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Has Adobe done a poor job of messaging their CC initiative? To the pro markets, not really...the pros are starting to get it...a monthly nut and they get all the apps they need and free new upgrades with new features as long as they stay subscribed...yes, there's an effective price increase–which is a pittance to the total cost of operating. Now it's up to Adobe to come through on the promise of more frequent upgrades with new features which is one of the main motivations to going all subscription.
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And if any of you fail to remember, Adobe is a company that excels at one thing, designing professional applications for use by professionals. That's what they are good at, really good at (and about all they are good at). Look at the markets Adobe "owns": graphic design with Illustrator and InDesign, digital imaging and graphic arts and prepress with Photoshop, web design with Dreamweaver. The one market Adobe doesn't own outright is digital video because Apple's Final Cut Pro has a large segment of the market. Adobe knows pros ad what they need/want and a long track record of delivering.
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They did it anyway because they (Adobe) honestly believes tat this is the best way of addressing their core market, professional now and in the future.
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it took a lot of guts for Adobe to do what they believed was the right thing to do for Adobe and the pro marketplace.
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All of Adobe's marketing and advertising is directed towards the pros...because that's the market Adobe knows.
Schewe and others,
Thanks for your info, it's genuinely helpful.
the thing is, we are one of those small production houses.. we have about 20 design standard licenses, 3 production premium licences, maybe 15 acrobat pro and a few individual PS, and AI and maybe 10 or 15 PSe licences. (we have no master suite)
we're currently using CS5. we wanted to move to 6, but we were kinds srewed by the 5.5 bull saying we were 2 releases behind.. but we can get over that..
as a company, we've been using some of the adobe suite since release 2.5
in general, we've upgraded every 2 releases. we certainly see the advantage of upgrades, but we have to balance costs.
so.. the last time we upgraded from CS 3 to CS5, I think it cost us about €15k (it may have been €18k I can't remember) -so annualized, it's maybe 5-6k.. a very manageable amount of money.
the thing is, almost none of us use just 1 program, a lot of us use PS, AI and ID on a daily basis. design standard was the ideal package for the majority of us, and we expanded where needed.
I certainly understand the benefit of the full master suite - I'd love to have it.. but.. not everyone in our team need it.. you can buy the individual licences but, it's not really viable to do it for 3 individual licenses per user.
quickly doing the math - even just for 25 CC licences (which isn't enough for us) - €61 per user per month, that's 61*12*25 -
that comes to €18k per year! now to make things worse,
instead of getting a discount for buying 25 licenses, they introduce "teams"... so instead of paying €61 per month, it's €86!!! so that's 86*12*25 -
that's almost €26,000 per year!!!I like centrally managed licenses, I don't need 100gb of online storage.
so that goes from an annualized cost of €6k per year to €26k per year..I know they have an introductory offer - I don't care about that.. that's only 1 year in what I hope is a long company future.
and we're growing.. increasing our number of users.. but at this price... well.. we will be looking long and hard at alternatives..
so I'd argue, Adobe hasn't got the first clue about the SME Pro market.. genuinely, I'm not sure what to do.. I called adobe sales and spoke to them at length, and while the lady I spoke to was very able to answer my questions, I got no real advice.
thanks for listening and I look forward to seeing how this pans out.. and I'll continue to read this post, watch eps of the Grid, read the adobe blogs and press releases.
James