Thursday, May 24, 2012

My Thoughts on Adobe Creative Cloud vs CS 5.5.

Recently there has been a lot of advertising urging me to "upgrade" from CS 5.5 to the Adobe Creative Cloud.  I am hesitant for a few reasons.  The first is pricing.  Right now introductory pricing is between free (introductory trial) $29.95 and $79.95 per year.  This is noted as "Introductory pricing.  My concern is that instead of buying the software as I have in the past, I am not in a model whereby I will be paying rent every month.  There is no guarantee that pricing will not go up in the future either.  I am concerned about a new model where I pay monthly revenues every month, even if I do not require or use the software.

The next part is fairly obvious.  Storage will cost money.  The $79.95 plan (roughly $950 per year), comes with twenty (20) GB of storage.  I have episodes of Duane's World that are over 100 GB.  How much is this going to cost me?  Maybe I archive it locally?

Some good points should be the performance.  I will definitely be trying some of the more computationally expensive tasks from the free account to test.  Another benefit is that all my files (well 20GB of them) are with me wherever I go.

Adobe has put a lot of thought into this and it will be interesting to see what percentage of CS 5 and 5.5. users actually jump to the cloud or upgrade further.  I'm not a good designer (as is obviously by my blog design) and probably cannot make use of most of the features. This makes me happy to stay on 5.5.

I'd like to hear stories from those on the Creative Cloud.  What kind of experience are you having?