I love Adobe and its products, despite their eccentric UIs, awful installers, and the mystery that is Bridge. The fact is Adobe knows its shit and does it better than anyone else. However, while for many years I considered myself a “power user” of Photoshop and competent enough with Illustrator, the capabilities of Photoshop have long outstripped my needs, and Adobe’s marketing team has done a remarkable job of alienating me with pricing shenanigans.
My first experience with Adobe Software was learning to use Illustrator 88 in a production environment — mainly tracing logos. I was introduced to Barneyscan (the program that became Photoshop) when the multimedia startup I joined acquired a Barneyscan Slide Scanner. We soon discovered that Barneyscan was actually a very capable graphics program that was better for handling 24-bit color images such as scanned photographs than anything else on the market.
Then Fractal Painter and Color Studio came out and, briefly, it was a three horse race. When Photoshop introduced, in quick succession, a better implementation of Painter’s layers and editable text layers, the competition fell by the wayside. Other competitors, e.g. Macromedia’s ill-fated xRes, the amazing Live Picture, and Microsoft’s Expression Studio, came and went.
Despite its many virtues, I couldn’t justify buying my own copy of Photoshop until it started being bundled with scanners. I literally paid $500 for a scanner and didn’t use the scanner in order to get Photoshop 4. Adobe’s upgrade pricing led to my upgrading Photoshop as each new version came out until Adobe got me to upgrade to Creative Suite for not much more than the cost of just upgrading Photoshop, but then made further upgrades horribly expensive (and also made skipping versions very expensive). My last CS purchase was CS4 Web Pro academic (I was working for a University at the time) just after Adobe announced that anyone buying CS4 would receive a free CS5 upgrade.
Over the years, Adobe’s other applications rose and fell in my esteem. I used Premiere for years, and once found After Effects to be an unbeatable combination of power and usability — I haven’t touched either in years, and Apple’s $50 Motion does everything I need. (Indeed, I don’t have any use for Final Cut Pro, either.)
Now Adobe is essentially offering us three options: pay $50/month to get access to all Adobe software, pay $20/month to get access to Photoshop (both require one year commitments, it’s higher if you go month-to-month), or somehow get academic pricing for $20/month to get everything. The plans also come with 100GB of cloud storage (which would cost you $10/month on its own from Dropbox — of course Dropbox’s 100GB is a lot more flexible).
So for me, that means it’s time to kiss Adobe good-bye. (Except for Adobe Ideas of course — I love Adobe Ideas.)
Alternatives to Adobe’s key products
- Photoshop: Acorn (Mac), Photoline (Mac/Windows), Pixelmator (Mac), Paintshop Pro (Windows), Painter (Mac/Windows)
- Illustrator: Inkscape (Mac/Windows/Linux), iDraw (Mac), CorelDRAW (Windows), Intaglio (Mac), Lineform (Mac), Artboard (Mac), ZeusDraw (Mac), EasyDraw (Mac)
- Dreamweaver: a good text editor (e.g. BBEdit (Mac), Sublime Text (Mac/Windows), Vim) or web-centric IDE (e.g. Webstorm (Mac/Windows), Coda(Mac))
- Fireworks: no direct replacements that I know of, but UI-oriented graphics apps like Sketch (Mac) seem like replacements to me.
- InDesign: Pages (Mac), TeX or Latex (Mac/Windows/*nix) or even Quark XPress (Mac/Win).
- After Effects: Motion (Mac), or one of the fire-related products (Inferno, Flame, Flint, Combustion, Smoke, etc.)
- Edge: haven’t used it, but I’m guessing something like Hype (Mac) or learn to use CSS and jQuery.
Chances are, if you’re a hardcore InDesign or After Effects user, you probably pay Adobe $600/year for the privilege and the new pricing policy doesn’t faze you. The problem you need to worry about is just how badly is Adobe going to hurt itself by its new pricing policy, because I suspect that the new pricing policy will convince a lot of people to live without Adobe for as long as possible, which will turn out to be forever.
Adobe is bucking a big trend — software is getting cheaper and more powerful — and a major perception issues — most people hate recurring expenses. See, I can splurge on a big software purchase because I’m flush with cash or have a big check coming in or some kind of weird justification. I don’t think of a $2000 camera purchase as, say, $55/month based on my using the camera for three years. No, I think of it as “can I afford a $2000 camera?” If you tried to sell me a camera that was just as good as my $2000 camera for $55/month with a one year commitment, I’d probably laugh at you. Do I need to pay as much for my camera as I do for cable internet? No way!
I strongly suspect this move by Adobe will be catastrophic. At this point in their old marketing cycle they’d be offering free upgrades to any new buyers of CS6 — instead they will at most be getting a few $50/month subscriptions. Next, they’d be offering time-windowed discounts on the new suite once it shipped. That’s not going to happen. So at best they get slightly more money than they’d have gotten with their old model, only spread out over twelve months. How likely does anyone think this is? I suspect they’ll instead get less money spread over a longer period. And they run the very significant risk of simply losing customers the way, say, Netflix did with its Quickster fiasco. My CS works fine, I’ll think about the Adobe cellphone plan when I need to. The difference here is that, as far as I can tell, time isn’t on Adobe’s side the way it, arguably, was with Netflix. Streaming video on demand is the way of the future, so Netflix (and Hulu) can probably afford to stumble. Adobe is the king of print media and web worst practices — it probably can’t afford too many mistakes.