An Open Letter To Adobe Systems from Scott Kelby about Creative Suite pricing

I don't upgrade Photoshop every time - it's not worth it for me.  Every two or three, yes.  But the incremental benefit from each upgrade is, for me, pretty marginal, whatever the hype from Adobe.  I have CS5.  Unless CS6 is so good it lets me walk on water, I won't get it.  The amnesty for CS6 doesn't help me. 

I'm not making any moral point about Adobe "letting down" their customers.  Adobe's upgrade policy is a purely commercial matter.  As is my decision not to upgrade every time, or ever if I can't upgrade two or three ago. 

Well, that brings up one of the biggest complaints regarding Adobe's new upgrade policy: a sense of diminishing returns with each new upgrade cycle. Some new features (like content aware fill in Photoshop or the Warp Stabilizer in After Effects) are great and very useful. Others, like the perspective grid in Illustrator, are kind of "meh." I rarely ever used the perspective grid when the feature was added to Freehand a decade ago. That's just me though. With apps like Photoshop and Illustrator there's a core set of functions we use all the time and then other things we may rarely ever use.

The fact remains a LOT of users don't believe every upgrade is worth it. They want the option of sitting out one or two version cycles until enough big features pile up to make upgrading finally worth it. This applies to far more than just Adobe's software. I know people who use ancient versions of Microsoft Office on old Win XP machines because it does everything they need it to do. They may not move up to something like Office 2010 on a new Windows 7 machine until the old one finally dies.

What about the possibility of a new release being buggy and best to avoid? Anyone remember Macromedia Freehand 10? It had problems, particularly the Mac version -billed as the first vector drawing app made for Mac OSX. Worse yet, Macromedia did little if anything at all to offer bug fixes. That forced a lot of FH users to stick with Freehand 9 and wait for Freehand MX. Macromedia Studio suite users were pretty annoyed when Freehand MX was not included with Macromedia Studio 8. This happened during the lead up to Adobe acquiring Macromedia (and eventually retiring Freehand). Incedentally, when I upgraded to Adobe Master Collection CS5.5 I could have used either my CS3 license or my old Studio 8 license.

Every upgrade for an application or suite of applications has its own set of issues for each user. It's not as simple as "if you're a loyal Adobe customer you'll buy every upgrade." What if your current computer isn't powerful enough to handle the new version? What if it has a 32-bit OS and the apps, like After Effects, require a 64-bit OS? Not everyone has the money laying around for both a new computer and graphics suite upgrade. Even though frequent hardware and software upgrades may be no problem for some businesses, times have been pretty tough for a lot of people.

At the very least, Adobe ought to stick with its previous upgrade model of perpetual licenses of Creative Suite products. If the Creative Cloud is as great as Adobe believes Adobe ought to show they have enough faith in Creative Cloud by not forcing perpetual license owners to move over to it by adopting the 1 version back upgrade model.

Quote from the page ProDesignTools linked to: 

»Therefore, we’re pleased to announce that we will offer special introductory upgrade pricing on Creative Suite 6 to our customers who own CS3 or CS4.«

What sincerity-level do any of you detect in the word »pleased« here?

Anyway: I am pleasantly surprised that Adobe revised the decision (until »December 31, 2012« at least).

Unfortunately, this issue is more broad than merely Photoshop.  At $200, Photoshop upgrades are a relatively minor expenditure at best, even for a modest business.  Heck, a pair of socks can cost more than that.  People who use the suites, particularly the Master Collection, are being asked to spend a heck of a lot more at extremely short-notice, or risk losing the ability to upgrade later (at least according to everything Adobe has said thus far).  As a CS3 user, I can either pay about $1150 now with the paltry 20% discount, closer to $1500 at some point in the next few months if Adobe hasn't announced some alteration or addendum to this new upgrade model, or full price yet again for the CS6 Master Collection (around $2600) with no upgrade benefit at all.

What rubs me the wrong way about this is the timing, almost exclusively.  The shift itself would be reasonable had it been announced upon the release of CS5, giving everyone fair warning and the chance to buy CS5 and actually get a couple years use out of it.  But timing it now as they did, in conjunction with a tiny discount, Adobe is essentially exploiting their users and attempting to use this situation to push a few more copies of CS5.5 off the shelves before it's replaced in a few months.  The exploitation is what bothers me, rather than the new upgrade policy itself.  If Adobe sticks to their 24 month cycle, then IMO it's not unreasonable to ask their users to upgrade every 2 years (with the option to upgrade to the .5 version each year, if someone is the type to just have to have the latest version).  The entire reason I myself adopted a version (or two) skipping policy is because every 12 months was just too often to justify upgrading the full Master Collection.  Every 24 months is acceptable, provided Adobe alters this upgrade policy in such a way as to not exploit current users by forcing them to make a purchase they never intended in order to qualify for an upgrade they were counting on being eligible for without said purchase.

So if Adobe maintains their policy of a grace period after CS6 is announced, allowing CS2/3/4 users to upgrade to CS5.5 and receive a free CS6 upgrade upon its release, then I plan to do that and then proceed to upgrade every 24 months, as required.  If instead they choose to forgo the grace period, or some other mitigating element to make this new upgrade policy easier to transition in to, I'll begin looking for alternative software.

wait for CS6 to be announced, then immediatly upgrade your copies of CS3 or CS4 to CS5.5, and then claim you're free upgrade to CS6

I wonder if Adobe have already factored that into their CS6 marketing.

It's a wise strategy but will only apply to the next upgrade cycle (CS2/3/4 > CS5.5 paid for upgrade during grace period after CS6 is announced > CS6 free upgrade).

After that, it's on to the benign subscription model for perpetual licenses - a.k.a. must upgrade every cycle to enjoy upgrade pricing.

adobe have always offered a grace period in the past and there is no reason to think they won't this time.

One caveat I can think of is that no-one saw the end of the "3 versions back" policy coming so who knows what they'll change about the traditional grace period and when?

Unfortunately more and more large American businesses are more steeped to selling stock to shareholders instead of selling product to customers.

Lots of graphic designers are caught in a squeeze. The broader economy is still pretty bad, making it necessary for many to work even harder chasing after a limited number of projects. A lot of markets have been poisoned by self-taught amateurs who don't know what to charge for certain types of work. Sadly, the average customer doesn't know the difference between good design and bad design. So they'll save a buck and get their stuff from someone likely to set everything in freaking Arial and Comic Sans, with the lettering distorted to boot. Amateur hour has affected most niches of creative work. I recently saw an article (I think at the Forbes web site) listing 10 jobs where the earnings weren't worth the hassle or overhead to pursue. Professional photographer was listed among those jobs. Anyone with a DSLR suddenly thinks he's Eddie Adams. By that logic, if I buy the same model of Les Paul used by Zack Wylde shouldn't I be able to play just as well as him?

Anyway, the simple point of that rant is many designers do not have it easy. If Adobe wants to start hitting users with a sort of Apple style "Mac tax" for the priveledge of using their software products it's just going to make the situation a little bit tougher still.

Re: the perspective grid in Illustrator. I rarely ever used that feature when it was introduced in Macromedia Freehand. It may come in handy for certain kinds of graphic effects. In terms of creating a 3D illustration or 3D technical drawing, I would rather use a real 3D modeling program to get the job done or sketch something by hand, scan it and then dress it up in Illustrator and/or Photoshop. For me the bigger improvement in Illustrator CS5 was the addition of adjustable variable stroke widths, controls over arrow heads and dashed lines and more graphics tablet oriented drawing tools (like the bristle brush) to give vector-based artwork a more natural feel. It lessens to need to draw/paint something by hand and scan/trace the results.

If they'd knocked a few hundred dollars off the full sell price (and maybe some off the upgrade price as well), it seems to me people might have ignored the "one version back" upgrade policy change in their zeal to talk about how great Adobe was for making their software more affordable to more users.

There's an element of truth to that.

Off topic a little: When the Creative Suites were first introduced in 2003, the rush to get the deeply discounted software was akin to Black Friday.

I remember howls of protest in these forums when people gradually realized that they could not upgrade single components of the Suites. Only Suite to Suite upgrades were (and are) available.

There was nothing new about that policy. It was always part of the Suite deal (pardon the pun). But the low entry price meant many ignored the fine print.

Interestingly, this time around, rather than being viewed as a good deal, the limited-time 20% off CS5.5 offer is being viewed more cynically, primarily due to its poor timing and its clear link to the one-version-back policy - as Kelby points out - I suspect.