Adobe In the Cloud

Edit Geek by Dylan Reeve

Today at the Adobe MAX conference Adobe made a very big announcement: Boxed products are dead, as are large versioned releases.

The internet freaked out.

I can only assume that these people don’t understand the model? Now, instead of US$1,700-2,400 for various Adobe Creative Suite packages you pay $49/mth. $600 a year. For almost everything Adobe makes.

For anyone who makes money with their Adobe products this shouldn’t be a big deal, a hour or two of work in a month and you’ve covered your cost. You don’t need to worry about a big expense the next time Adobe release a new version.

Some are complaining about Adobe’s ability to revoke app access – that’s true in a sense, but it’s unlikely. Surely if Adobe, for some reason, decided to stop their Cloud activation services then smart people would work around it. Similarly and always-on internet connection is not required – the license tool verifies access once a month. And software will continue to work for 180 days which offline. read more...