Adobe announce updates to Creative Cloud, the end of Creative Suite

Adobe Creative Cloud

At the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles Adobe have announced updates to their Creative Cloud offerings and the end of the line for Creative Suite 

 SInce 2003 Adobe have been selling their software as individual applications but also in bundles known as Creative Suite. Depending on the type of work you needed to do you could buy a suite of programs tailored for Designers or for Media Professionals or you could buy the "Master Collection" which included nearly all of the applications.

Just under a year ago Adobe announced "Creative Cloud", a software subscription service that gives you access to all of the applications for a monthly fee. On Monday at the Adobe MAX conference they announced that they will no longer be selling the Creative Suite packages, the current release, CS6, will be the last. From now on all software will be part of the Creative Cloud and will be renamed with a "CC" suffix. There will be new versions of most of the apps arriving in June, such as Photoshop CC, InDesign CC, After Effects CC etc. These applications will only be available to Creative Cloud subscribers.

For most user Creative Cloud is a better deal although that does depend on the number of applications you use and how frequently you would update your copy of Creative Suite.

Subscription becoming the norm

Many software companies have tried to move to the subscription model in order to maintain a continous income stream rather than a burst of income with each new release, Adobes Creative Suite has been very successful, with more than half a million subscribers in the first year. By switching their users over to a subscription model Adobe stabilises their income and also keeps their users running the latest versions of their software. It also reduces the need for anti-piracy measures which had caused problems for some legitimate users of the Creative Suite packages. It should also take some pressure off of the software developers as rather than having to hit a release date for the whole Suite they will be able to release updates to the individual applications as and when they are ready.

Of course there are going to be some questions from users who typically purchased the Creative Suite upgrades and to try to answer any criticisms Adobe have published a letter to their users here 

It will be interesting to see how the community will react. What do you think?