Peter Coleman: Adobe CC suite – have your credit card ready

Depending on your point of view, Adobe’s accelerated move to cloud-delivered service is either a “reimagination” of the creative process or two giant fingers jerked at those who believe they are already paying too much for the company’s software (writes Peter Coleman).

Less than two months after the company’s Australian managing director Paul Robson was called to a parliamentary inquiry to explain why its products were almost 75 per cent more expensive than in the US, Adobe says it will no longer sell outright, versions of its key software products.

The only option will be to pay a monthly rental.

From being largely a collaborative space where creatives could share files and ideas, Adobe’s Creative Cloud is also to become the checkout where they have to pay up to retain the use of the software on their computers. Users are told they must log in online every 30 days to “verify their account status” or after a “grace period” of a week it will simply stop working.

This isn’t the industry familiar cloud model of software hosted on a remote server being accessed by a relatively dumb client, or the newspaper publisher’s digital business model of customers receiving – and paying for – new content all the time.

Your copy of Photoshop or InDesign resides on your computer, just as it always did; it’s just that if you don’t keep paying, you won’t be able to use it. Certainly, updates and new offerings will be available, whether or not you want them… but if you’re planning to take your DSLR and laptop walkabout for more than a few weeks, and reckoned on having Photoshop to keep you company, forget it. You’ll need a satellite dish… and your credit card.

New from Adobe in June will be CC-designated desktop applications in addition to the established collaboration and publishing capabilities and Behance community the company bought last year. The upside may be Creative Cloud’s hub which connects and synchronises files and people via desktop, web or mobile device.

“A designer can take a photo on their iPad, use Photoshop Touch to refine the photo while on the go, then access that file, via the cloud, and use Photoshop CC on their Mac or Windows PC to further enhance the image,” says a spokesperson. “Designers can designate shared folders and invite others to collaborate on files. Edits are stored with version history so users can share their files with confidence.”

The downside for many will be that the next round of software upgrades will be available exclusively to Cloud members. This includes the former Creative Suite components of Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Premiere Pro.

Adobe promises more than 30 tools and services for professional-grade content creation and delivery, and “hundreds of new features”.

They’re clever – such as ‘camera shake reduction’ and ‘all-new’ Smart Sharpen in Photoshop – and will improve productivity, as with the new architecture of InDesign CC which we are assured will “turbocharge” performance.

And of course, selling this sizzle is essential to Adobe’s future business model: How to get users to keep paying for incremental improvements, and thus sustain the behemoth the inventor of Postscript and Photoshop has become.

If you can create an effective monopoly – as Adobe has since seeing off QuarkXpresss – there isn’t an alternative. Pay your US$49.99 per month (for individuals) or US$69.99 per seat for teams…. and like it.

To get you hooked – and potentially waive actual ownership of the software you have been using – there are first-year discounts of up to 40 per cent for those with CS3 to CS5.5 versions, and ‘promotional pricing’ for those who shelled out for CS6. Once Quark was ‘the company you loved to hate’, but I see a possible new contender for the title.

The changes – announced in Los Angeles this week at Adobe’s Max creativity conference – are an effective answer to Australian politicians, even though we’d accept Robson’s assertion that there is no connection. Not only is Adobe no longer selling boxed product some say it would be cheaper to fly to the US to buy, but they’re offering a service on which no Australian GST is apparently payable.

To Labor MP Stephen Jones – who told Microsoft Australia managing director Pip Marlow at the same parliamentary hearing, "you’ll charge as much as the market can bear" – the corporate message must be clear enough, unintentional or not.