Adobe Kills Creative Suite: Replaced by Creative Cloud
Adobe has discontinued their Creative Suite products, replacing them with a subscription-only system now named CC (for Creative Cloud). Individual apps are available for $20 per month, or you can get the entire collection of Adobe’s professional apps and services for $50 per month. There are upgrade options if you currently own CS3–CS6 (see here), and Adobe will continue to sell the CS6 versions for now (which will be updated with bug fixes, but no new features).
For more on the Creative Cloud, we recommend Jackie Dove’s story at Macworld here.
Also, Lesa Snider is presenting a free full day workshop on Creative Cloud on June 24 at CreativeLIVE.com. to tune in, or to buy the class to watch later, see http://lesa.in/clvideos
Jeff Gamet is a contributing editor for Design Tools Monthly, the executive summary of graphic design news. He is also the morning editor and reviews editor for The Mac Observer and iPodObserver.com, and contributing writer for Layers Magazine and Photoshop User. He writes the InBrief column for InDesign Magazine, and is the author of “The Designer’s Guide to Mac OS X,” from Peachpit Press
When Jeff isn’t writing about the graphic design world, he’s talking about it on the Design Tools Weekly podcast with co-host Jay Nelson. He also talks about Apple and the Mac world every week on The Mac Observer’s Apple Weekly Report.
Jeff studies, tests and reviews new software and technologies for the Macintosh community as well as the design and print industries. He is a former Pre-press specialist, and has nearly 25 years experience with computer technology. Jeff trains, lectures and consults on techniques for more efficiently using Mac OS X in creative environments throughout the country.
In the rare moments when he can get away from his MacBook Pro, Jeff spends his time climbing and biking in the Colorado mountains.
I seriously hope Quark don’t go down this path. They have a real chance here to cash in on a few of the more disgruntled Adobe users… but they have to play there cards right with the next version of Xpress… and get things absolutely right.
Dudes, this makes me real happy that my company is still using QuarkXPress and FreeHand as key solutions to our creative workflow.
Yes, we use the Adobe suite as well, but the decision has been made now to drop Adobe (i.e. avoid the Creative Cloud subscription) and stick with CS6 and QuarkXPress.
Yes, lets hope Quark don’t go down the same path. But my bigger hope is that Adobe don’t eventually pull the plug on existing users of CS by withdrawing the online activation facility for current versions, thus forcing EVERYBODY to sign up to their Cloud subscription. That would be downright evil.
As for Quark, I sincerely believe that they’ve learnt valuable lessons from their distant past and have turned around big time. Certainly their customer focus is now impressive and we have zero issues with their software. We’re very happy customers indeed and I hope it stays that way.
Perhaps more surprising is that, as an illustration tool, we still find that FreeHand gets the job done faster and easier than Illustrator, and works seamlessly with QuarkXPress. So much the case in fact that we invested in a line of Mac Pros running Snow Leopard for this very reason. Some might consider this a blinkered approach, but our productivity and return on investment has already proved this to have been a very wise move indeed. And we still have Illustrator too, so all bases are covered.
Lets face it, apart from maintenance and platform-specific updates, what else can Adobe stuff into any of their products that’s really going to make any real-world difference to the end user, and be so worth the forced upgrade premium that Cloud users are going to have to commit to? The end-user benefits are likely to be marginal at best as time goes on, and costly regardless, particularly for the many users that, historically, just haven’t had the need to upgrade every time a new version comes to market.
Certainly, in our case, we just don’t need Adobe any more, and it’ll be business as usual here for a very long time indeed, Cloud or no Cloud.