Harrisburg, Pennsylvania-based photographer Derek Schoffstall has started a petition urging Adobe to "restart development for Adobe Creative Suite 7," following the company's announcement that it had "no plans for future releases of Creative Suite or other CS products." Adobe has already decided that the newest iteration of Photoshop - called Adobe Photoshop CC - will be available exclusively to Creative Cloud members (although it did add that "Creative Suite 6 products will continue to be supported and available for purchase"). The petition, which has already been signed by more than 1500 photographers from around the world, argues that customers ought to "have a choice between either CC or the creative suite."Adobe is going to listen because this is a gargantuan can of expensive worms. There's already those now trying to the Federal Government to looking into them using their monopoly against consumers. People are looking into class action lawsuits. In only a day or two, the petition has already grown to thousands of people and it's growing rapidly as we speak.
Adobe has made a huge mistake. It's time for the Adobe CEO to step down. Shantanu Narayen needs to resign for this blunder ASAP.
You see, real professionals want control over their machines and the apps that run on them. Real professionals know what's going on with their machines to keep their own data and their client's data they have on their machines secure.
Other professionals and myself (testing it on a non-production computer) have already witnessed Creative Cloud phoning home more than Adobe claims it does. There has even already been premature subscription shutdowns in the middle of the month that stopped the entire workflow until it was addressed.
Are you a professional? You may think so, but I sure as hell wouldn't want MY client's data on your computer. I would never work with someone who put's my client's data at risk because they don't have command over their own security.
What about when Adobe's Creative Cloud is hacked and people can't get access to their apps and files once the subscription is up? How long before the subscription service protocol is hacked and hackers can disable your Creative Cloud apps remotely? Not long.
This is why this is a horrible idea for customers, but great for Adobe to price gouge its captive customers (cough! " subscribers") down the road.
Adobe is just another huge corporation that doesn't want American small businesses to own the products they buy.
This won't stop piracy, instead it will hurt the paying customers. The irony will be that some of the pirated versions of Creative Cloud will be safer to use than the legit version because the pirated version won't have a gaping hole in your computer to contact Adobe's servers or even hacker's servers who exploit the hole.
Government and businesses with high value sensitive data will need to hack their own CC apps to make them secure. Will Adobe sue these entities with a DMCA attack?
Get your head out of Adobe's FUD and look around...
