Adobe, a universally known name to artists, photographers, website designers, gamers, advertising professionals, and other digital media content producers, has announced the suspension of its Creative Suite packaged desktop applications ― a shock for Adobe customers worldwide. However, Adobe Creative Cloud ― a substitute of its Creative Suite, would give the same functionality most people desire.
In Los Angeles on Monday during the Adobe MAX conference 2013, the company officials disclosed that they will no longer be releasing any Creative Suite packaged desktop design applications, and that Creative Suite 6 is the last edition of releases, as Adobe is shifting its focus on Adobe Creative Cloud ― an online collection of its applications and software, which was announced a year ago.
Adobe’s Creative Cloud is a subscription-based software model that can support all Adobe products. As per company officials, Adobe’s latest products will now be accessible only via Creative Cloud where users will be able to download the required applications, without any software packages. However, Adobe will be available for sale and support of the latest version of its CS applications.
With the new reallocation, Adobe applications shall be branded with Creative Cloud (CC) caption, a new collection of ‘CC’ desktop applications, an alternative of ‘CS’ like Photoshop CC, Indesign CC, Illustrator CC, Dreamweaver CC, and Premiere Pro CC. The new CC Adobe desktop applications consist of a multitude of latest collaboration features, including collaboration via mobile apps and a comprehensive storage space on Adobe Cloud servers. It also includes the amalgamation of Behance cyber creative community.
The shift is intended to speed up Adobe’s innovation process from yearly updates to regular online updates. Adobe Creative Cloud will also help Adobe and its customers to combine Photoshop and Illustrator, the conventional content creation enhancement tools with Adobe’s Marketing Cloud ― a collection of online marketing software and services.
According to David Wadhwani, Adobe’s senior vice president and general manager of digital media, the new shift will liberate us to think in a different way, and will help Adobe to rapidly innovate. Wadhwani considers this new change a “much more modern business model”. Adobe believes, the new subscription model will attract many customers along with small businesses which shall also change the entry cost. “We’re starting to see penetration into these customer bases.”
Adobe told, it has a total of 500,000 paying Creative Cloud customers, while other 1.5 million are non-paid users. However, it realizes that moving into cloud won’t be much easy for customers, as Scott Morris, a senior marketing manager for Creative Cloud said, “there might be some customers who aren’t ready for the change.” Morris thinks, it will take some years for many to move, like Adobe which also went through the same change around 10 years ago when instead of individual programs it proposed a Creative Suite. “We proved to them over time that it was better for them to get software that way,” said Morris.
The new Adobe Creative Cloud has come up with a variety of subscription plans: a ‘single application’ will cost $19.99 per month, which lets users download and run one application only. The normal Creative Cloud membership costs $49.99 per month along with a year contract allowing users install important Adobe applications, equal to Adobe Master Collection, which costs $2599 for a full copy, $1049 as an upgrade and $599.88 for a full year. Adobe has also announced one year subscription of Creative Cloud just for $29.99 per month for all those users having CS 3 to CS 5.5. Teachers and students can also get the membership just for $19.99 per month. For CS6 users, there is a promotional pricing, but the rates are not mentioned yet.
Adobe anticipates that by June 17, the new Creative Cloud and new CC versions of their applications will be available for users.
