Adobe Officially Unveils CS6 And Its $49/Month All-Inclusive Creative Cloud Subscription Service

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Adobe Officially Unveils CS6 And Its $49/Month All-Inclusive Creative Cloud Subscription Service

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

Today is a big day for Adobe. Not only is the company officially unveiling the next versions of virtually all of the applications in its Creative Suite, but Adobe is also launching its Creative Cloud online offerings. This marks a major change in how Adobe is selling and marketing its flagship product: while the company will continue to offer a shrink-wrapped version of CS6, it’s also introducing a subscription service with this update. For $49/month with an annual subscription or $79/month for month-to-month memberships, users can now get full access to any CS6 tool, including Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and AfterEffects. The suite will also include Adobe’s new HTML5 design and development tools Muse and Edge, and will be deeply integrated into the company’s tablet apps. Users will be able to download and install these apps on up to two machines.

Photoshop, the most popular application in the suite, will also be available through a stand-alone subscription for $19.99/month with an annual membership and $29.99 without.

Adobe will also offer a student and teacher edition of Creative Cloud for $29.99/month. Current CS3, CS4 and CS5.5 users will qualify for a special introductory offer of $29.99/month. In the coming months, Adobe will also launch a version of Creative Cloud for teams, though the price for this one hasn’t been determined yet.

Oddly enough, the company hasn’t announced an actual launch date for these updates and new services yet. According to today’s announcement, however, these products “are scheduled to be available within 30 days.”

[FSogol]

1. Oh yeah? Adobe should pay me $49.99 a month for making me update their "products" every 20 minutes.

[HappyMe]

3. lol!

Yeah, it's a pain in the ass for sure.

I don't pay for anything but the internet connection.

[originalpckelly]

4. This is stuff you'd have to pay thousands of dollars to get.

$50 a month over the same time period is a steal of a deal.

They must have number that they will pull in all the people who pirate the software and get them to actually use it.

[TheWraith]

11. Or you could just buy Paint Shop Pro for a one-time-fee of $50.

I never understood why people go so nuts for Photoshop when there are equally powerful alternatives available for a fraction of the price.

[nadinbrzezinski]

13. Because there are a few things that neither paint shop pro

or GIMP (which is free) can do.

Mind you... they are fairly specialized and most regular users would not notice.

But you asked, this is why.

[TheWraith]

14. I get that, but probably 99.9% of Photoshop users won't notice or care.

It's entirely a brand-name based thing.

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. Agreed, but that is why

I know a few people who do use Photoshop to the extreme. It's like Word, it is not necessarily the best Word Processor out there, hell Word Perfect was better. But most users will never be power users. I mean silly basic shit like track changes is not used by 99.9% of users, and that is amazing to me.

Yes, most users would do well with a basic RTF editor, which is free or really cheap. Right now i am using a text editor that can preview Markdown language... and it works GREAT on the netbook... and it saves in txt.

Way too much inside computers here.

[TheWraith]

17. Actually, I use Wordpad for 95% of my word processing.

When I need page layout or spell checking, I launch OpenOffice.

[nadinbrzezinski]

19. But we are not average users

and you could use wordpad to do markdown too. Hell, I could code it, in Word.

I have word. It has it's uses. It actually runs better on the netbook than OO. But it came with it.

I HAD to install it on the Mac though. My husband IS an average user... and he uses it rarely on it for school work.

[MattBaggins]

18. Vi and LaTeX are all anyone should ever need.

[originalpckelly]

2. This is really a big announcement. May change the whole software industry forever.

This is something I see a lot of people using.

They really need to change the pricing, because as they said in the article, it is one of the most heavily pirated apps out there.

I'm split. A lot of what I need is in a sub-$30 app called Pixelmator. The only thing I could see myself using is fireworks, that is if Adobe has actually done anything to update it.

[originalpckelly]

6. The problem from doing the math...

is for people who already own the software. They are going to get hosed someday when Adobe just kills the purchased software, because right now they get it for about $250, if they have the best version with all the apps in there.

In the new system it's $600 a year.

It's a good deal for people who don't own it or could never afford the whole thing all at once, but not for those who can afford it.

It's almost like buying in bulk v. buying just what you need.

[FreeJoe]

8. It's a good deal for me.

I already own the Master Collection. Upgrading would cost me $540. I can subscribe for a year for $360. It will go to $600/year after the first year. So I'm paying a little less and I'm getting more - Muse, storage, Lightroom. I'd like to see more continuously developed software move to a subscription model.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

9. I'm still using Photoshop CS2 and the final Macromedia Studio version (8)

For the vast majority of sites I build, I do a Photoshop comp, slice it in Fireworks, and tewak it in Dreamweaver. There are exceptions, but that's my normal work pattern, and the versions I have do the job I need to do at the moment. None of the upgrades have enticed me to come up with money I don't have right now. Many of the enhancements have been "nice to have, but not essential."

[Safetykitten]

5. Next up for this is AutoCAD, unless Microsoft makes a bid to buy Autodesk.

[originalpckelly]

7. I'd really love to see Cinema 4D or Protools offered this way.

People really need these things to make their lives more creative and interesting, but it's just not affordable.

[Occulus]

12. I do not like this trend at all.

If this is a success, soon we will be paying for subscriptions for the OS itself.

Do. Not. Want.

[Occulus]

10. I'll just stick with GIMP, thanks

And Blender, both of which are free and MORE than powerful enough.

[originalpckelly]

20. Blender is horribly designed.

But then again, I'm a weirdo who likes only 1 menu in his window. Go figure.

GIMP is not at all nice on OS X, and was only passing on Windows when I used to use it.

[Spike89]

15. Just a pain for smaller operations

On the surface, regular improvements/updates to software is a good thing. In practical terms, it is a fiasco and major hurdle for small and mid-sized publishers (and I'm sure for other creative areas). It really isn't too awful hard to keep our in-house staff synchronized, but it is a fair amount of staff time devoted to what is essentially non-producing overhead.
There are two areas where the constant updating is killing us though. The first is archiving and backup. Although each version of inDesign pretty much opens previous versions (at least from the last few years)--there are "opened" files and then there are "opened and as is" files. We often need to reprint a book that may be a year or two old (sometimes older) and it is frustrating to find that subtle "enhancements" in the new versions of CS change the flow of legacy inDesign files. In essence, we need to proof the entire book for weirdness. Of course we use PDFs, but if we have errata, PDFs aren't always an option and we go back to the inDesign file.
The second problem is managing the freelancer pool. As with most publishers, we use a fair number of freelance artists, designers, typesetters, and others who need to be able to open the files we send them, save them and send them back to us. Adobe is pretty good with backward compatibility (CS 5.1 opens 5.0 files seamlessly) but forward compatibility doesn't work (can't open a 5.1 file with 5.0). That means that if all our freelancers are on 5.0, it just makes things difficult for us when we jump to 5.1. We must "save as 5.0" and that means most of the benefits of 5.1 are lost to us AND our designers have to cope with remembering which people have which versions.
What really makes the whole thing extremely frustrating is that there isn't a real payoff from the last few updates. Some nice tweaks sure, but we were capable of producing the same quality books in roughly the same amount of time years ago with CS 3. There is no jumping off the upgrade bandwagon if you deal with outside clients, freelancers, or printers.
Publishers desperately need stability in the versions much more than an overheated upgrade cycle.

[hobbit709]

21. And in a couple of years they'll make more than just selling it outright.

It's like those appliance/TV rental deals.