Adobe courted double controversy by taking its software built around Photoshop into the cloud and replacing a perpetual licensing model with subscription only. The move to monthly subscriptions caused the greatest outrage among existing customers, with 32,000 of them signing a petition against the plan for the newly bundled cloud based applications package under the banner of ‘Creative Suite’. Yet ironically this makes Adobe’s software more affordable for some, especially now that Adobe has been forced to respond to the criticism by setting keener subscription prices, rather than the much less palatable alternative of doing a U-turn and going back to licensing.
Adobe had decided long ago that the middle market was an uncomfortable place to be for a provider of a sophisticated software product and therefore set license prices for Photoshop so high that only professionals could afford it, except for the inevitable student version. But Adobe is now making introductory offers providing the full works for $30 a month, which is still quite expensive but 40% below the initially touted figure of $50. There have been rumors that Adobe may after all do a partial U-turn by giving some customers lifetime access to the software with guarantees of regular updates after they have subscribed for three years, presumably confining this offer to premium subscribers paying the full whack.
The essential aim is to convert to a subscription business model providing regular income, while in return giving users continual updates and fixes as they become available, as well as various benefits conferred by the cloud, such as 20 GB of storage plus support for collaboration among up to six users on a project. Of course this presupposes adequate Internet bandwidth and that means quite a lot given the size of the software and capacity consumed by the uploading and downloading of high resolution images. This then has also drawn criticism for disadvantaging customers in more broadband-deprived rural areas.
Adobe has also tried to woo users and soften the blow with a range of new features that increase Photoshop’s power, although early feedback on these is mixed. One of these is a camera shake corrector, claiming to correct blurred images and also enable images to be captured at higher resolution without need for a tripod. But it looks like the amount of camera shake that can be tolerated is limited.
In the longer term Adobe hopes that it will be able to derive new revenue streams from publishing via the cloud, attracting new customers who may want to offer services around brochures, photograph applications and online magazines. It is also looking to emulate its Photoshop success in the lower end video editing world, having created movie versions of some existing editing features for still images.
These exploit Adobe’s Mercury Playback Engine available on GPU accelerated 64 bit multicore CPUs, with features such as real time effects adjustment during playback and the ability to marry spoken dialog to scripts. In the hope of poaching customers from rivals, Adobe has made it easier to import projects from competitive systems via keyboard shortcuts.
As part of the Creative Cloud announcement Adobe has extended Photoshop’s refine edge tool to moving images, designed to improve display of very thin or fibrous picture elements, such as hairs, fur, grasses or leaves. This is just as relevant for the moving image, especially for impending ultra HD productions.
While Adobe’s lurch into the cloud makes sense it remains to be seen whether the subscription model will hold given natural antipathy to make ongoing payments for what traditionally has been viewed as a once off purchase, but that depends partly on pricing. The attempt to leverage Photoshop for video editing will depend more on quality and performance, although Adobe can also exploit its position in high end production where it competes with Apple and Avid.