Adobe have announced that their industry leading Photoshop software will now only be available in subscription. The existing version, CS6, will continue to be available in persistent license, but all new versions will not and you will have to move to their subscription service called Cloud.
The current software suite costs £1800 which gives you the license to install it on your machine. It never expires. The new offering from Adobe is £70 per month. My maths suggest that this means that Adobe assume you upgrade every two years. As twenty five months of Cloud costs equate to approximately the cost of the original software in “persistent” licenses form.
I do upgrade my software quite often. But not all of the software all of the time. I am still using Office 2010, I still use PSE 8. I am still a heavy user of Windows 7 and in some instances Vista!
Its going to get expensive for us consumers. I just hope that the OpenSource applications catch up with the “paid for” applications so we can switch sooner rather than later…