation or two will adopt subscriptions, but I'm skeptical. Like Paul said, if CS becomes subscription only, most new designers will look for something pirateble and/or affordable first.

davidjade2• 14 years ago

Except Adobe killed upgrade pricing if you skip versions now. Only CS5 and 5.5 owners get upgrade pricing for CS6.

There is a temporary reprieve for CS 3 & 4 owners until the end of 2012 (they backtracked somewhat after user feedback). After that only the most recent previous version get upgrade pricing going forward - everyone else pays full price.

This effectively kills version skipping as for the suites you'd typically have to skip 3-4 versions to spend less than $50/month overall in the end.

radley3• 14 years ago

Hardly.

If you've paid for CS5.5 Master Collection, your total upgrade cost is $549.

Even if you've only paid for CS2 Design Standard, the upgrade cost is $1399.

Considering a two-year subscription cycle costs $1200-$1900, it's more cost effective to upgrade.

If you're short term, subscriptions are probably ok. But if you're committed long term they're a HUGE risk.

galfarragem2• 14 years ago

I don't know if "pirates" are aware of it but the cloud will change pirated software game. Not on audio (that's why audio industry keep on complaining) but on top software for sure (we don't listen them complaining..). Free use of top software will have hard times. Is this good?

ed2092• 14 years ago

um... or $75/Month if you are in the UK http://cl.ly/0W0O1T23121r0O0d0g0j

adrianhoward4• 14 years ago

The UK figure is inclusive of VAT. The US figure is exclusive of sales tax.

So the ex-VAT figure would really be about $62. So only about $12 on top - and a chunk of that 12 will disappear dealing with hedging exchange rate nonsense.

paulofisch• 14 years ago

Even accounting for VAT@20% this is still a £9 price increase over the US price. It's not that hard to put the 'u' back in color.

ed2092• 14 years ago

although they seem to be charing a VAT rate of 23% http://cl.ly/1g382s2t1P290Y0i2V3S - which I can't see any reference to in the VAT rates guide for the UK http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/vat/forms-rates/rates/rates.htm

mark_l_watson• 14 years ago

I think that this is a really good idea. $588/year is expensive for hobbyists but not for serious amateurs and professionals. The online storage and iPad integration for editing while travelling also looks great.

A little off topic, but one of the architects of Creative Cloud called me a couple of months ago, mainly to talk about Clojure vs. Java development, and that got me interested in Creative Cloud.

I probably won't be a customer though: I have invested a lot of time learning Final Cut Pro 7 and the combination of expense and the getting up to speed time is a deal breaker for me.

pclark• 14 years ago

I paid for Photoshop 6, and then CS1 and CS3.

I'll happily pay $29/mo (and even $49/mo) for the Creative Suite. I think that a lot of people under estimate the power of Photoshop and the other applications -- there is no alternative because nothing robustly imports and exports as .psd files. Photoshop especially is an example of a Microsoft Office esque product in that every designer I know uses Photoshop in a subtly different manner, making it nearly impossible for anyone to create a "Photoshop killer." I also secretly love Fireworks, despite it not being updated for about six years.

I have always thought Adobe did a pretty good job at combatting piracy, especially in the more recent CS versions: it really is a lot of work to pirate the applications now.

The applications are total trash to use though if you're anyone other than someone that is not technically sophisticated save for growing up in the Adobe world. (designers, basically.)

Adobe Officially Unveils CS6, $49/Month All-Inclusive Subscription Service

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