Adobe: Eliminate the mandatory "creative cloud" subscription model

https://www.change.org/petitions/adobe-systems-incorporated-eliminate-the-mandatory-creative-cloud-subscription-model

by 19_ploT • 13 years ago

14 14 13 years ago

nwh• 13 years ago

A few commenters on here mentioned in another thread that they would buy it for a month and see. Bear in mind that there's a years contract hidden away in the terms and conditions, otherwise it's $75 and not the advertised $50 per month.

nemothekid• 13 years ago

I don't really understand the rationale of petitioning a corporation to change the price of their products. Why should Adobe gut their business to support yours?

If you don't like what Adobe is doing, vote with your wallet. If it turns out businesses really can't afford to pay Adobe what they are asking, they will see that in your bottom line and react accordingly. Thats how you make a stand, not by making a petition. If you need Adobe's products, then you should work that into your costs accordingly. Charge your clients more to make up the costs.

Adobe may be robbing small business, but at the same time the thailand floods destroyed factories and caused the prices of HDDs to go up. Does it really make sense for me to petition Seagate's decision to increase their prices?

At the end of the day its really your fault for putting all your eggs in one basket. I'm not saying its wrong to depend on corporation x, but you should be aware that they are the ones controlling the pricing.

neya3• 13 years ago

While this answer is spot-on, I'm sorry to say that this doesn't work with major players who hold a monopolistic advantage because they make some of the best/most used products.

As a designer, I think this is a nightmare scenario for my fellow designers and artists. Most of the professional designers have been very early adopters of Adobe because the alternatives simply aren't comparable enough. Because, if there were, that's what we'd be using right now.

Can you suggest me a good alternative for Photoshop? GIMP?? It doesn't support several things that is possible on Photoshop, - (edited out because of my ignorance) for example.

This is a case of Monopoly and hence this petition and I think it's entirely valid. Imagine if Microsoft/Apple one fine day decide to charge you for detecting additional RAM that you install on your PC, using their OS. Something like that.

tadfisher• 13 years ago

> GIMP?? It doesn't support several things that is possible on Photoshop, - content aware fill, for example.

While I am sure the GIMP doesn't support many features that Adobe does, that is a really poor example: http://blog.patdavid.net/2012/08/getting-around-in-gimp-heal...

mvanveen• 13 years ago

As someone who recently plunked down for his first (and apparently last!) legitimate/non-cloud Photosohp license, I totally feel your pain!

I think there's a really important point about why Adobe's pissing of it's core cutomer base that people are missing here. All things being equal, it doesn't seem rational for a brand to just piss off it's customers for profit, as it's a bad long-term strategy that will severely damage the brand value/equity.

Perhaps it's because of the implied illegality, but I want to speak to the elephant in the room and offer that simply ignoring the fact that there is a massive market of pirated Adobe Photoshop copies seems to be providing an incomplete picture.

I'm speculating, but willing to posit that the amount of Adobe Photoshop piracy will increase as a result of this decision. Does design major Tim really want to shell out money for the creative cloud to get his weekend project off the ground? I think it's intuitive that this increased piracy would make Adobe less money, but I think the counter is true. They've clearly adopted this strategy because they think they're on to something and any marketing idiot would realize this would piss off their core base, get legit users to pirate, etc. So why would they do it?

Professionals like yourself and myself shelling out money for legitimate Photoshop copies are burdened by the fact that this tremendous amount of piracy exists. Pirates will be pirates, so it's unlikely that you're going to get a pirate to switch their behavior and suddenly gain a new customer; thus I suspect Photoshop's got a finite supply of legitimate photoshop customers, and while it could even be increasing over time it might not be growing at a rate that is in-line with performance expectations (e.g. the adoption curve has hit some inflection point). If Adobe wants to get more money out of Photoshop sales, it's got to look to its existing customer base and find ways of excising more funds overall, and hopefully with more regularity.

I'm not arguing that this piracy isn't effective; indeed, many users are likely legitimate users of Photoshop now exactly because pirated copies made Photoshop training so available despite the high cost for a professional license. I'm not even trying to even make any claims about the ethics involved in piracy.

I'm simply saying that Adobe's business model likely has to look at its adoption rates and its quarterly revenues, and might only see a few options given the reality of the situation. I think this could signal why it doesn't matter that Adobe is pissing off their core base of customers. These customers don't have any viable alternative as you've stressed, so they're locked into the feudalism of Adobe, who's really left with no other monetization strategy other than squeezing out more from existing customers than it can.

jakejake• 13 years ago

The subscription price is probably a little more expensive than if you were to outright purchase every new release. But you don't have to cough up $600 or whatever to buy it initially either.

If you're a professional designer and must have the industry standard tools, this doesn't seem like a nightmare scenario to me to pay $19/month for Photoshop.

coldtea• 13 years ago

>I don't really understand the rationale of petitioning a corporation to change the price of their products. Why should Adobe gut their business to support yours?

Because some times negative publicity (petitioning, nagging, blog posts, etc) work just as well as "voting with your wallet".

Especially when a monopoly position ensures you cannot easily "vote with your wallet", since you need the damn thing anyway.

mistercow• 13 years ago

Petitions are great for rallying people around a cause, but remember: the only message Adobe is going to hear is the one you send (or don't send) from your wallet.

etiam• 13 years ago

I wonder if there may be a streak of good news to this policy change. If Adobe make their CS software effectively unavailable to most individuals and small companies then there should be even more incentive and resources available for usability design and features of the (free and open) alternatives.

mathnode• 13 years ago

If you can't afford £50 a month for a software license. I doubt your ability as a "freelancer" or business owner. That is a very small price to pay for software which is your bread and butter.

Adobe: Eliminate the mandatory "creative cloud" subscription model

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