I was very disappointed to find out Adobe had decided to end sales of Creative Suite in favor of a leasing model through Creative Cloud. Judging from a few minutes surfing the web the vast majority of web posters agree.
In my case I had looked at the option when I was thinking about upgrading to CS6. Based on the upgrade costs and frequency I calculated an upgrade to CS6 was more economical for me than moving to the Cloud. Since I had already made the big investment in the original purchase, upgrades were about half the price. Yes, some of the Cloud features interest me. I would like to play with Muse, but not at $180 per year. I also do not need to storage and collaboration aspect of Creative Cloud. I already have several cloud storage accounts and as a one man design shop I have no real collaboration requirements.
Frankly I don’t see how Adobe can claim CC is cheaper even if you include the original full retail cost of the software. It looks cheaper for the first 10 years but then the pendulum swings in favor of buying. Yes, 10 years is a long time but how long have you owned a copy of Microsoft Office? Designers who use the applications in CS are long term users. Career users. These are not typically consumer level buyers. No one I know would buy Illustrator over the other alternatives out there just to play around, not when Illustrator is 5 to 6 times the price.
The other big gotcha with Adobe’s plan and possibly the biggest one is when you quite paying, you have nothing. Going back to my 10 payback model, you would have spent $6000 and will have exactly nothing to show for it the day you let you subscription lapse. With a purchase model I would still have functioning copies of all of the applications in the suite.
I do like the cloud only concept though. I usually buy as a download if I can, and avoiding the packaging step does allow for immediate version updates as bug fixes and new features are developed. On this point I agree with Adobe.
It really comes down to the pricing. Adobe has just doubled my future cost of ownership and I have received very little in return. Practically nothing. Certainly nothing worth more than $5 per month for some storage.
I have to agree with the posting populous. It a straight out money grab. I am going to hold off for as long as possible. Maybe they will get enough of a backlash and change their mind, just like they did with the Touch app Kuler.
My Elysium 