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**Danger Will Robinson** **Danger Will Robinson**
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[Richard Cardonna] “I think we should start posting our concerns on other forums starting with the adobe forums if we are to achieve critical mass.”
As I have mentioned before, it would be best to focus your energies on filing your wants and needs here: https://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform
Complaints or suggestions made in these and other forums will probably not reach the people at Adobe you want to reach unless you fill out the form.
Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter! -
If your intention is to educate other users about the issue to motivate them to let Adobe know how they feel, I think that is a great idea.
I can assure you from my personal experience with the issue that Adobe is aware of this concern by a lot of its customers.
Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “As Groucho Marx once said “A plumber doesn’t rent his pliers every four weeks – that would be insane.””
Well, craftsman doesn’t update pliers tooth depth or jaw angle every time a new pipe is invented, so that metaphor is tough to use for anything but a bumper sticker.
When I’m thinking pricing, I’m thinking Master Suite…which is the most similar product lineup.
It wasn’t all hat long ago that I was paying well over 2,000.00 USD for a half-dozen floppy disks with a version of AE that I could probably run on my phone these days…
Adobe’s products are incredibly powerful, and even though their costs keep increasing (more engineers and more licensed and purchased technology) their prices have been decreasing for 15 years. I watched the highly respected Discreet *edit die because it was a great product that was ahead of its time that was no longer viable as a revenue producing product in Discreet’s business model of the time…
Business models change and I suppose it all rides on whether you see software as a product, with each version being a different product, or you see the upkeep of that software as something of a service for the longer term. FCP7 users certainly didn’t feel that FCPX was a new product, delineated from FCP7…they felt that Apple had abandoned them and that there was some ongoing pact between customer and company that the company somehow breached.
What better way to carry on a symbiotic relationship than to have a company need to earn your business every month? (or maybe they’ll ave a plan where you can just pay a year up front…)
I get where you guys are coming from, but I think we can look around and see that all our files and data and software tools are pretty transient these days already.
I’ll admit it will be a bit different for me to “subscribe” as well, but I can still see where it can have benefits, and I have a feeling Adobe won’t be alone in this for long as companies need to keep re-examining how they monetize their products with pricing pressure tightening all the time, and engineering demands increasing…(Avid Media Composer 7, 999.00 USD?)
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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I understand your point and i am sure that my suggestion has caught the ears of adobes top brass but I stand by my post and now include the social sites. I dont understand how a company can push a product and ignore the user base when in every nab they mention the upgrade pathe to all except in this one. Adobes silence is deafning. Yes I know it just the opinon of some of us but it not created in a vacum.
Richard
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[Richard Cardonna] ” I dont understand how a company can push a product and ignore the user base when in every nab they mention the upgrade pathe to all except in this one.”
CS6 was a sneak peak last year, too. Pricing and availability was announced in late April, and the product shipped in early May.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
that is my point. i am not talking about pricing last year and the years before we all knew that that an upgrade wsa to be announced and was coming, this year we dont know. no talk about it just the cloud as if we perpetuals dont exist.
Richard
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[Tim Kolb] “What better way to carry on a symbiotic relationship than to have a company need to earn your business every month? “
But Tim – isn’t it the exact opppsite? they have me on a subscription hook – if i want to keep cutting, i pay them every month no matter if the update amounts to group folder colour icons.
With perp.license upgrades, with a mature product – they’ve got to sell you that they are advancing and so should you.
Two years into CC – with all the cleint project material built up, you’re going to keep paying regardless -you have to – just to access all the assets you’ve built up to that point. It’s you know – cable subscription.
I’m not surprised they want to go there. But it fundamentally alters the relationship, and if they completely remove perpetual licensing, its fair to draw inference about how they want this to work out – and how much behind the eight ball we will all be in two years. At that point they’ve got us all on the hook.
I don’t know about you but I didn’t go to FCStudio 3 immediately at all. many moons ago I stayed with an early iteration of PS for a very long time. Ditto a windows copy of AE 4.1.
Granted I’m unlikely to do either thing now. But saying that adobe getting us all on a hire purchase subscription hook is going to fundamentally motivate them to over perform on upgrades – when that entire motivator would be gone – strikes me as a wee bit of a non-sequitur.
three years in on a full market hire purchase hook, I’d say they they could start taking it easy.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “But Tim – isn’t it the exact opppsite? they have me on a subscription hook – if i want to keep cutting, i pay them every month no matter if the update amounts to group folder colour icons.
With perp.license upgrades, with a mature product – they’ve got to sell you that they are advancing and so should you.”
Very good points Aindreas.
Tom Daigon
PrP / After Effects Editor
HP Z820 Dual 2687
64GB ram
Dulce DQg2 16TB raid
http://www.hdshotsandcuts.com -
[Aindreas Gallagher] “With perp.license upgrades, with a mature product – they’ve got to sell you that they are advancing and so should you.”
Well…OK. What should the next big advance be?
A lot like *edit, at this point Premiere Pro has accumulated a fairly extensive if not bloated slate of features…other than a few platforms that still hold an edge for strict editorial on the timeline, it does most things competitively or superior to most competitive products…don’t you run out of shiny objects to tack on after a while?
Again, I hear where you’re coming from, but software companies need to re-think how to derive income from their intellectual property as software itself has been decreasing in price in a world where everything else is headed the other direction.
At 600.00/yr it’s still about 6% of what the yearly charge was for tech support and software patches for Avid’s online systems a decade ago…and it’s about 10% of what I used to pay for the same support for Media 100. My Media 100 didn’t stop working if I stopped paying the support fee of course, but they didn’t ship me updated product (hardware) as part of my maintenance fee either… And I wouldn’t have been able to rent hardware for 50.00/month if I needed it down the road.
I’m still a little concerned myself as to how this will work out, but frankly after 25 years of watching this orgy of feature packing and price slashing, I’ve been wondering how in the world these manufacturers will be able to continue…there are only so many users you can add with lower pricing, eventually you’re at saturation. Ask Avid.
However it turns out, the assertion that a company who sells products that improve as fast as software does for less and less over time (look at the 10-15 year progression) is somehow scheming like some sort of software illuminati, is definitely FUD.
“Bing” of course is a different story… 🙂
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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I guess these debates will continue even though at this point we have, oh I don’t know I’ve lost track of the threads.
Ok, so I’m assuming all of you have ZERO monthly subscription payments right now. No telephones, no internet, no cable TV, no DirecTV, no netflix, nothing at all that requires you to pay a monthly subscription so the idea of paying a monthly subscription for software is 100% out of line for Adobe.
Do you every wonder WHY so many companies use the monthly subscription model? A steady and predictable cash flow. With the Once a Year payment model, particularly with a software release, there will be a huge spike of purchases when the product is released and then that will slow down dramatically for the next 11 months.
Look at your own businesses. How many of you could run your businesses by having 1 or 2 killer months and then 10 months with 1 or 2 very small jobs per month. I certainly couldn’t. I need to have steady workflow over the entire 12 months in order to keep the doors open and my employees paid.
Adobe is by no means the first company to explore this concept. By balancing out the ebb and flow of the yearly purchase cycles into a monthly subscription, Adobe can better manage their resources, put more immediate resources into engineering and release updates to the subscribers almost “on the fly.” Right now it seems they have to hold a bunch of updates to about every quarter so they can make some announcement of “New and improved 7.0.1 with these fixes!” to get some press so folks will do another round of purchases.
To call Adobe greedy and they’re gunning for our checkbooks is far from the truth. They’re simply adjusting their business model to keep up with changing times. I’m sure they will adjust their pricing models based on feedback, but the idea that subscription based Cloud is going to go away, based on the overwhelming positive feedback I’ve heard from editors both here in Atlanta and in Vegas, I don’t see that happening.
I’ll also point out, again, that there is nothing anywhere in this world that says you MUST use Adobe products. Apple, Autodesk, Avid and even Blackmagic have good editing products. We still run Avid in our shop for projects and Autodesk is on the horizon for installation very soon.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
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