Adobe shoots itself in the foot?
So Photoshop et al is going over to subscription only. I think the cracked copies of Photoshop in circulation can only increase.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22432171
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22432171
Post edited by Jimmo on
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Now they have done this. You want to keep getting upgrades. Pay for a subscription.
Its obvious Adobe are quite comtemptous of their audience if this is what they are going to do.
You can live without their products?...good for you then.
But many businesses can't. The world doesn't revolve around you single user
My games for the Spectrum: Dingo, The Speccies, The Speccies 2, Vallation, SQIJ.
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I guess really its a case of Photoshop became so prevalent among the web development community that many kind of got used to its strange ways.
However many ex-Photoshop users find the free alternatives very awkward to do things they want to do. Not saying they can't do these things but normally its more convoluted.
I am not a Pro Photoshop user by any score. .. and Adobe charge the earth for their programs, but sadly its true what Jimmo says. Many may just resort to cracked versions rather than pay an ongoing fee to get pretty much what they already own.
Well that doesn't matter really because I'm not a business, and if I was maybe I'd be bothered, but I'm not.
So like I said f**k em'! :D
It is probable that Adobe, in case things turn out worse than planned, will revert to a partial form of locally-based software licensing.
Me too!:smile:
Eh? Businesses also have the same choice. Free and/or open source software (FOSS) is legal for both personal and business use. Just like free Bulletin Board software. The only rule for FOSS for business or personal use is that you don't re-write the source code and sell it as your own software.
The humble "single user" cannot be held responsible for availability of free software on the 'net. If it's free (with choice of donations), then this area of the market will continue to thrive. Hell, you can run an entire business on free software.
I recently tried GIMP. Oh, IT'S ONE OF THE BEST OUT THERE AND IT'S FREE "they" exclaimed. What a pile of pish it is. Don't get me started on the convoluted layer system - a system so easy on just about everything else, including PS and it's incredibly easy and simple layer creation and handling - that it felt like GIMP was trolling me hard. "Hey, I need to select something, GIMP?". "Well", it'd reply, "why don't you do this...this...this..this......". "S'okay, I've forgotten what I was going to do, let alone forgotten what in Sweet Moses I was going to select."
Sure, there are others out there, but GIMP (and a few others) just haven't been able to cut it for me.
considering .net paint is free , it's great .. but to be fair M$ has some involvement with it.. and couldn't give such an advanced version with the OS perhaps. there is a .net paint derivative for c64 art "Timanthes" that might be useful for porting speccy stuff also :)
flash, has been a nightmare update wise and like java seems to be patched a lot for security exploits.
I use 2 corel products, they bought up ulead. Paintshop pro + video studio. I got video studio a fair bit cheaper of a legit ebay software seller than direct from corel . ?50 IRC.. trick is a lot of the time to stay a version behind or NEAR the grace period..which I am doing for the music software that I use.. e.g. buy version 7 and get version 7.5 or 8 as a download.
sometimes it's cheaper to buy a older version 2nd hand then upgrade *BUT* you have to check the company allows license transfers + they don't charge for that. The other thing is getting an educational version IF you have family in education
every company has a different update model / how they get money.. I only can say for music stuff.
some want a yearly fee / update (cakewalk roland)
others do .5 updates.. while they fix a bigger update.. then will charge more if you don't have the .5 update (steinberg)
others do free updates for life (fruity loops)
others sell dirt cheap (reaper)
I like how piriform work with their products.. they are donation ware.. and the rep. they have is used as word of mouth.. e.g. ccleaner . they must be doing ok as their london office is far from cheap to have.
open office took a lot of M$'s "office" business no doubt.
' "Customers have to come to terms with the end of perpetually licensed software," IDC analyst Al Hilwa told the Associated Press.'
So who do you think will be next to go to subscription only licensing? Although people have said Valve would be cutting their own throat if they did so but now,I wouldn't be surprised if Steam goes subscription in the near future.
http://www.dpreview.com/news/2013/05/08/Adobe-photoshop-cc
If GIMP had a more straightforward UI then I'd use that instead.
I can see why they're pushing this hard though, the levels of Photoshop piracy are insane. There have to be more than a few people within Adobe who are betting that 90%+ of the people on the interwebs crying out that they'll never buy Photoshop again have probably never actually paid for it anyway. And they might well be right on that.
I wouldn't say that Photoshop has a particularly straightforward UI. It's not a piece of software that I tend to use a lot, and I do find it a bit of a pain on the rare occasions that I have to. The advantage to its users is mainly that they're used to it; had they invested the same amount of time in GIMP they'd probably be just as fluent with that.
The main disadvantage of GIMP is that it simply doesn't offer the same range of features that graphics professionals expect. For rank amateurs who just want to tart up some photos and knock together graphics for their homebrew projects it's more than sufficient though.
That's basically it. Photoshop is, despite what everyone says, a niche product. Every professional graphic designer I know swears by it. They are also willing to pay lots for it because they have no real alternatives.
GIMP is a really, really good drawing program for everyone else. I make all my graphic designs in it. I can do almost everything in it. I love it. There's not a chance I'd switch to Photoshop simply because I've never used it.
But GIMP is just not comparable to Photoshop. No one is going to add professional features in it for free just because some professional person wants it. Besides, those professionals are already willing to pay a lot of money for those features.
Something that could be competitive with Photoshop would therefore require a lot of investment and a huge amount of time, but it could be a viable idea.
So, the answer to the original question? I'd say they have found their niche and I wouldn't be surprised they increase the subs fee in the next few years as well without any problems.
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My employer has photoshop installed on my office computer and in the classrooms. I gotta say that the subscription model will not be compatible with their software procurement model, so I guess people won't be seeing any new versions of Photoshop in my work place for a while.
Adobe has made so many bad decisions of late that I feel like many other once major now stuck in the past, un-innovative, overbloated software giants/stallwarts that believe that their requirements, wants and whims are more important than the user's needs and opinions, they will dwindle away in a slow unagile death.
Scottie_uk, WHAT HAPPENED TO THE "WOS WALL OF TEXT"??? :-?
Seems like there vere vandals EVERYWHERE! :-o
:cry:
The gits been at it for a while now. I guessed if I would re-draw it would only make the sad tosser worse, so I have just left if for a while. Do feel free to make repairs and amendments to Speclins Holiday camp.
Sadly I think you're right there AndyC. A mate of mine came up with a great definition of Cloud Computing.
'a technology that 99% of companies seem to have completely failed to grasp the advantages of, and what 99% of software publishers are attempting to use to screw over their consumer base.'
So what's stopping them paying someone to add it to Gimp? Or if it's something that isn't in the current roadmap, creating a fork like Film Gimp (now cinepaint) did when they needed bit depths greater than 8 bits per channel and support for film formats.
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The cost of developing new features for something like Photoshop are amortized across the entire customer base, so despite the fact every customer is paying for a new feature, nobody is having to outright fund the development themselves. That doesn't work with FOSS software, so if one customer really needs a feature they've pretty much no choice but to pay someone to do the work in it's entirety and then is pretty much obliged to give it away for free to competitors. Making the argument for ROI on such an investment is incredibly difficult in most cases (though by no means all).
For the same reason as why "the programmers" not jumping into this gap in the market..?