CS6 - subscription vs paid app

SteveF

Hi,

Interesting move today with Adobe and CS6.

They have rolled out some new features that are only available if you have purchased the Cloud based subscription, and not if you have just bought (for example) a stand alone version of CS6.

The two features I was bummed to see not supported in the stand alone CS6 I have are Blur Gallery and the Liquify tools both now have smart object support. There are others, but personally a smart object Blur Gallery would be useful to me.

I expect that if I dug through the fine print on page 94 of some document I signed with an "I agree" button I'd find that I agreed to this at some point when I installed CS6.

But it makes me wonder how divergent the fully paid program vs. the online subscription models are going to become. For me just using CS6 the subscription really isn't a good financial deal compared with upgrading PS every few years. However, for Adobe it is both more lucrative as well as guaranteeing a more forecastable revenue stream.

Anyway, wonder if others have insights / thoughts about this.

Dan7312

When Adobe first offered the Cloud they said that that new features would appear in cloud versions before the did in the stand alone versions. At that time they seemed to imply that the new features would appear in the standalone versions only on their next major upgrade.

If you are using just Photoshop then the Cloud Suite will be more expensive than the standalone. But if you are using a number Adobe app's and tend to upgrade as soon as new versions come out then the Cloud will probably be less expensive and is really not a bad deal.

You can subscribe to Photoshop by itself, but the Cloud subscription includes Photoshop Extended which includes 3D support if you care about that.

Going forward my guess is that Adobe really wants to move to a subscription basis for it's products and the "new features in the Cloud first" is part of moving in that direction.

SteveF wrote: »

Hi,

Interesting move today with Adobe and CS6.

They have rolled out some new features that are only available if you have purchased the Cloud based subscription, and not if you have just bought (for example) a stand alone version of CS6.

The two features I was bummed to see not supported in the stand alone CS6 I have are Blur Gallery and the Liquify tools both now have smart object support. There are others, but personally a smart object Blur Gallery would be useful to me.

I expect that if I dug through the fine print on page 94 of some document I signed with an "I agree" button I'd find that I agreed to this at some point when I installed CS6.

But it makes me wonder how divergent the fully paid program vs. the online subscription models are going to become. For me just using CS6 the subscription really isn't a good financial deal compared with upgrading PS every few years. However, for Adobe it is both more lucrative as well as guaranteeing a more forecastable revenue stream.

Anyway, wonder if others have insights / thoughts about this.