Some users of Adobe’s Creative Suite software aren’t taking the company’s planned move to the cloud laying down.
A petition posted on Change.org Monday after Adobe announced a shift to all-cloud delivery of new Creative Suite features and versions has 3,000 4,000 signatures as of Thursday. Creative Suite — a bundle of software tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver etc. — is a popular among artists, designers, publishers and others. But the current Creative Suite Version 6 will be frozen with no more updates and users wanting new features will have to shift to Creative Cloud. That requires a subscription costing $ 20 to $ 50 per user per month. If the user stops paying, the software stops working.
According to a petition posted by Derek Schoffstall, the issue is this:
” … all of Adobe’s consumers will not be able to make such a large payment every month on the CC subscription model. In the short term, the subscription model looks to be okay, but over time the only entity that is benefiting from this is Adobe. The (no longer) current model: paying a one time fee for infinite access is a much better business model and is better for the consumer.”
Some comments on the petition echoed what GigaOM readers had said earlier. Namely that freelance artists and designers — a key Adobe constituency — don’t want to rent the tools of their craft. Some threatened to stick with their existing Creative Suite product as long as possible and then seek alternatives like Corel.
One Change.org commenter, Lee Whitman, wrote:
“Due to the nature of the ‘upgrade at gun point’ nature of the change, and the forced ‘renting’ of software at prices that could be jacked up at anytime, I will not continue with the Adobe brand. It’s suicide for a small business model.”
Three thousand people isn’t a huge number out of an estimated installed base of 12.4 million Creative Suite users, but this is certainly not the kind of PR Adobe must have hoped for. The company has not responded to request for comment.
This isn’t the first time Change.org has been used to push tech vendors for change. Other petitions ask Verizon to cancel its wireless contracts and for LinkedIn to protect its users from stalkers.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.
- What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
- The evolution of consumer-media cloud storage
- Infrastructure Q1: Cloud and big data woo enterprises
     |