Adobe: We locked our customers in the cloud and out poured money Reassuringly expensive software maker Adobe is laughing all the way to the bank after shunting more of its customers into the cloud - like they had any choice in the matter. The company closed off fiscal ’15 ended 27 November with Q4 revenue of $1.31bn, up 22 per cent year-on-year, driven by a 44 per cent hike in subscriptions …
You have to wonder though, how much of the extra revenue is actually coming from home users buying a month here and there who never would have bought a boxed product. I only use it occasionally and a few quid now and then is much easier to swallow than hundreds.
Of course, the reality may be that they priced it too high and made a fat wedge, but it's possible that some of that is new business from former pirates.
"You have to wonder though, how much of the extra revenue is actually coming from home users buying a month here and there who never would have bought a boxed product."
Not much, I'd guess. Most of it is going to come from corporate design houses who now have to pay 3-4 times as much for the software that they were already using day-to-day.
I wouldn't mind... but there's no real advantage over CS6, as near as I can tell. The 'cloud dashboard' has all the functionality of Wordpress in 2006, the cloud version of Acrobat borders on unusable, deployment is actually painful (we had to raise support calls with 2 separate third parties for Adobe's arcane AD lookup, since LDAP isn't good enough for them for some reason), and you still have to deal with Adobe's own sociopathically aggressive support staff who will gladly tell you that any given problem that only affects their programs is caused by literally anything else (even if the only thing the various machines affected have in common is the presence of Adobe products - even if they're on different OSes).
The sooner an open-source alternative can catch up, the better. Adobe products haven't really advanced in any meaningful way for about 10 years.
Yes, I believe that's called the coma after the aneurysm.
It is obvious that what Adobe did resulted in more profit ; Adobe's customers are practically co-joined from the hip to Adobe's products given that the competition is not exactly either ferocious on the market or up to par where competition there is.
Open source, from what I've heard, is stepping up its game, but it's not there yet as far as the professionals are concerned. So the professionals had their hissy fit, then complied with many a grumble and regret.
Adobe is celebrating that as a victory, but the day there is another viable solution, Adobe just might see its revenue tank and wonder why. If so, the why is simple : it's never a good idea to force your customers into anything, you encourage them with incentives.
"it's never a good idea to force your customers into anything, you encourage them with incentives."
Larry Ellison says "I'm sorry, I can't hear your great advice from the top of this huge pile of 49 billion dollars I got from locking my customers in and screwing them over!"
(Rough guide as to what that might look like in $100 bills).
No, there will never be another viable solution. This was the critical moment and if Adobe products users have swallowed this it is clear enough they will take any abuse form now on.
I am personally delighted and I consider they deserve this entirely because each time alternatives were discussed they would scoff at them.
Now, everybody, check out Windows as a service to see where you're all being herded. Don't bother looking for an exit because you have missed it long time ago!
This is the Age Of Internet.
Never Say Never.
Come on, are we capitalists or not ? Adobe certainly has developed a metric ton of expertise and functionality, but that is nothing that the Internet cannot take on and overcome. We're not talking about Google, which has invested billions in its search engine and has harvested #Deity only knows how much data. Microsoft is currently demonstrating how hard it is, and how much it costs, to become a Google competitor.
We're talking about a program that can create and edit images. Any number of mathematicians get together and they can very well create a program that will crush Adobe's product.
It may not be easy, but it certainly won't require the kind of cash needed for a data center. It will only require a collaborative effort, the likes of which Linux has already largely demonstrated is possible.
> No, there will never be another viable solution
Never is a long time in computing. It may be a long time coming, but over time you can be sure that two things will happen :
1) People will get fed up of paying the ransom
2) People will find ways of reducing their dependency.
"Adobe is celebrating that as a victory, but the day there is another viable solution, Adobe just might see its revenue tank and wonder why. If so, the why is simple : it's never a good idea to force your customers into anything, you encourage them with incentives."
That's why you corner the market and make everyone dependent on you. You raise the barrier of entry and create a de facto monopoly that's tough to beat. And in Adobe's case, they have quite a bit going for them. There are no alternatives for video directing that are as well-constructed as Premiere and After Effects, and while GIMP is making inroads on the veteran Photoshop, the whole culture built around the veteran is very hard to duplicate, especially when it comes to add-ons. Plus Adobe's working hard to integrate all the applications together so that one can transition between them, making the solution more a gestalt that pretty much requires another all-in-one to duplicate, and once there's one big player in the market, it's rare for a second one to emerge since the incumbent can act against it. That's just how it is with captive markets.
Quark Xpress was defacto in the industry. It was impossible to prise it out of the designer/printer/page layout person's hands.
Indesign came along and bam - within a few years it had unsurped Quark.
If it could happen once, it can easily happen again.
The detail that I find most amusing is the fact that this is no cloud at all, this is a subscription driven software with online-forced DRM checks.
The applications in the suite are all regular win32 or win64 aplication that runs on your computer. (office 365 does the same) they add some "cloud" (online) storage I'm aware of that, and some other service no one asked for.
If you don’t like being locked into the cloud, there is a viable alternative - and I speak as one who not only once used Photoshop and Illustrator, but was also paid to teach other people how to use it.
Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer are both viable alternatives, and they require remarkably little in the way of retraining in order to use. Sure, there’s some functionality missing - but since the missing functionality is largely in the field of automation (building panoramas and so forth) it’s stuff that you may be able to do without. Personally, I’m happy to make do without and abandon the subscription model at the same time. I’m sure that Serif will be adding in the missing functionality in future versions (fingers crossed).
Adobe does still have one worthwhile tool - Brackets. That one’s free. Download it now.
There seems to ba a couple of Adobe Fanbois here :)
I totally agree with you.
When they moved Photoshop to Subscription I said No and kept my wallet firmly shit.
I did buy a new version of Lightroom as I was on V4 it was time to move to V6.
I'm evaluating a few products that can replace full blown Photoshop.
When I am done with that then it will be over to a Lightroom replacement. I need something that can work as a library to some 520K images( all taken with DSLR's since I went digital in 2002). If/when I find that then Adobe will be a thing of the past as fas as I'm concerned.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
@Steve Davies 3
Fanboys everywhere on el Reg. It's a very partisan site.
I know that there are people who still swear by Adobe - my sister's business for one, and she's happy with the subscription model. I'm not even saying that the subscription model is bead for everyone - just that it's bad for me. I like to have a perpetual licence.
I like the way that JetBrains do it - you buy a subscription and, after each year, your license changes to being perpetual for the major version that was current when the year's subscription started/renewed for you. If Adobe did that too I'd have no quarrel with their subscription model.
Completely this. As soon as Affinity make a Lightroom equivalent I'm off. I'm assuming they're working on one, they'd be mad not to.
I make money from Photography and Lightroom is part of my workflow (an essential part) but - and OK I haven't researched it much because it just sounded like a shit idea from the start but - RENTING the software I use for my business? And it not working when I'm not online? Are you MAD? Apparently so.
People have switched to creative cloud because they have no choice. When Lightroom 6 came out I searched for links to a 'Standalone' version, but despite finding links and following them I was never able to actually download a product. This is the point at which I would normally do my Dr Evil impression while saying "Another customer lost, Adobe", but given this news I'm sure they don't give a shit. What a wunch of bankers.
problem with a lightroom equivalent (and there's a pretty decent one, DarkTable, free open source) is that if they aren't EXACTLY like lightroom, your existing libraries of albums are tied to LR and won't import well into anything else, Surely you're not going back and re-editing your entire 5 years of photos again, right? I know I won't. Yet sometimes I go back and dig out an old album and refine it some more,
"There seems to ba a couple of Adobe Fanbois here :)"
I for one don't believe there's any such thing as an Adobe fan. Just people with severe Stockholm syndrome.
But really, the alternatives aren't alternatives. Adobe products are industry standard, and our clients expect psds and indds. If we open stuff up and edit in GIMP, then it can bork PS formatting. I've tried , repeatedly, to offer open source alternatives to standard CC products, but the lock-in goes beyond individual companies and actually covers whole sectors of industry - it's much like how you couldn't send out docs made in Open Office ten years ago, because no-one could open them and Word would screw up the formatting if you did. Everyone was using MS Office because everyone else was using MS Office.
Adobe's monopoly is bad for the industry, and the sooner someone breaks it the better... but overwhelmingly, designers aren't going to accept other programs unless they're both identical in functionality and completely seamless in their interaction with existing Adobe file formats. And nothing offers either of those things yet.
I willingly pay for my copy of any software product. But I don't care to lease software from anyone.
A big upvote for your comment on Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. I only had Adobe CC to use Photoshop and have removed it; I only use Affinity Photo now. Serif is coming out with a layout product that will probably replace my old InDesign. I'm hoping Serif will work on a replacement for Acrobat as well.
BTW: Affinity Photo panorama is available in beta. ;)
I really am surprised the the sue bat has yet to be deployed. Taking a product suite that is central to a good number of businesses, with very few realistic alternatives, making it more expensive, and even removing the ability to actually use a copy of the product once the protection money stop being paid is an utterly disgusting abuse of a monopoly position.
Yet all the bean counters see is $$ flashing in front of their eyes. Every other software vendor is looking on in jealousy and wondering how quickly they can turn their offerings into subscription based affairs to screw more from their customers.
What would you sue adobe for, making a new version? They didn't remove any functionality from their suite. They didn't make the last version a shorter timescale for support. Arguably they decided to let their customers know that their business model was changing, they released a major upgrade to it, said this will be the last, but given that some people had been quite happily running on CS2 for a number of years, and not everyone upgraded every year, gave customer 2-3 years notice.
If your business can't deal with it's tooling prices going up, then don't upgrade, buy CS6 today and use it out of the cloud.
Or, you know do what the rest of us do, look at the alternatives, evaluate them, work out if they are better for you, buy them and train again.
There are loads of alternatives to the CS suite, so they are hardly a monopoly.
Key to their turn around I suspect is that businesses had to sort their licences out, and it's not easy to pirate a cloud.
"making it more expensive" - As a semi-pro photographer it's a darn sight cheaper. Were it possible, PS and LR would cost me around £750 for aboxed copy, for which I get no upgrades and I'm tied to using and registering just a single copy of the software, it still has to phone home, granted it only does this during installs and uninstalls.
With CC I get to install the software on 2 separate machines ( I have one copy on Windows and the other on my Macbook ), I get constant upgrades and patches every few weeks all for just for £8/month. It simply needs to phone home once every 30 days. So I get 6-7 years of use for the same money but I get patches and upgrades. My files don't stop working just the software gets switched off, that's shite FUD people spread. Your PSDs don't stop working! Personally I only work in TiFF format, never PSD so I can take my files and bugger off to GIMP or Affinity if I like if I ever get tired of Adobe.
"and even removing the ability to actually use a copy of the product once the protection money stop being paid" - Yes but the Adobe software has always had to phone home during installation and if you want to uninstall/reinstall the software it has to phone home to unregister and re-register itself. With the huge disadvantage that I could only use a single copy for your £700 spend. At least with CC I only have to "phone it in" once a month.
And when your £8/month turns into £20/month what then eh?
As for phoning home once a month... My cousin was on board a ship studying marine life in the seas around South Georgia. They were at sea for two months. Sat networks were very restricted and expensive. No way could they download any updates.
Some of his colleagues were well and truly stuffed becaise of the 30day call to the mothership thing.
Luckily his copy of CS6 came to the rescue.
Still want to vote in favor of subscriptions? What if you went off grid for more than 30 days eh?
Seriously, invest a couple of bucks in alternatives like Affinity, Pixelmator, Corel, etc. Even if they aren't Photoshop equals (yet), we need to encourage and support these developers so that we have options - including telling Adobe to get stuffed. Otherwise a few years from now Adobe will be all that's left, and then watch what happens to the subscription price.
I was a long time user of Paint Shop Pro, but Corel turned it into real crappiness. Stopped upgrading it after I bought X3 - and it also installed strange processes that continuosly scanned my hard drive (and no, there were no way to not install them). With competitor like this Adobe sleeps on gold.
Affinity looks a far better alternative, but being Mac only it's not what I need.
"Reassuringly expensive software maker Adobe is laughing all the way to the bank after shunting more of its customers into the cloud - like they had any choice in the matter."
There was a choice, and I took it. Losing Photoshop after 20 years fucking hurt; but there are alternatives that are almost as good (for my purposes, although I'm still looking for a decent GIF animator, ideally FOSS) and don't come with the toxicity.
Going cold turkey was not painless; but there isn't a single Adobe product on my machine; no irritatingly frequent reminders popping up unbidden that you're Adobe's bitch and you are going to do things their way or else; and as a bonus, I'm several thousand times less likely to get hacked.
Photoshop was always considerably ahead of the competition; but 'de-facto standard' is a big part of it too...even now, if you can't play with .PSD you are simply not in the game: Clients want working files and they want them to be PSD. Plus you sometimes have to shiny up old files and they'll be PSD too. Also there's the force of habit thing...if you've used a program over an extended period of time you get used to certain ways of doing things and anything different is going to be a pain in the arse.
PSD handling is a big part of the reason for my particular choice of substitute; and there's a linux version too, which ties in with my longish-term goal of ditching Windows as well.
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