Adobe Makes the CS6 Sales Pitch
Adobe Systems first showed a few paws, then a tail, then a couple ears and some whiskers — but now the company is letting the complete Creative Suite 6 cat out of the bag.
After a series of sneak previews and early announcements, Adobe now is detailing the full CS6 line, the meat and potatoes of Adobe’s business. It’s important to a large number of people involved with photography, videography, design, and publishing on the Web or on paper, and it’s set to be arrive within 30 days, Adobe announced today.
But CS products aren’t cheap, so Adobe must periodically add something new to keep people coming back. This time around, Adobe is adapting CS6 for more advanced Web design and publishing on mobile devices, and it’s got a major new way to buy the products for $50 a month, the new subscription plan called Creative Cloud. For CS3, CS4, and CS5.x customers, Adobe is offering an introductory offer of $30 per month.
The subscription includes a lot more than the CS6 Master Collection, including an 20GB Dropbox-like online file sync service, Lightroom for photo editing and cataloging, Adobe’s new Edge and Muse tools for designing Web pages in the HTML5 era, the Touch apps for tablets, Web site hosting, and a tablet publishing service.
Adobe, no longer content with releasing yearly bug-fix updates that masquerade as full version upgrades to it’s Creative Suite, has apparently decided that it can make a killing by renting out CS 6 to customers for $50/month. That’s right, you now have to pay $50/month with a minimum 1 year commitment (or $75! per month for a month to month option) to get the latest version of this software suite. That’s a minimum of $600/year per license to use their software. Of course, to sweeten the pot, they are adding a bunch of other services to the mix, but this just smacks of greed to me.
