And I hate it!
Adobe’s software is stunning stuff, no doubt about it: Photoshop, After Effects, Dreamweaver, to name a few of the industry standards.
Over the past few years, Adobe’s software has become prohibitively expensive for the common man, easily costing well over a thousand dollars for a software bundle.
But, at least you owned it and could use it until it was no longer compatible if you upgraded your computer system.
That’s all history now.
In just a few weeks, you will not be able to buy Adobe software. (In fact, I don’t see it for sale on their site now.) You will only be permitted to rent it.
Adobe is touting the great advantage of their “creative cloud”: instant updates. Well, they could just as easily have chosen to provide instant updates to their existing software product line. But they didn’t do that. Instead, instant updates is supposed to be an irresistible enticement to make people bite the software rental bullet.
Unlike previous software license arrangements, after the purchase, you don’t own the software to continue using it.
With software rental, if you stop paying your rent, you’re evicted: the software stops working.
$50 a month to rent their software. It’s a very big bite to swallow unless you’re a business.
As far as I am concerned, the only real advantage to their creative cloud (as they call it) is the ability to enhance collaboration. That’s it.
Frankly, I hope their efforts to rent software fail. It costs too much money. It creates and extends dependency.
Software rental offers no graceful way to stop upgrading as prices go up and up and up. You are totally dependent at that point. You can’t do without paying their rent. They have you.
And they know that.
Hello, Matrix.
I can’t live without you, and my dependency started with Adobe in 2013.
Are we going to allow this business model to succeed? We have a choice to make, and it will greatly impact our future world!
Related articles
- Adobe kills packaged software (smh.com.au)
- Adobe Will No Longer Sell Software On The Mac: You’ll Have To Rent Photoshop Instead (cultofmac.com)
- Adobe Just Radically Overhauled Its Business Model And Won’t Sell New Software Any More (ADBE) (businessinsider.com)
- What Photoshop’s Move to the Cloud Actually Means for You (lifehacker.com)