Adobe ends tangible software license. Sad day

BBC News - Adobe starts subscription for Photoshop and Dreamweaver

So instead of paying $2500 for the master suite collection and getting to use it until you die, you now must sign up for this Adobe cloud based service which will only work when you have an internet connection (bye bye editing on planes or buses or outside away from internet) and you have to pay $100 a month forever to use it.

If you upgrade every upgrade cycle, the cost is about the same. But it destroys your ability to get anything done when you have no internet. I use Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and Captivate all the time. The rest less so, but I still have purchased the master suite collection for versions 4, 7, CS2 (9), and CS4 (11). They will be stopping at CS6 (Version 13) and then force you to the cloud.

I guess it is time to start shopping around for a new tool. Completely unacceptable Adobe...

 

Microsoft has offered it with the 365 products, but they still have the no-subscription option available, albeit at a higher price. I am happy paying $400 once for a real copy of Office versus paying $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year. Same reason I don't rent or lease things. I still have software that I use either for fun or business that was made 20 years ago. Some so old that they can only be used within a DOSBox or DOS emulation environment.

So 20 years from now, if I want to use Office 2012 I don't want to rely on having a subscription somewhere I cannot control. I have files in Word Perfect format from an old AT computer that I needed to read one day. I was able to go from Word Perfect to one of the first releases of Office when they had an import to it. I was then able to import that into Office XP, then save and import into modern day Office and view the file. Formatting was even still in tact. It took hoops, but I had a way to use those hoops. The new subscription based cloud means that you lose all hopes of using a backward hoop unless they keep all copies of all updates. If 20 years from now I can login to Microsoft Office's cloud thing, and say I want to use Office 2012, fine. But we all know that the only version on there will be the latest version.

 

If you pay by the month, it is £70. That is currently $108.27USD. If you pay for a full year, it works out to £47 a month, which is currently $72.69.

That is good. But I have machines that are never connected to the internet. Secure systems do not have an internet pipe period. Big companies already block all "phone home" requests. My full time employer blocks all update ping requests to Adobe servers, Java/Oracle servers, Microsoft servers, basically anything where the only point is an update. This means that without changing the model of no-phoning home, the Adobe products will only work for 1 month then not work.

Also, our company does not do subscriptions. We do everything based off of POs, and every single one no matter how small is signed by all 3 Vice Presidents. This is a multi-billion dollar a year company. We have lots of Adobe and lots of Microsoft. If it is subscription based, it does not get bought period. Many employees of other companies have similar policies. One of my many small roles here is handing out license requests for software that gets flagged by our automatic generator. So sending files and license checking for lots of very very big companies that you guys probably use every day but don't know it will never allow this sort of subscription based phone home thing.

When software updates and it breaks something, it can take a million dollar machine offline for hours or days. That million dollar machine is making thousands of dollars in profit an hour. If it goes down, somebody is paying for that.

I'm thinking they will have a run on CS6 products. I am thinking of buying a suite now to be my "forever software". Instead of giving them thousands of dollars every 3-4 years, I will buy once more and never again.

 

I expect it will continue to work until the x86 instruction process is dead and I have plenty of hardware to keep that going until I personally die, hopefully 60+ years from now. The latest version I have is CS4. I trialed CS5 but I usually buy every 2 gens because the limited feature and bug improvements are not worth a whole new package each time. But I patronize them because they are the best. Nothing even touches Photoshop with the power.

My CS4 and I would assume CS6 and CS7 can run without internet and subscriptions. They haven't retroactively changed that as far as I know. So worst case is that the CS4 suite I have can be run on any modern day PC and virtualized to run on almost any machine in the future. As long as I am retired to the fact that I will not be able to use the newest features and fix the bugs that still exist in CS4, it should and will work forever with the current limitations. My CS4 already never calls home, and I have physical disks I can use to install it anytime anywhere. I block the activation and crack it even with my legitimate copy just as I do Windows and most other programs. I am not relying on any external server, program, database, or code monkey to make the software I paid for work.

And quite honestly, I see no improvements to CS4 from CS2, and I was annoyed by the change to a non WinForms look in CS4 making things harder to use. I relayed out my workspace to mimick CS2 essentially. So at this point I may be happy to keep running CS4 until Adobe goes bankrupt, and then some more...