Adobe to cease offering upgrades from anything but last version

[firestarter]

This is a heads-up to anyone not on the latest CS5 rev of Photoshop, Creative Suite etc.

Henceforward (from CS6), buying an upgrade will only work if you're on the previous version - in marked contrast to the current Adobe upgrade policy that allows upgrades from the last three versions.

http://prodesigntools.com/last-chance-to-upgrade-adobe-cs2-cs3-cs4-to-cs5.html

Adobe are to offer reductions on upgrades to CS5.5 through the end of this year - but you're pretty well stuck past that point.

It'll be interesting to see what the cost of a CS5->CS6 licence is when it comes out. From my own perspective, I've always saved money by skipping every second upgrade, since I've never found single upgrades to be cost justified in terms of new features.

 

[GoCubsGo]

All things considering, that's pretty f'ed up. I don't know why they feel the need to do that.

 

[chrono1081]

Adobe just gets more and more greedy. They remind me of Autodesk (releasing very few features and charging a lot for it).

I understand paid upgrades are needed to provide Adobe with money, but I wonder if consumers aren't getting ripped off in the process.

Look at Pixologic. They have been giving owners of ZBrush free upgrades since the program came out 11 years ago. Each upgrade contains a ton of new features, their site offers free tutorials,a ton of free and insanely useful plugins, and a slew of other things. ZBrush is only $700, a fraction of Adobe's creative suite and the same price as Photoshop. Pixologic also has a much smaller user base than Adobe and still cranks out the updates, new features, etc on a regular basis.

 

[snberk103]

... From my own perspective, I've always saved money by skipping every second upgrade, since I've never found single upgrades to be cost justified in terms of new features.

Thanks for the heads-up...

Seems to be backwards.... I would have thought that Adobe would want to have as many installations as possible. Good for visibility, bad for competitors. Supposedly someone has calculated how many new licenses they will sell vs how many licenses they lose to the competition. I'll bet they didn't look more than a 1-3 years into the future. Licenses lost to the competition are then going to start converting their friends and colleagues to the competing product away from CS - at least that's what I would predict.

I'm also an alternate version users. Luckily I can get my CS at an educator's rate (legitimately!) The policies on upgrading the educator's version seem to change every couple of years, so I don't know how this will affect me.... but I do have an order in with the school for CS5.5....

 

[sigmadog]

Guess I'll hold on to my CS4 Suite till the wheels fall off.

I used to have a lot of respect for Adobe as a company; not so much anymore. They have what is essentially a monopoly on professional level software (for print designers, at least), and still they have to gouge us for more money at every turn.

As I get closer and closer to hanging up my T-Square (metaphorically) and retiring to a life of ease and relaxation, I begin to view the whole software game with a slightly cynical eye. I don't see the major advances with each new "upgrade" as I did in the hey-day of the 90's and early Aughts; the technology has plateaued, and developers seem to spend their time tinkering with bits and pieces and little else, and then offering the resulting mediocrity as the "next great thing".

I used to play along like a good little consumer, but as the suites (and the accompanying prices) have swelled with bloated features of little or no consequence to my daily workflow, I'm more inclined than ever before to let the great Software Wave roll on by.

I don't think I'll regret the decision. I've got all the software I need, and it works just fine. Besides, I'm disappointed in Corporations like Adobe that seem to value my money more than my allegiance.

 

[jaw04005]

That's fine, but lower the damn price and don't charge for .5 updates.

The price of all their suites have crept up to the stratosphere since CS1 (which launched at a doable $999).

 

[chaosbunny]

Adobe is really trying to make users who have a cracked version have no guilty conscience.

I have a legal CS5 licence at home and one at the office from work. This basically means that both will have to be upgraded to CS6 or loose any future upgrade ability.

CS5 brought some features I wanted to see for 10 years, like different sized pages in InDesign and gradients to transparency in Illustrator, but now I can't think of anything that's missing for my every day workflow.

 

[Jim Campbell]

I don't see the major advances with each new "upgrade" as I did in the hey-day of the 90's and early Aughts; the technology has plateaued, and developers seem to spend their time tinkering with bits and pieces and little else, and then offering the resulting mediocrity as the "next great thing".

I'm inclined to agree. I haven't seen what I would call a compelling upgrade to Photoshop since v5.5!* And, whilst I'm sure there have been some nice tweaks around the edges for specialist use cases, InDesign seems to offer me no more functionality than when I started using it back on V2.0 (not CS2, version 2).

Cheers

Jim

*No, I don't include adding vector drawing tools to a bitmap image editor an improvement.** Perhaps Adobe ought to spend a bit more time on their ACTUAL vector drawing package, which still can't understand a relative link to an image and doesn't implement copy and paste the same way as the whole of the rest of the frickin' system.

** Nor do I count shoe-horning in an entire 3D rendering system that no-one who knows anything about CG will ever even look at. How about an auto-save option instead, Adobe? Wouldn't that be of more utility to, oh, about a hundred per cent of your user base?

 

[6749974]

Figures...

I entered the design world when Adobe was a breath of fresh air.

Now they're starting to stink up the place. They have grown big, and in many ways had a monopoly on the professional market. But their business plan is antiquated and the software/web world is accelerating. They're

1. nervous
2. soon to be desperate, and
3. will be less cool of a company and more of a Microsoft.

Then a new company will come in and be a breath of fresh air again. Pattern recognition.

 

[MechaSpanky]

I agree with SAdProZ, what happened to Adobe? They used to be a cool company but somewhere they went wrong. I have been using Adobe's software since 1990 and to me, it was around the time of the first "CS" is where they started heading down the wrong path and with every CS version, they started to be more and more Microsoft-ish.

I was completely against the "merger" with Macromedia because to me, it stifled competition. I know many will argue against that (as many here on these forums have done) but look around the graphics world and it is hard to find anyone that can compete with Adobe. Before the merger, Macromedia was probably the closest thing to a competitor that Adobe had (well okay Quark as well but they only make one piece of software and Macromedia made quite a few).

I think Adobe's management is out of touch with the graphics world. As Jim mentioned above, they often add "features" that are of no use instead of adding actual useful features or instead of improving the overall quality of their software. Maybe their management are "business" or "computer" guys and so they don't really understand the graphics world. I have no idea but that is what it seems like. I hope that Adobe wakes up and realizes that they are headed down the wrong path and I hope that they can correct this before it is too late. Just my two cents.

 

[6749974]

@MechaSpanky Well said. I think this is the same formula. A company has disruptive objectives when they are the little guy. They wanted to beat out Quark, for example, and the market at large, so they had to innovate to disrupt that. Now that they are the big guy so their internal objectives have changed. Now they must defend against disruption. Until someone else comes a long they will just squeeze their customers. From their position it's good business.

So I'm just gonna hang tight and welcome the new guy when they show up. Hell, maybe I'll start that company.

 

[jeremy h]

Roman emperors used to get a slave to whisperer in their ear that they were mortal every so often to keep them 'grounded'. I'd suggest the CEO of Adobe gets an intern or pays someone to whisper the word 'Quark' in their ear at least twice a day.

 

[6749974]

Roman emperors used to get a slave to whisperer in their ear that they were mortal every so often to keep them 'grounded'. I'd suggest the CEO of Adobe gets an intern or pays someone to whisper the word 'Quark' in their ear at least twice a day.

Haha. Brilliant!

 

[diarbyrag]

Adobe... Don't get me started ...

In all my years of computing they have to be THE worst company I have ever experienced, I really hope they go bust, all they are trying to do is make as much money as possible to make up for Flash going down the pan and trying to force people to use their overpriced subscription scheme !

Third party devs Rule in my mind..

Good job car companies don't work the same way and penalise you for not upgrading your Prius every year !

As if life ai'nt expensive enough

 

[6749974]

If one designer can create this amazing iPad app, sooner or later someone's gonna put together an office of similarly talented developers and beat Adobe at this game. Until then Adobe is the perfect bittorented-software candidate. $1,900 vs $0 per year.

 

[Moof1904]

Sad...

I spent nearly a decade at Macromedia, leaving shortly before the merger. Adobe at that time was "the competition," but we respected them and loved their products.

Adobe seems to have grown from one of the cool pioneers of the .com era into a bloated, greedy uncaring company that feeds from its customers instead of partnering with them. I know many of the people still at Adobe and at the individual level I see a ton of people who care very deeply about the products and the customer, but somehow that vision has been lost by the company as a whole.

No matter how Adobe does financially from here on, I'll view the past five years or so as the period when Adobe lost sight of who they were and began to die.

 

[6749974]

I spent nearly a decade at Macromedia, leaving shortly before the merger. Adobe at that time was "the competition," but we respected them and loved their products.

Adobe seems to have grown from one of the cool pioneers of the .com era into a bloated, greedy uncaring company that feeds from its customers instead of partnering with them. I know many of the people still at Adobe and at the individual level I see a ton of people who care very deeply about the products and the customer, but somehow that vision has been lost by the company as a whole.

What's your theory? Do you think once they got to a certain size and/or got a new round of investors their investors took control of business objectives?

 

[designs216]

I know a guy that says the bigger a company gets the dumber it gets -- I think this goes double for a monopoly like Adobe.

It seems to me that they have been moving toward their latest anti-customer policy on upgrades for some time now. Think about how saving in the latest edition of some programs prevents one from ever opening the document in an earlier edition of the app again. That hasn't been the case in the past but with each new edition more and more CS apps have that limitation.

 

[Moof1904]

What's your theory? Do you think once they got to a certain size and/or got a new round of investors their investors took control of business objectives?

I dunno. I think part of the problem is the nature of the shrinkwrap software product model that forces a company to compel users to upgrade every year or the company doesn't have revenue. Such a model encourages bloatware and discourages quality because new features, not bug fixes, make a spec sheet and a marketing department happy.

It's not that simple, though, because there are plenty of companies that are getting it right and don't treat their bread and butter like Adobe does.

Maybe size is a factor, too.

If I had the answers I'd be one of those CEO's that everyone bitches about.

 

[MechaSpanky]

I agree with Moof1904, well put.

I would also add that a large part of the reason that Adobe has fallen so far is from a lack of leadership. That or a lack of a corporate vision. From the way that Adobe has been treating customers the past 12 years or so, their only goal is to make money. Focusing on money and failing to focus on the product or products is what has lead Adobe to where they are now.

It isn't only greed that is corrupting Adobe, it is from them losing touch with why they originally started the company. From my own personal experience, when a company loses sight of their original vision (and in essence they lose their passion) and money replaces that, then the company is on the way down. A company whose passion is money isn't going to make great products. That isn't to say that money isn't important to companies but money shouldn't be the number one factor (their products should be number one).

Unless Adobe can find someone more competent than Shantanu Narayen (which is too bad as Shantanu is an Apple alumni) I fear that nothing will change and Adobe will continue to head further and further down a dark path.

 

[6749974]

I dunno. I think part of the problem is the nature of the shrinkwrap software product model that forces a company to compel users to upgrade every year or the company doesn't have revenue. Such a model encourages bloatware and discourages quality because new features, not bug fixes, make a spec sheet and a marketing department happy.

It's not that simple, though, because there are plenty of companies that are getting it right and don't treat their bread and butter like Adobe does.

Maybe size is a factor, too.

If I had the answers I'd be one of those CEO's that everyone bitches about.

I think Adobe, in an ideal world, should decide they won't release a new version but every 2 years instead of every 1 and use that time for fixing bugs and adding a few scripts/effects/features (much like iOS does). That way consumers are compelled to purchase the software instead of pirate (pirated copies can't upgrade) and Adobe will be forced to space their upgrades to make the advancement a thing of innovation instead of to meet a yearly deadline. That's ideal, though. Adobe isn't idea.

 

[charleswhalley]

Adobe to cease offering upgrades from anything but last version

Adobe are beginning to stink.

Their attitude and Creative suite and also Flash for mobile just about sums them up!

They need to wake up.

Let us hope an Adobe Killer comes along soon.