The Cloud Wars.

 
Adobe recently announce that “everyone can join the Creative Cloud,” and while customers will have access to a free membership to explore certain features, a monthly price of US$50 (based on a one-year subscription) has been set. The idea is that users can access the latest version of Adobe’s popular programs (like Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 4), without  buying the boxed version and subsequent upgrades. In addition to receiving updates to the programs as soon as they are released, users also get 20GB of cloud storage for syncing their work.

On Amazon, Adobe Photoshop CS5 costs around $639. With a yearly subscription you save about $40. Not an amazing deal if you need to use the software every day, but you could  “rent” it for $50/month, and only use it when you need to meet a deadline, and then stop paying while you are working on something else. The idea is good on paper, but I am not completely sold on the benefits of a subscription system. Unfortunately, I believe that there’s no turning back. This is how we will be buying and using software in the near future.

At the same time Adobe set the “Creative Cloud” pricing, Amazon lowered their S3 storage rates. Small businesses with fairly typical 50 TB of data capacity, will see a 12% reduction in costs. Bigger companies storing up to 500 TB of data will enjoy a 13.5% reduction in costs.

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