back to article Adobe kills Creative Suite – all future features online only

Adobe had been expected to demo Creative Suite 7 at its MAX conference down in smoky Los Angeles on Monday, but instead announced there'll be no more versions of its boxed software and that the Creative Suite brand will cease to exist. All CS apps updates will only be added to its Creative Cloud suite, and Adobe showed off some …

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  1. Marty McFly Silver badge
    FAIL

    I'll pass...

    Welcome to Microsoft where we have a failure to innovate! Adobe = the new Microsoft.

    Solution: Change everything up. Charge more money. Lock customers in. Get them to forget that 99+% of what they want to do, they can do with the existing product.

    Smoke & mirrors.... "Look at our new go to market strategy and ignore how uncreative we have become".

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Paid to be lazy

    Meanwhile, inside the padded cells at Adobe HQ:

    MBA1: What do we do with CS to keep selling the latest versions and maintain revenue? The suite is mature and innovation is too much like hard work and expensive. How much more bloat do our suckers, cough, customers need?

    MBA2: Why don't we switch to a subscription model? We can rest on our laurels, fire half the staff and just throw users a bone now and then while raking in the cash.

    MBA1: But won't existing users just quit upgrading and stick with their old versions if development of the suite stagnates?

    MBA2: We'll stop selling it outright and eventually they'll have to lease it permanently because they'll be incompatible with the latest version. We just mess around with the file formats a little. It's genius!

    MBA1: Great job everyone. Hefty bonuses all round!

    While out in the real world: CS isn't structurally dependent on cloud services, and enterprising people in China, India and Eastern Europe are setting about addressing the lack of a standalone installer. The internet has a long track record of filling artificial vacuums.

  3. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    "And you do CMYK properly?"

    Yes, Gimp has supported CMYK for quite a while, and on recent distros (including Ubuntu) they also have color correction support (monitor and printer). I really don't know about feature parity over all, both gimp and photoshop have many addons so I'm sure there's features missing going either way.

    Anyway, hate to say it but I guess you have 3 options; 1) Freeze your system in time and use what you have. 2) Pay Adobe more and more money. 3) Suck it up and deal with something else.

  4. Another Justin
    Thumb Down

    Would have been fine if they had chosen a more reasonable price

    If the release cycle for an adobe product is 18-24 months then you can probably expect users to upgrade on average about once every 2 years. If the cost of an upgrade is around £200 then this makes the cost of ownership for that product around £100 per year, not the £200+ that Adobe are charging.

    Subscription pricing actually sounds like a pretty good idea (no need to pay for upgraes, you can use it for a couple of months and ditch it), but the massive price hike just makes me think "money grabbing bastards".

  5. ihatejam
    FAIL

    Strange move

    We understand that the future is cloud-based. But it isn't at the moment. There are vast populations who are not able to access the internet reliably, never mind enjoying a cloud-based existence. In some cases the issue is infrastructure-based, in other cases the issue is cost - sometimes both. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Adobe will need to revisit this stance and modify it accordingly.

    And the cloud subs cost!!?? What a blunder!

  6. promytius
    FAIL

    some feedback on serif

    one commenter mentioned Serif.com as an alternative. I went there, looked around, DL'd their Movie Making program as a 'test' and got a huge surprise - UNLIKE Adobe, they insisted on installing a TOOLBAR, A SHOPPING SERVICE, etc., etc.

    Revo Uninstall/System restore/update all anti-virus/FORBID myself any further contact with them - oh, damn! I had to register, and now they know who I pretend to be! :)

    Say what you will about Adobe but they never said bend over and receive our malware.

  7. Atrophic Cerebrum
    Unhappy

    The problem with Creative Cloud is...

    I was using it for my work and had a deadline looming I needed to deliver some documents to a client urgently. The Creative Cloud licensing server rufused to open any programmes and my files after a few attempts (about 15) I had to go and use a friends copy to export IDML files and then open them on CS5 to get the work done on my backup system, this wasted about 4 hours of billable time. I was not impressed by the reliability of software that's been really solid for getting work done in the past. Once I was back working in CS5 I realised that it is faster and more reliable than CS6 two things that matter to me. The help system for the new tools like edge is terrible, there's hardly any documentation at all.

    I looked at the new features in CS7 and to be honest I'm really dissapointed that really useful features were not implemented - x-ref stylesheets and content like 3D, CAD and web design have been doing for years I thought was a no brainer to implement in InDesign, I was expecting InDesign and Dreamweaver to be merged into the same programme. Doing that alone would be worth the upgrade.

    Behance and QR code generators as major features? WTF?

  8. Allonymous Coward

    Other alternatives

    I think this is a particularly crappy move on the part of Adobe, but I don't use PS much any more so I don't really care. They can take their overpriced software and shove it up their activation API.

    Back when I did more graphics, though, my go-to vector app was often Xara X. Now called "Xara Photo & Graphic Designer" or "Xara Designer Pro" depending on edition.

    Worth a look if you want to get off the Adobe treadmill and CorelDRAW or Inkscape don't quite do it for you.

  9. Eponymous Bastard
    FAIL

    Film anyone?

    Or you could avoid using any software at all and shoot film and print your images in a darkroom like everyone used to do only about 10 years ago . . . . Or maybe you prefer to work in a room with 18% grey walls and subdued lighting and hope that your printer can satisfy your needs. Oh BTW, yes, I have done this in colour and black and white and it's really not that hard and it involves standing up and not sitting down which is apparently very bad for homo sapiens. Is digital so appealing then, given the "costs"?

    I won't need a coat as, at the moment, it's not raining in Cornwall.

  10. tempemeaty

    Ferengi

    Adobe is now a Ferengi business.

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