What I'm struggling with is if Adobe appears successful, and others follow the subscription model, I'll have to pay a monthly fee to a dozen companies to be able to turn my computer on. As a one-person business, I have a really hard time seeing the upside to that.

Indeed, did you hear that Microsoft is now planning a subscription model for Windows!

Windows 10 may be the last piece of Microsoft's cloud puzzle | ZDNetfor

Yay! Let's rent everything in the future!

Maybe Adobe must to considers offers a perpetual license for customer that has one year paying a license, same as you rent a car for one year with option to purchase a definitive owner license.. I think this is possible.. why? You are being paying for one year and you are a trusted customer.

Regards

César Qüeb

It's funny how at this point it doesn't really matter all that much to me whether Adobe is subscription or not because that doesn't seem to be the biggest problem with the company. The biggest problem with Adobe is that they just don't put out compelling upgrades anymore. Even if Adobe decided to dump subscriptions I still wouldn't give them money for their licensed software either since I keep drifting away to other companies that provide better value like Affinity. From my view Adobe's failure is their current crappy updates not the subscription.

Yes, and I work from a PC which means when they release a fiasco like Windows 8, I'll be stuck with their vision of what I need. If people are tied to paying the subscription fee and MS loses no revenue over their mistake, what will their incentive be to write Windows 9? Kinda wondering the same about Adobe. Bugs come out with every new change, and you don't get the choice of whether you're going to be their beta tester or not.

I'm still not clear on how they plan on advancing their software without forcing us to upgrade our hardware when their hardware demands more power. Maybe I'll be running Ubuntu and donating to open-source projects by then.

I can't figure out how Windows can hold on to such high market share. I suppose they are starting to lose some of that share with tablets now.

Pik80, many of us predicted the updates would suck in the subscription model, because users no longer had the choice to skip the updates and thus vote with their wallet. So I do think the lack of new features is pretty much related to the subscription model.

Checked out Affinity. I love it how they specifically advertise: "No subscriptions, just 49$."

I don't agree. Adobe went the subscription route right after the updates got lame and people were doing more upgrade skipping. I upgraded from CS4 to CS6 last year and thought the upgrade was nearly worthless. The upgrade was purely for OS compatibility reasons. Now that I have it on a modern computer I can just keep running Adobe subscription free as long as I want and keep buying new alternatives. When CS6 no longer works with the latest OS I will just get a new computer to run the new non Adobe software replacements and just keep CS6 on the old machine. I have done this before, for an example I keep an ancient Power Mac with Freehand on it simply since it doesn't work on my latest machine. Someday my current computer with be the machine that is used for legacy software.

I also wanted to respond to your comment on Affinity. Yesterday the price was $40 and on top of not paying a subscription you get two years of free updates.

The price for a year, and all the programmes a user gets isn't that bad. If it were an outright payment. But it's an annual fee. Why do you ask us to pay so much each year/month? Not everyone can afford it. It's a good way to loose customers.

I see the creative fields going similar to how the gaming industry went, only much worse. Games used to come as one. No extras, no micro payments. Now they're coming as a cheap game that you need to spend lots on to get all the extras.

In the creative field, at least for Adobe, it seems like we need to spend the money for the program that comes as one, and the buy it new every year. At least give us a discount for continuing our subscription. What we really want is to be able to buy them outright, but if subscription renewal weren't so expensive as buying the license in the first place, I'm sure more would continue to use the software..

ADOBE called me the other day.  It was a pleasant lady from India asking me why I have not joined the cloud.  I proceeded to unload on her all of my objections.  She listened politely and then told me she would pass them on and hopefully the company could find a solution to my concerns.

At one point in the conversation however she did say that Adobe has chosen to go this route, implying they will stay the course and I will miss out on all of the great new features by sticking with my dead CS6 software.  I countered that as a customer I will choose to go another route and I’m currently looking at alternative software as are many other former Adobe devotees. 

My hope is that they come to their senses before it’s too late.  I’m using Premiere CS6 which is a decent program but it needs some improvement like the ones I see in the new CC versions and I will not wait forever if they don’t switch to a more reasonable position on purchasing their software.

The reality is that there are plenty of good editing programs available and I refuse to join a never ending software renting scheme with no reasonable way to obtain a perpetual license.  That is my main concern regardless of how the deflecting marketing speak attempts to convince me otherwise.  Even AVID is offering a perpetual license as an alternative to their new rental model.   

ADOBE software has gone from a perpetual licensing system to a perpetual payment system and in my view that benefits one party—ADOBE.