Category: Applications

Thoughts on cool applications

Wish Adobe would get its head out of the clouds

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.

Creative Cloud: thoughts on why I can’t go there (yet).

By now everyone has seen the news that Adobe is phasing out stand-alone, perpetually licensed software. And they have valid reasons for this change, particularly in regards to services that they can now focus on providing to creative professionals. It also has the added benefit of flattening out income and revenue, making for a more sustainable economic model (for Adobe).

But there’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of questions left to be answered, the danger of creative tools being inaccessible to those who most need it, of subscribers eventually leaving Adobe’s services and having nothing to show for their subscription.

Here are my reasons why I can’t go with Adobe’s Creative Cloud right now.

  1. My employers business model (grant-funded) does not work with the ideas of tools being “subscribed” to. Our funders have the expectation that the tools we use to accomplish the grants they award us with, to be there perpetually after purchase. Our funders only want to purchase tools once. And to them, Adobe’s products are tools, not services.
  2. There’s no multiple-year subscription option (that I’m aware of) with the ability to front-end load the subscription (pay up front). This would help with issue 1 noted above, as we could show the funders we have the tool for at least a guaranteed period of time and they only have to pay once, not multiple times over the lifetime of the project.
  3. I can’t think of a subscription that, after fulfilling the terms of the subscription contract, you did not end up with something that encapsulated the value of your investment. Subscribe to a magazine? Once you’ve quit your subscription, you still have access to the magazines you’ve bought. But buy into the Adobe services and once you stop paying, there’s nothing. Except files that you can no longer edit, or in the worse case, view. I really think there should be a way to get a snapshot of the tools you used up to the end of your subscription. Maybe more of a “rent-to-own” approach.
  4. The mental disconnect of trying to think of tools as a service. While I can appreciate services that provide additional value for my tools, this is just…weird. I’m not sold on it (pun intended).
  5. And then we get into the murky waters of what happens when the service becomes unavailable? If I can’t do my work because Adobe’s licensing servers are down or I can’t use some service essential to complete a project because Adobe’s server room was having a bad day, my clients will be very upset. In fact they may have legal standing (not a lawyer, don’t take this as legal advice, check with your attorney, etc…) to sue Adobe for loss of business essential services. Perhaps Adobe will need to provide a SLA with a certain level of service. Otherwise, why would business’ take the risk? Why would anyone take the risk that their tools may be unavailable? While this one isn’t a major concern of mine, it does add to the unease I have over the Creative Cloud.
  6. At the end of the day, I want to own, not rent, my tools. I need my tools to be there when I need them, I need to be able to upgrade my tools on my own time-table and budget, I need these tools to be “mine”. Creative Cloud just doesn’t provide that assurance. Yet.

This is not meant to bash Adobe or its change of business approach. I think there is great things ahead with the Creative Cloud. But until these concerns are resolved, CS6 is the end of the line for me.