> I remember the exact moment that Quark pssed me off so badly that it forced me to install Indesign for the first time. I mistakenly ordered another Quark seat for apps $800-ish, and mistakenly pressed "PC" instead of "Mac" on PCZone's website. Zone wouldn't fix it so I called Quark to return the unopened PC version for a Mac version but they would do nothing. No transfer, no refund, I was S.O.L. of $800. That pushed me over the edge to try Indesign, and I never looked back. I now owe Quark thanks, because as a printer and early adopter of Indesign, I personally helped dozens of my designer customers discover Indesign and switch from Quark. Adobe was a true partner company and we all made great businesses together….*
> …. until Adobe Creative Cloud. It's dejaVu all over again, where Quark and now Adobe customers feedback can be ignored. Adobe with CC has succeeded in pssing off former advocates so badly that it's a distasteful just to say Adobe. In one swoop they destroyed tens of thousands of users paid value in anyone's full paid CS6. (except for a slight discount for first year towards forever payments). This CC Adobe bundle of 20+ crap apps to create value, much like Corel tried to do unsuccessfully a decade earlier, is an insult.*
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I'm still using my legal copy of CS5, though I recently upgraded from Lightroom 4 to Lightroom 5. There was some kind of deal to use the Creative Cloud but I ignored it because even though I was only upgrading because LR4 doesn't yet support my new camera, the $99 upgrade is a pittance compared to the time LR saves me in photo editing. Second to Sublime Text, Lightroom is my favorite "work" purchase I've made as an individual customer.
So, what do people think of the Cloud? I didn't really read the terms, just that it sounded cheaper, in the way that "Just 30 monthly installments of $10!" sounds cheaper on certain TV advertisements.
I needed Premiere for a short project, so the Creative Cloud business model was great for me. I was prepared to spend a couple of bucks to use this software for a month, but they actually give you an automatic first month free.
I don't normally do any video editing, so this saved me a lot of money. But I certainly wouldn't buy my PCB layout software this way; I use it all the time and it makes a lot more sense for me to own a license with the ability to upgrade when a new version comes out rather than pay in perpetuity.
It seems to me that Adobe's business model here is amazing for people outside of their target market. A casual user who rarely needs their tools will love this, but their core user base is losing out. That's very short-sighted on their part.
I pretty much only use Illustrator. I'm still on CS6. It didn't help much that CC1 was one of those releases where I look at the list of new features and say "there is nothing here for me" that's happened every 3-4 years since Adobe moved to the marketing-driven "new release every year" model instead of the developer-driven "new release when it's done" one.
I've done the math and the Cloud model is not worth it for me. It starts to make sense if you regularly use like 4 of their big apps, I think.
Edit. Oh shit I just looked and they've quietly added some new features that I actually would like to have. Now I'm running the numbers. The existing pre-CC user pricing works for me - $360/y for my one big app every day, plus being fully legit when I need to briefly use InDesign to lay out a book or Premiere to edit a Kickstarter video - but once that trial year is over I think I'll be ditching it for the single app subscription plus briefly subscribing to other apps and canceling them.
Our shop is still using CS6 and we have no plans to upgrade to CC. There is no compelling reason to do so, and financially it doesn't make sense for us to join. For the rare times when a customer submits artwork created in CC, we simply ask them to re-save it in CS6 format.
In my previous job where we developped our own PDF interpreter (neither based on Adobe owns PDF lib or Print Engine) we only needed InDesign in short occasional burst, mainly to produce test files when new PDF features were introduced, or to check some issues reported by customers. Switching to the CC model for us made sense as it saved us money.
And in my current job we only need to use Adobe applications to generate demo files for tradeshows and sometimes private demos. So, we never require a full-time license. And we can use it as an alternative to a floating license as any of us can log in to use one of the application before logging out once finished. However now that I think about it I am not sure whether our marketing team switched to the CC model or have been using CS 5 or 5.5 the whole time. Considering they use it much more often than us it would make sense if they did not use CC.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/01/quarkx...
> I remember the exact moment that Quark pssed me off so badly that it forced me to install Indesign for the first time. I mistakenly ordered another Quark seat for apps $800-ish, and mistakenly pressed "PC" instead of "Mac" on PCZone's website. Zone wouldn't fix it so I called Quark to return the unopened PC version for a Mac version but they would do nothing. No transfer, no refund, I was S.O.L. of $800. That pushed me over the edge to try Indesign, and I never looked back. I now owe Quark thanks, because as a printer and early adopter of Indesign, I personally helped dozens of my designer customers discover Indesign and switch from Quark. Adobe was a true partner company and we all made great businesses together….*
> …. until Adobe Creative Cloud. It's dejaVu all over again, where Quark and now Adobe customers feedback can be ignored. Adobe with CC has succeeded in pssing off former advocates so badly that it's a distasteful just to say Adobe. In one swoop they destroyed tens of thousands of users paid value in anyone's full paid CS6. (except for a slight discount for first year towards forever payments). This CC Adobe bundle of 20+ crap apps to create value, much like Corel tried to do unsuccessfully a decade earlier, is an insult.*
---
I'm still using my legal copy of CS5, though I recently upgraded from Lightroom 4 to Lightroom 5. There was some kind of deal to use the Creative Cloud but I ignored it because even though I was only upgrading because LR4 doesn't yet support my new camera, the $99 upgrade is a pittance compared to the time LR saves me in photo editing. Second to Sublime Text, Lightroom is my favorite "work" purchase I've made as an individual customer.
So, what do people think of the Cloud? I didn't really read the terms, just that it sounded cheaper, in the way that "Just 30 monthly installments of $10!" sounds cheaper on certain TV advertisements.