I get it. Adobe wants to move to a subscription model where everyone is on the current version. There's only one problem: ultimately, their pricing is too high to justify mass consumption and those users balk at the subscription model due to cost.
What am I complaining about now? Adobe recently decided to change their update policies for their major products: you can only get upgrade pricing if you have the most recent full point release (i.e., to get next year's CS6 as an upgrade you'll need to have CS5 or CS5.5). With Adobe approaching a one year update cycle, this means you'll need to pony up an upgrade fee of hundreds of dollars at least every two years, or else be forced to buy Adobe products at list price when you do upgrade.
The question all Photoshop users ask--which includes plenty of photographers--is how often do you really have to update and what's that cost going to be? Adobe's answer is basically now "give us US$100 to US$200 a year." Of course, they do offer specials from time to time, like the 30% off for Black Friday they announced just following their update policy change. Should you miss an update, though, Adobe will now be happy to essentially charge you for the update you skipped. Net result: a faux subscription model.
Other net result: business opportunity for competing companies. Mac users have the very good and low cost Photoshop-like Pixelmator, which has the whopping price of US$49 (intro and special offers get that to US$29). Expect more such choices to appear the harder Adobe tries to extract a yearly tithe from us. If you've got Aperture or Lightroom (and you should have one or the other), the primary thing Photoshop gives you is pixel-level editing and layering/masking. Thus, those of you balking at the update change need to start looking at products that give you those things you don't want to pay the Adobe tax for. I've already mentioned Pixelmator on the Mac. My usual recommendation on the Windows side is to look at Picture Window. It's not a direct Photoshop replacement as it tackles pixel-level changes in a different manner, but there's not a lot you'd need Photoshop for if you have Aperture or Lightroom plus something like Pixelmator or Picture Window.
Of course, one thing that locks a lot of us into Photoshop is our use of plug-ins (advanced layering, especially with Smart Objects, is another one). Worse still, the plug-ins themselves tend to need upgrading with major Adobe releases.
As much money as we have in our acquisition system (camera and lenses), the downstream system can be a larger investment. Even back in the early days of personal computers, I noted that people eventually spent far more on software, support, and output than they did on the computer itself. Consider this:
- Yearly implied update to keep Lightroom/Aperture and Photoshop up to date: US$200-300
- Plug-in Suites costs averaged to yearly: US$100 a suite
So, if you've got Lightroom, Photoshop, two plug-in suites, Capture NX2, and maybe another two or three software programs, the likely ongoing yearly investment for you is likely to be something on the order of US$500 or more to just stay current. That's on top of the US$1600 or so that you spent in the first place (I'm being kind and have you shopping on sales).
Who says film and processing were more expensive?
Don't get me wrong. I'm a computer geek at heart, so I have a high-end computer and a massive suite of software tools at hand to deal with virtually any pixel problem or technique I want to handle. I've willingly paid my Adobe tax, my Nik tax, my OnOne tax, my...well, you get the idea. Still, had I spent so much on the back end during the film era, my darkroom would have had a hand-carved slate counter, black carbon fiber walls, a ceiling mount titanium enlarger with an automated film/paper loading and holding system, fresh water imported from a distant glacier, and an air filtration system that the CDC would be jealous of.
Adobe needs a bit more user focus here. Scott Kelby wrote a thoughtful and intelligent response on his blog last week, and it shows that it wouldn't take much change in attitude on Adobe's part to institute a policy like the one-revision update in a better and more user-friendly fashion than they did. Here's the thing: every time you do something that pisses off your existing and loyal customer you make it easier for that customer to go somewhere else if something even remotely equivalent comes along. I've watched software company after software company make that mistake, some more than once. Just this year I've abandoned two tools I've used for years for that very reason. In doing so, I lowered my software taxes.