Re: Survey regarding new Photoshop Subscription Pricingit's
I don't use Adobe products due to platform compatibility issues: I run Linux as my main OS. That said...
Cloud storage for a 1TB photo archive? Really? Just using remote storage for 500GB of photos on the local network is painful, and it's a LOT faster than connecting out over the internet in both latency and bandwidth. For the sake of showing the point, an 80Mbit link (max on VDSL around here) you are looking at 10MB a second, saturating the link, assuming adobes servers let you. 1TB is 1,000,000MB, so.. pulling that entire library down to local storage will take 100,000 seconds. That is well over a day, on a FAST internet connection. Given that those connections are asymetric, uploading will be slower. Remember, 1TB is only 10,000 100MB images.
Regarding the price increases: Who didn't see this coming? Adobe never made a serious claim that the subscription model was intended as a "business enabler", and given they scrapped the "stand alone" options, it is hard to see how anything other than a price increase was planned. Contrast the Adobe subscription licenses with the Capture One subscription licenses: P1 openly stated that the subscription licenses were intended for business customers who wanted "monthly pricing" (CFOs like this model as it makes it easier to model costs), and, so far, have continued to push the non-subscription option as the preferred one for individuals.
Adobe had managed to get themselves into the bind of having a near monopoly in a nearly saturated market with products that were for most purposes feature complete 3 versions ago. Add to that consumers were realising that they didn't need to follow the upgrade path blindly. Switching to a subscription model makes business sense if you can bring the customers with you in that scenario. There are (in theory) benefits to the consumers of a subscription model as it removes the pressure to introduce new functionality to sell the upgrade. If anything, it should in fact bring more of a focus to addressing current customer issues (AKA fixing the corner case bugs). Not having used Adobe I can't comment on how this side of it has played out, but the reports I've seen suggest it hasn't.