Goodbye Photoshop

[texkam]

Steve,
I understand what you are getting at, but disagree. The quickest way to kill a brand is to piss off it's loyal customers. Ask JCPenney.

Read and learn: J.C. Penney ad addresses ?mistakes,? says co. learned to listen to customers - The Washington Post

 

[Jad]

Well considering that i'm already subscribed, that means I get new updates and more features! Woohoo!

As someone who makes about half their total income off photography and photo related services, the creative cloud has been a no-brainer addition to my workflow.

-Offsite backup of files
-Two licenses which can be used simultaneously (workstation PC / Tech MBP)
-Guaranteed latest versions
-Use of just about all their software
-Better support
-$24 cheaper than Photoshop by itself (as of 5/6/2013 on Amazon.com)
-PLUS, it's a tax write-off!


The only people b*tching about this are the folks who don't make money in photography.

Yeah that is right I don't make much money off of my photography so what does that make me? Inferior to you I guess. You are currently paying Adobe a monthly subscription just to use your current software you have already bought and paid for. The only thing you bought is 2 gigs of cloud space. There is no new software release with this new creative cloud program. Why buy it if there is no new product involved. Of course you have the money from all of the photography you are selling, so it is a no brainer.

 

[sleist]

This is the future of software. I don't like it much, but new PC's aren't selling enough to drive new software development and sales like they used to.
People used to get significant increases in computing power with each upgrade cycle and software developers were happy to add bloat - er, features -to use up all that extra power and call it an upgrade.
It worked in the opposite direction as well. Huge increases in software capability drove the need to upgrade hardware as well as software.
The upgrade curve is leveling out and so are sales. Something has to give.

 

[manaheim]

I don't even have a problem with the subscription model exactly, but I do have a problem with unreasonable prices.

Figure if I had to pay that kind of money for every major package on my system... let's see... that would be...

$30 per month for Windows, $30 per month for Photoshop, $30 per month for Illustrator, $30 a month for Office (I could easily argue a single office app should be considered one major one, and I use Word and Excel a lot... oh and Outlook).

That's $120 a month just for my PC. $1,440 a year? I don't think most people have that kind of money to spend yearly on their systems.

Oh and don't forget my wife's system...

Oh and don't forget I have two daughters who will need laptops soon...

Oh and I have a good 5-10 games and a good 5-10 utilities and smaller apps on here, so we'll need to factor those in...

It just gets totally unreasonable after a while. If this continues down the road it's on you're going to see alternatives start to show up and people will begrudgingly move to them (despite their shortcomings) because they'll have no other reasonable choice.

GIMP has the worst interface on the planet... but for $360 a year, I can deal with it if I have to.

 

[amolitor]

Various people: google google google

You're not a customer of google's, you're the product. The customers are the advertisers. Also, they spend a LOT of time throwing their "products" under the bus.

 

[amolitor]

Gee, it's almost as if there has to be some sort of BALANCE between customer satisfaction and revenue. There might even be some lines, of opposite slopes, that cross at some point.

None of your blokes are exactly gonna get an invite to an endowed chair at Harvard Business School, are ya?

 

[amolitor]

And finally: The Cloud is just mainframe computing all over again, complete with leased everything. Welcome to 1975 again. It went away after a while. The great wheel of software turns and turns. This is largely because persuading everyone that the status quo sucks is the way you sell everyone new stuff.

 

[manaheim]

Gee, it's almost as if there has to be some sort of BALANCE between customer satisfaction and revenue. There might even be some lines, of opposite slopes, that cross at some point.

None of your blokes are exactly gonna get an invite to an endowed chair at Harvard Business School, are ya?

I don't begrudge them trying it... and if it works the world of software is going to become a very rich place for me... and my career.

But I do think there is a line somewhere and they've drawn it a lot closer to the big business and the question is how many sales of end consumers will be lost? And if they care?

I once worked for a software company that had 75% of their web traffic coming in from Asia... and 5% of their sales. Needless to say when I had to choose a web acceleration vendor, and the one that worked best out of all of them in Asia (and was most expensive) was Akamai... I chose the one that was less good with Asia and cost me about 1/10th the price.

In business you have to make these decisions and someone is gonna yell and complain... the question is... again...do you care? Maybe Adobe doesn't.

 

[ronlane]

I think that Adobe does care but someone has them drinking the cool-aid thinking that the best thing that they can deliver is a subscription where everyone gets to keep the latest greatest version of it's software.

I still have mixed feelings about this since I purchased LR4 and PSE11 in the last year. I don't need to upgrade for a while (but I like some of the features in the beta LR5) so I have time to sort it out and see how things play out.

 

[bhop]

The only people b*tching about this are the folks who don't make money in photography.

well.. yeah..

 

[manaheim]

The only people b*tching about this are the folks who don't make money in photography.

well.. yeah..

That's QUITE a few people.

 

[jamesbjenkins]

The only people b*tching about this are the folks who don't make money in photography.

And silly me, here I was thinking I was "b*tching" about this (read: expressing perfectly legitimate frustration about a fundamental shift in their business model) and I make quite a nice secondary income from my photography.

Nice try with the over-generalization fallacy though.

 

[Tiller]

I agree with manaheim. I don't think the cloud service is a bad idea, I just don't like it being my only choice.

 

[pixmedic]

The only people b*tching about this are the folks who don't make money in photography.

well.. yeah..

That's QUITE a few people.

Really? Im honestly not seeing the correlation between being successful, and wanting to incur a mandatory monthly charge. What if Matco or Snap On used this same business model? Would every mechanic be happy with it? And would do it yourself mechanics be ridiculed for liking to have the ability to own the tools they use? Why is it so difficult to believe that there are successful photographers that want to purchase their software outright and only upgrade when they feel it absolutely necessary? Adobe will do what they feel is in the best interest of the company, and the consumers will have the same option they have always had. Use the product or not.

 

[jamesbjenkins]

As much as I want to get flaming mad about this, the simple fact is that it won't affect me much at all. And I suspect it won't affect a great many "smaller" photographers who predominantly use LR in their post work.

How many of you guys are like me? Be honest. My workflow is 90-95% LR and then I finish up the "heavy" edits in Photoshop CS6. Now, with the new Lightroom 5 (which won't be restricted to the cloud AFAIK) including a true cloning/healing brush, radial gradient tool and the improved RAW support, the develop module in LR5 will more or less duplicate ACR.

There goes two of my biggest reasons for ever visiting Photoshop. So, all that to say, I imagine I'll be perfectly content to rock Lightroom 5 and Photoshop CS6 for a LONG time to come. Definitely long enough for the market to provide a high quality alternative to Adobe Slavery. (I'm looking at you, Google/Nik).