Adobe recently released the latest version of its Creative Suite. For the uninitiated, the Creative Suite is no longer under development, and Adobe has moved its core creativity suite into a new product collection called the Creative Cloud. In some ways, the move makes a lot of sense, but it has a lot of feathers ruffled. Subscription based software licensing seems to be very polarizing in general.
Subscription-based Software
At the core of it is whether or not the new subscription-based model, which has "retail" customers paying $50 each month for access to the entire Master Collection product, is a fair price, and whether or not it's fair to expect customers to subscribe at all, as compared with buying a perpetual license. This is $600/year for a product that previously cost about $2,700 every 18 months. Regular customers would have paid a lot less each year to incrementally upgrade, and when one of these customers did this, technically, their subsequent licenses became unavailable for use. However, I suspect most people didn't follow this guideline and either left both versions installed on a single machine, or left the old version installed (and working) on their previous machine. Some people who upgrade in this fashion even sell their old licenses, which is against the terms of the license agreement.
Where the value proposition falls apart is if you were a customer of one of the lower product tiers. Back in 2007, I purchased a copy of Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard, as well as a standalone copy of Dreamweaver, as it was the main reason I'd originally wanted a copy of Design Premium. Today's product that I would likely buy is "Design & Web Premium." The student & teacher pricing on this suite is $599, compared to $29.99/month for the subscription. Design and Web Premium is $1,900 at retail. The other main difference is that if I buy a copy of Creative Suite 6 Design and Web Premium today, I can keep it on my machine permanently, and use it forever without paying Adobe any more money.
I believe that for Adobe's ideal customer, the folks who were going to buy and use every version of the Creative Suite, the new subscription model should be ideal. These customers would probably prefer to see new features get added on a regular basis, rather than waiting 18 months for it and most of these people are creative professionals who need access to the latest tools and may well make enough money with a day's work to pay for their year of access anyway. These are the people whose Mac Pros were maxed back in 2009 when the "current" platform was new. Plus, I suspect many of Adobe's ideal or core customers are the ones who were touching every part of the suite on a regular basis to accomplish specific parts of their workflow. If you eat and breathe this stuff, then it makes a lot of sense
The problem I have is I was never a frequent purchaser of Creative Suite, and I certainly won't be, but I do like having access to these programs. To put it bluntly, I'm not Adobe's customer and I really do currently spend a minority of my time in the Adobe applications. It's hard to tell if having the latest versions and being a paying subscriber would change that.
And so, I'm left to decide if I even want to have these applications on my computer, and if I do, how I want to be billed for them. I could choose to purchase a perpetual license to Creative Suite 6, and Adobe wouldn't put up a fight if I chose to move that license from computer to computer, but years down the line, when I buy my next digital camera, I may find myself jumping on the creative cloud boat anyway, even if just for Photoshop.
Maybe (ideally) there is going to be some leeway or give in the way the subscription model works in the future. I would love a version of the Creative Cloud where the customer gets a bit more to pick and choose from than "all" or "nothing."
Microsoft Office 365 is pretty interesting. In traditional perpetual Microsoft Office licensing, a customer chooses an edition (Such as the $140 Home & Student edition, the $220 Home and Business edition, or the $400 Professional edition) and buys a number of copies equal to the number of computers they need the product on. The customer then uses those copies of Office until they buy a new computer or they want a new version of Office.
With Office 365, Microsoft offers a similar number of editions, namely University for $80 every four years, Home Premium for $100/year, and Small Business Premium for $150/year. With these products, the customer gets Office (the whole thing) on up to five machines (an arbitrary but probably fine number) as well as Skype credit, an Xbox 360 Gold subscription, and a bigger/additional SkyDrive quota. University only includes two machines, but includes the product for four years, and Small Business Premium sweetens the pot by including a hosted Exchange/SharePoint account using your own domain name.
The other major variant of subscription-based software I've seen (which nobody acknowledges is subscription-based) is antivirus software, and a few other utilities. Most of the time when you buy a copy of, say, Norton 360 or McAfee Total Protection (or whatever the kids call it these days) you're buying a license to use the software, and a one-year subscription to the updates to these products that literally make them go. If you don't buy the next version in a year or pay to subscribe to the software, it stops doing its essential function.
A friendlier version of this is software like Backblaze or Acronis Small Server, which are each backup applications that are primarily designed to connect to a service. In the case of Backblaze, the application's only purpose is to put your files on Backblaze-owned servers. Acronis Small Server can do backups both to local destinations, as well as to Acronis' servers, but you're getting local destinations as an added bonus to your subscription to the online storage, in contrast to software like Backup & Recovery 11.5 for Small Business Server, where your money buys you a license to the bits and nothing else.
My Computers
Given that I have a lot of computers and I do like staying up to date with Office, and I like having the whole Office suite, the whole thing sounds like a fairly good deal to me. The hardest part is (or could potentially be) relinquishing control of my Exchange and SharePoint environments, although that's another discussion.
Software is one of the costs of owning a computer that many people forget, in part because some computers come with software, and in part because most workplaces are licensed for software already, and osme people are in the practice of using workplace, school, or public computers rather than buying and maintaining their own. Most of the way through high school and college, I didn't even consider software costs on my own machines because I did what it turns out most people my age did: I acquired permanent trial editions of the software I wanted to use.
This post sat half un-written for a month and if anything, it has made me start to think about what machines I have and what I want to do on those machines. Right now, I have almost a dozen endpoint computers, and most of them have an OS, Office, development tools, utilities, and probably some sort of creative productivity app on them. Whether or not they're all licensed properly and all of the machines are particularly useful is a different matter entirely. In some cases, switching to software licensed by subscription will actively improve these computers' usefulness, and help me focus on which computers are worth using. In some cases, such as in the current iteration of the Creative Cloud, it will prevent me from being able to float between two similarly useful machines to do the same tasks, which could be a disadvantage.
On the other hand, my previous theory with perpetually licensed software is that I license a computer for some software while I use it, and then buy new software for the next computer, meaning that while my ThinkPad X31 might have a legal copy of Windows XP, Office 2003, and Adobe Creative Suite 1, those versions are all totally incompatible with the software I'm using on machines like my ThinkPad T400, the Surface RT, and the Sony Vaio, even if those computers each vary by a version of two. (The T400 and RT are likely to have Office 2013, the Vaio and my T42p are likely to have Office 2010, for example.)
Right now, all of my own software is licensed perpetually. For me, switching to subscription software will create some management complexity, but it has the ability to create some benefits, such as providing licensed software for more of my machines, creating a more predictable cost structure for the software I use most often, and granting access to some network-based services that could simplify the management of my local server system.
I will eventually come to a decision in regards to my next big software need, which is Lightroom 5 and/or Adobe Creative Suite, but unfortunately I can't say the jury has returned on that decision yet.