I've been using adobe products, registered & fully legit, since the days of Windows 3.1. Don't know how many years that is now, but I totally disagree with this new business model for many reasons. Just a *few* of them off the top of my head:
1) What if there is no internet?
Completely serious about this. I use my laptop in the field while camping, often far away from any wireless or internet hook up. I need the product installed on my hard drive, period.
2) Privacy Issues.
So many problems here, I don't know where to begin. If not for myself, then for my clients, I handle some very private data. I have no idea what kind of information is being transmitted back to whom or where when I use a web based program. Perhaps it doesn't matter to most of you, but I am in a business where i have to be able to guarantee to the best reasonable effort that their privacy & information is protected. I simply cannot do that with ANY web based program. That's why I keep my firewall running and i do not allow my adobe products to automatically connect to the web every time I fire them up.
3) Poor Upgrades.
I have found, including adobe products, that many so called "upgrades" are terrible, and quite often raise as many new problems as they solve. For that reason, I never, ever jump to an upgrade as soon as it is available - I always wait a bit, and let others be the beta testers. I will not have that option with web based programs.
4) Cost issues.
I have a stove that is 25 years old, and some of my large format lenses are older than that, they all work great. I use a 30 year old 300mm tleephoto on my Nikon digitial SLR.
When I tell people these things, I often get a response to the effect "oh, you should get a new one right away!" When I ask "why, what I have works fine." I often get dumbfounded looks.
The current business model is to convince the general public they need new upgrade, whether they do any good or not. For example, I've gone from Pagemaker 5 to 6.5 to 7 to now using InDesign. You want to know something? The interface in version 5 was the simplest and for me, the most productive of all the versions.
While the new programs have some new features that have proved handy, the point is, if it were still compatable, plain old version 5 of Pagemaker would still serve 99% of what I need to do.
And perhaps this is the irony for all of you. I mean this as no offense, and I always ahve to seem to say that because on the internet people always seem to assume you mean to offend them for whatever reason, but for guys like me who use Pagemaker or Photoshop for every day business use, that is to put food on the table, and pay bills, upgrading is often the last thing you want to do. Where does the money come from for the new training for the new hardware and the new software? I have to put gas in my car too, and i don't have any spare cash lying around today.
My "offensive" point is then, reading the forums here and on other photo based forums, you often tell the difference from the person who uses the products (hardware & software) discussed on these forums by thier reaction to upgrades. The person in it for hobby, or at the very least, not concerned with meeting a payroll, will always be the one jumping in and say "oh, as soon as that come out, I'm gonna upgrade!". Whereas the guy like me who has to use it to make ends meet, and is dealing with customers who are constantly looking for a lower price, the upgrades are a PITA.
So, I think for end users like me, in a business enviroment, the web based products are going to be a nightmare on many, many levels. I honestly don't know what i am going to do about it in the future.