I am hardly an Adobe evangelist and was on the side of Apple when Jobs took them to task over their crap-ware Flash. However I have become dismayed over the recent complaints from the artistic community about how unfair it is that Adobe decided to drop its Create Suite collection and opted to only sell its Creative Cloud online service.
For some background I found this article from Adobe’s Keynote at MAX Creative Conference, reading though the comments you can get a pretty good idea about how polarized this issue is. It even sparked this blog Animation Insider to offer alternatives to photoshop (albeit missing the most common one GIMP).
The main argument is it’s too expensive for us poor artists. As the first article pointed out, if you are fine with the CS Suite that you have, keep it, no need to upgrade. However, if you are like me and need to be on the cutting edge of every update and your job expects you to use the latest features then yes, you will need to buy in on Adobe’s new program.
Is it expensive? No not really when you consider that most artists in the subset who need to buy the full Adobe Suite probably have internet. Internet can cost anywhere from $30 a month to $60 a month, how can Adobe CC be that much worse? Many artists also have at least $16 a month in subscriptions between Hulu and Netflix (Many who are also shirking cable). If that is what you spend on entertainment, $49 a month becomes far less onerous.
Those complaining about cost were not complaining about forking over $2400 for the entire Master Collection so why are you complaining about $600 a year? Do you actually own it, or did someone ‘lend it’ to you? It sounds more like “Oh its going to be so much harder to get it off of Pirate Bay now”. That $600 a month is a full 100% tax write off, if you are paying taxes at the end of the year and owing the IRS then buy this, add it in as a deduction and you will have to pay less or even get a refund.
Artists need to realize something, this is the cost of doing business. If you worried about having to buy your software, congratulations you just grew up. If you now need to spend an extra $600 a year that you didn’t expect, consider charging more or assessing a software fee to your clients. This is not some awful burden that you alone will need to suffer though. This is the model many companies will start to adopt so you will just need to suck it up and move on.
UPDATE Just a note, if you are migrating from an older version of CS to CC you only pay $39.99 a month. Also note there is a petition going on now at Change.org
yeah but still