Saturday 11 May 2013

Sympathy for Adobe?

I've just finished reading the comments about Adobe Creative Cloud (CC) in a report on Wired.com.

I found one, often repeated, criticism interesting. This was the complaint that many of the software updates that Adobe charge for, Photoshop in particular, aren't radical enough for the money.

Photoshop is a fantastic piece of software which I've used every day at work now for over 20 years. Photoshop pretty much started doing everything I want a photo editing program to be able to do, since the version when they added 'layers'. I really don't want radical changes made to it. I'm happy with the incremental improvements.

Similarly for Illustrator and InDesign, version CS4 had all I need day-to-day. The feature differences between CS4 and CS6 (yes that two upgrades) really are minimal and imagine most graphics professionals hardly need them.

This puts Adobe in a difficult position. They're not an arts project, they are a business. Nobody could realistically expect Adobe to declare Creative Suite complete, only cover OS updates and just sell it to anyone who hasn't already bought it? Adobe then have quite rightly expanded their range of software applications to tackle other tasks that graphics businesses may face such as editing video, animating a vector or building a website but most of us don't need them all.

The whole software bundle is the grandly titled Master Collection. It's great but it is quite expensive. I have it at work (CS6 version) but only really use the three titles mentioned above and AfterEffects. I can definitely do everything I need to with CS6 as it stands.

At work, our incentive to upgrade is already low. With Adobe CC it's lower. Adobe CC is too expensive for the new toys and the minor upgrades. We want Adobe to stay in business but not at our expense.

Adobe is a victim of its own success. Adobe has a problem.

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