http://forums.adobe.com/community/creative_cloud?view=discussions
The range of issues with Adobe’s Creative Cloud is, to be blunt, simply staggering. Users can’t even install updates consistently. Updates change where or how certain tools are accessed (destroying months or years of muscle memory). Or remove former features and its difficult to find release notes. Customers having all sorts of issues and not knowing where to find consistent (and accurate) information. A single business model that makes it difficult if not impossible for certain business organizations to even engage with. People in low-bandwidth areas who now have to download monstrous application files over a constrained connection – and pay for that connection as well. Oh and if the licensing server goes down when your license needs to check…fun times I hear. And other issues.
I think there’s cool services Adobe can provide with a “cloud” offering – but their current “subscription-only” approach is probably going to result in some golden parachute openings – too much ill-will and trouble generated with the cloud-only subscription approach.
The better approach in my opinion would have been to:
- Do a maintenance-type subscription model, a la Autodesk.
- Keep working on developing compelling cloud features and make sure they work! The current issues CC subscribers have experienced is just inexcusable for a pro-level tool set only available through subscription.
- Another alternative would be something like this: After a 3 year subscription is completed (or whatever is a good consumer and Adobe friendly period of time), provide the subscriber a frozen snapshot of the Creative Cloud tools at that point of time and give them a permanent license to use that toolset. This would stop the currently accurate perception that one’s work files would be “held hostage” by failing to pay the Adobe “tax” (i.e. failure to re-subscribe would leave your work orphaned and uneditable.)
I’ll just leave it at that.