After several months of deliberation and talks with Adobe about where the product line was heading I finally decided that joining the Creative Cloud was going to be the best choice moving forward.
Truthfully just the simple math behind it is enough motivation to give in to this new business model of theirs. Having a decision forced upon me (no matter how logical) is not something I’m fond of however. I’m still of the opinion that the end-user should still at least have the option of a disc or usb-based primary copy. I’ve said this on here before I know but if you’re paying even slightly over $100 for a product it’s only decent to do that for your customers. I feel the same way about computer manufacturers too, give us a disk that we can use to restore our systems if somehow there’s no access to the internet. Files get corrupted, that’s fact. Of course we can make our own rescue disks, but is that simple courtesy really too taxing on the profit margins?
Anyway, the point isn’t to gripe cause I’m actually a big fan of the idea as a whole. The introduction of the Creative Cloud lets users that wouldn’t otherwise be able to use the traditional Creative Suite Master Collection the ability to do so now at a fraction of the standard up-front cost. I also don’t have to plan for a massive upgrade cost, or a day spent installing and configuring when a new version hits since everything happens incrementally.
The real big question is…will users be able to effectively roll-back to a previous version after an update. In the case of past issues with Lightroom there have been long periods of time where I’ve refused to upgrade due to a decline in performance when processing images.
So Adobe, remember what Quark taught us all and continue listening to your users and valuing our opinions.
See you tomorrow,
D