What the hell are Adobe up to at the moment? Seriously, I am asking, because I honestly don’t have a clue. I would love to know your take on things in the comments because it doesn’t make any sense to me.
On one hand they seem to have become evil personified and in the next breadth are doing some amazingly cool stuff.
I am confused by Creative Cloud
Take for example ‘Creative Cloud’. At first glance I thought this sounded like a good idea. In fact, I actively defended it on the podcast. To me it made sense that you get the latest version of the apps for a flat fee. That way you don’t have to pay for the apps you might only use once in a blue moon.
Then I discovered that you had to commit to a years subscription. Yes, you may pay on a monthly basis, but the contract is for a year. End that contract early and you end up paying 50% of the remaining months. That sucks and essentially makes using Adobe products infeasible for part time web designers. Once again this segment of the market is forced to pirate when Adobe could have got some cash out of them with just a bit of flexibility.
But they do cool stuff too
With behaviour like that it would be easy to dismiss Adobe as evil, but they are also churning out some excellent new tools for web designers including the ever growing Edge family of applications.
Most exciting of all is that some of these tools are open source. For example Brackets is an Adobe code editor that is built as open source software so anybody can build plugins or contribute to the code base. What is more it is a truly impressive app (see below).
So what is going on at Adobe? What is your impression of this schizophrenic company? What are they doing that you love and what is your thoughts about Creative Cloud? Let me know in the comments.
