Make Good Art

“Go and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.”

Neil Gaiman

Old, New, Good, Bad

When CS5.5 came out, I wrote about pricing, both upgrade/purchase and the new subscription. I’m still of the opinion that there are pros and cons to the pricing structure, but back in November there was news that frankly flabbergasted me: when CS6 was to be released, you would only get upgrade pricing if you owned CS5 or CS5.5. If you owned, let’s say, CS4, you would either have to shell out $949 (at least, that’s the current price) to upgrade to CS5.5 then upgrade AGAIN to CS6. At that point, you might be paying nearly as much as buying it for the first time. Scott Kelby, President of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals (NAPP) called Adobe out on this new structure in an open letter in November.

Yesterday, Adobe backtracked and announced that the upgrade pricing for CS6 would be available back to CS3, which is essentially their old pricing structure (though they haven’t given actual pricing yet). My best guess is that Adobe didn’t like ticking off the President of an Association that is dedicated to one of their products, although I’m sure they got plenty of other complaint letters.

Adobe seems to really want to get everyone on the subscription service, but it seems that the idea to force more people to that didn’t quite go like they wanted. I would expect that fairly soon you’ll only be able to get the Creative Suite by subscription, which gives you access to what Adobe is calling the Creative Cloud, which not only gives you access to the program you want, but storage space, web fonts, training, syncing, and collaboration in a cloud based system. The release is planned for the first half of 2012, so all the details aren’t available yet, but it will be interesting to see how customers take to it.

 

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