Adobe testing a new price point for the Creative Cloud Photography Plan

unfocused

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In a truly free and competitive marketplace, antitrust agencies would have barred many acquisition, and broken many companies. The IT marketplace is one of the less free and competitive, with a bunch of companies with a strong control over their market. There is more competition among camera and lens makers than graphics software.
In a truly free and competitive marketplace, there would be no need for antitrust agencies. Antitrust agencies are only needed in cases where the market is not free and competitive.

Adobe became the dominant player in the market by playing by the classic rules of the marketplace: offer a product that is superior to what others have, purchase companies that will make your brand stronger (Aldus, for example) and market your product relentlessly (Scott Kelby world). The result for consumers has been an incredibly sophisticated and versatile product that far exceeds the capabilities of its competitors. In many (but not all cases) Adobe charges more than its competitors but people buy it because they consider it to be a better product. The last thing we need is government stepping in and screwing that up.
 
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Apr 25, 2011
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Well, I like to disconnect from the internet when editing and don’t need to be online. I have backup disks that go nowhere near the internet.
Ransomware does not need to be connected to Internet in order to encrypt your data. It may as well be triggered by you attaching your backup disk.

The cloud services have all the protections you have, and some more. In particular, they have much more competent backup and security engineers. And if you really care about your data, you will have an off-site backup for it, and the cheapest regular off-site backup solutions these days are cloud storage based.

The likelihood of a local disk being hacked is much less likely than a permanent cloud service.
The only extra risk of the cloud storage compared to the local one is that the company that provides it suddenly goes out of business. Still, if it's Adobe or (especially) Amazon, the chances of that are negligible compared to the chances that you personally go out of business.
 
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SecureGSM

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Kit,
Some practices and methodologies you are referring to are quite unsubstantiated.
None of the public cloud providers would guarantee any data protection or integrity whatsoever. Read SLA. It is all at your own risk.
Adobe, Amazon and other known to have a long track record of cyber security incidents, millions and millions of user accounts leaked, user data accessed by third parties, etc.
the rule of thumb is: transfer to cloud only the data that you can absolutely can afford to have lost completely or illegally obtained by non-authorized party.

Only 20% of enterprises are on cloud already, insecurity is one of the issues there
 
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LDS

Sep 14, 2012
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remember the main driver for them going subscription was seemingly maintaining revenue stream in the face of the amount of software piracy

No. That was a little icing on the cake, but you can easily find pirated copies of CC, if you want.

The main driver for switching to subscription, and not for Adobe only, is that as markets mature, and adding new features to products becomes difficult and/or expensive, the old cash flows disappear. If once a two/three years old device or software looked outdated, not so much today, and the average lifetime increased to five years or more. It happened to computers, it happened to OSes, it happened to software, it's happening to smartphones.

Just as long as you have a market captive enough, you can find other ways to sustain or increase the cash flow. The two main solutions today are switching to subscriptions (or cloud services, which is mostly the same), and monetize users' data - often both. Only if a product is appealing enough you can try to raise prices, as it's happening in the smartphones market, as long as they can. In all situations, anyway, the losers is the customer - a symptom that those markets aren't really "free" enough.
 
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unfocused

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...None of the public cloud providers would guarantee any data protection or integrity whatsoever...the rule of thumb is: transfer to cloud only the data that you can absolutely can afford to have lost completely or illegally obtained by non-authorized party.

Cloud storage is for backup and convenience. Copy (not transfer) files to the cloud so that if your home/business storage is lost, corrupted or destroyed, you have a backup. Copy to the cloud so you can share files or access them remotely. Having your files in only one place is risky, no matter where that is.

Yes, anything you post, sell or give to someone else can be stolen. The only protection for that is copyrighting important images, but let's be realistic, how many of our images are so valuable that they are worth stealing?
 
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LDS

Sep 14, 2012
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In a truly free and competitive marketplace, there would be no need for antitrust agencies. Antitrust agencies are only needed in cases where the market is not free and competitive.

Sorry, no market remains free and competitive without rules and a regulator enforcing them. Otherwise the old apes behaviour takes the precedence, the 800 pound gorilla wins, and customers simply pay more than needed.

Adobe became the dominant player

Sure, like Microsoft, Google, etc - often adopting behaviours that should have been sanctioned but were not. Anyway, when you have a dominant position, usually stricter rules applies to avoid abuses of that position.

Like it or not, democratic governments were created exactly to stop the abuses of a few powerful ones. If you prefer oligarchies dominated by a restricted ruling class who can abuse its power at will, your choice, but not mine.
 
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Apr 25, 2011
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Kit,
Some practices and methodologies you are referring to are quite unsubstantiated.
No one here was asking for my backup schemes.

I am just addressing some common cognitive biases (like items in one's personal possession being seen as inherently more "secure").

None of the public cloud providers would guarantee any data protection or integrity whatsoever. Read SLA. It is all at your own risk.
And what kind of SLA do you have with your SoHo setup? Who will replace your data if your hardware gets physically stolen?
 
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I've been looking for that last push to move me to either On1's Photo Raw or Skylum's Luminar, both of which I've purchased. Both companies have demonstrated outstanding ethics and seem very customer friendly. Both are actively improving their abilities to import pre-existing work done in LR to their product. It would seem that Adobe is on the cusp of providing me with that little nudge.
 
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In the UK the £9.99 option is still available so i guess it depends on how the 'pricing tests' go in the US? However, I bought Luminar a few months ago to give it a try and whilst I still prefer Phtotoshop, if Adobe double my subscription, I will cancel & move over to Luminar. Not so much a case of if I can afford it but as a matter of principle.

The poll over at Petapixel suggests many will do the same - currently just over 85% say they would cancel.
 
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Even better, why not just offer the software for FREE? I mean, everyone likes free, right?

Damn that pesky desire for profit...
Its a reasonable question. I have there lightroom classic / photoshop cc subscription with 20GB storage. Ive never used the storage and never will all my stuff is backed-up 4 ways locally would not risk someone else just in case I decided to not use the service in the future. Im certanly not against them makng a profit, holding my asset I am.
 
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LDS

Sep 14, 2012
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Or you ran out of your stock of Kodachrome?

My Kodachrome of yesterday may be your cloud data of tomorrow. Don't believe even companies like Amazon could not fall (Enron? WorldCom? Lehman Brothers?), because of unexpected market changes, or simply change business model, and drop some products and customers when they are no longer remunerative enough.
 
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My Kodachrome of yesterday may be your cloud data of tomorrow.
And how many years did you have to switch from Kodachrome before it became unavailable?

Don't believe even companies like Amazon could not fall (Enron? WorldCom? Lehman Brothers?), because of unexpected market changes, or simply change business model, and drop some products and customers when they are no longer remunerative enough.
I don't believe we are talking about stock market investing here, and "unexpected market changes" don't happen in a vacuum, but are driven by the customers' preferences.
 
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SecureGSM

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No one here was asking for my backup schemes.

I am just addressing some common cognitive biases (like items in one's personal possession being seen as inherently more "secure").


And what kind of SLA do you have with your SoHo setup? Who will replace your data if your hardware gets physically stolen?
Please take you time to realise how physical security / data loss prevention strategy differs from cyber security objectives. Then please consider review of your contingency and mitigation strategies. Bottom line is public cloud insecurities is not about your files getting lost to the point beyond recovery but about mitigation of risk of unauthorised access to your business data and inadvertently revealing sensitive information of your respective clientele, visual imagery inclusive. I hope it explains.
 
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SecureGSM

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Feb 26, 2017
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Cloud storage is for backup and convenience. Copy (not transfer) files to the cloud so that if your home/business storage is lost, corrupted or destroyed, you have a backup. Copy to the cloud so you can share files or access them remotely. Having your files in only one place is risky, no matter where that is.

Yes, anything you post, sell or give to someone else can be stolen. The only protection for that is copyrighting important images, but let's be realistic, how many of our images are so valuable that they are worth stealing?
Thank for the feedback, personal images is the least what I would be worrying about. Business data is a different story though. I trust You have heard about GDPR? Cyber security compliance is on the rise. For a small business a data breach may result in substantial issues. Not arguing the point though.
 
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Apr 25, 2011
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Please take you time to realise how physical security / data loss prevention strategy differs from cyber security objectives. Then please consider review of your contingency and mitigation strategies. Bottom line is public cloud insecurities is not about your files getting lost to the point beyond recovery but about mitigation of risk of unauthorised access to your business data and inadvertently revealing sensitive information of your respective clientele, visual imagery inclusive. I hope it explains.
Here we go again: you are mistakenly thinking of your local storage as of inherently "more secure".

If you consider yourself a kind of business that can be targeted for its customers' data, all your backups (as well as all your other persistent storage) shall be encrypted with keys not easily available to an attacker. Neither your local not public cloud backups are the exception.
 
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LDS

Sep 14, 2012
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I don't believe we are talking about stock market investing here, and "unexpected market changes" don't happen in a vacuum, but are driven by the customers' preferences.

Who's speaking about stock market? Those companies didn't exist in a vacuum or in Wall Street only - they had customers which were hit by the bankruptcies and may have lost a lot.

"Unexpected market changes" are not only driven by customers, but also by the appearance of new technologies the incumbents could not grasp in time. There could be also ill decisions and many other situations that can run a successful company into the ground. Splits, spin-offs of less remunerative branches of business, and merger happens, and companies do realign their priorities.

if they hold all of your data, I'd be very careful about having all one's eggs in a basket. You like to talk about the stock market, do you put all of your money into a single investment because you trust a company so much? Or do you fear it could crash one day? There's a reason why banks in most parts of the world are heavily regulated and customers' money partly protected by governments... maybe one day that will happen to data also, but not now.

Thinking that cloud storage and applications will be there "for ever" is quite dangerous - and especially if you are one of the smallest customers you are among the ones more at risk - as you are an irrelevant percentage of their profit (if even a profit).
 
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