| Joined: | Thu May 10th, 2012 |
| Location: | Colorado USA |
| Posts: | 21 |
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Actually, I had little problem paying $200 to upgrade for the past three versions of CS3, CS4 and CS5. My wife wasn't too happy at the cost, but I pointed out that I made much more money than $200 from real estate photos, per year. A tool is worth what you use it for, not what you pay for it... and Photoshop is very definitely the best tool. But I also prefer not to be treated like a thief, and I prefer not to support a business model that costs me MORE money while not giving me something in return.
You got the entire suite, and I envy you somewhat for the power it places in your hands. Even more important, I envy you the fun of doing MORE fun stuff !
Adobe makes very good tools, and certainly, Photoshop is the gold standard for pro photographers. I just don't see this Cloud solution as a good idea for their bottom line, even though I acknowledge that they know far more about it than I do, and most likely they WILL end up making more money. If I were a full-on pro photographer, the whole suite might make more sense, video is becoming very important in real estate. I might even end up eating my words, if Adobe continues to allow people to upgrade the simple way to new versions of Photoshop. I'm still a bit peeved about them refusing to issue a fix for these new exploit possibilities, but that's not really related to the Cloud model.
Cloud computing has a place in the world, certainly, with collaboration between multiple authors or content creators. So far, I have not seen this being promoted as such, by Adobe. In ten years, who knows? Maybe by that point, Adobe will have integrated the entire CS suite into a single 50GB (installed) application. All I do is still photography, though I may dabble in video with a new camera, it'll be as a complete amateur.
As for greed... sure, Wall Street and bankers worldwide are far better targets of contempt. But, I don't actually have much to do with them, excepting the fallout of their fraudulent practices. Had Adobe decided to charge $5 a month for Photoshop alone, on a discount for upgrading from a previous version and a two year prepaid subscription, it would cost $120, and I could see millions of hobbyist Photoshop users joining up, saving 80 bucks. But that's a pipe dream, at this point. Adobe has the right to price their products any way they want to, I agree. My question is, why price the Cloud version to cost $480 over two years, vs the $200 a simple upgrade would cost? There must be very few people like me, who use only Photoshop, and none of the other pro apps in the Creative Suite. Conversely, there must be a LOT of people like you, who want access to the whole shebang, and Adobe is obviously aware of it.
I think their decisions will cost them money and users of Photoshop alone, but quite possibly they'll make that money back, and garner more users, with the whole Suite users. Looking back, I was pretty unhappy with a couple of the version changes that Adobe made, where they didn't deliver on the promises and the hype they generated. Still, I wanted a couple of new features, and just resigned myself to the reality of software marketing. I don't fault you one bit for signing up for the Cloud model, it does make sense if you use several parts of the Creative Suite. I just posted in another thread, I may actually go ahead and buy the upgrade to CS6, since Gimp is free, but I sure am going to continue to teach myself Gimp, in preparation for the future world of Adobe upgrades that I believe will be forced on their users. Paying $480 for Photoshop alone, with dubious promises of updates, fixes and new tools, more than double the cost of the normal upgrade? Not likely.
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