OT: Adobe 'Creative Cloud' (again)

Fri Jul 12 17:05:39 PDT 2013

Steve/Mike.

I agree with you both thoroughly. In a similar thread some months back, I noted that I was unable to renew my 2-year FrameMaker and Acrobat Pro update license agreement because of a new Adobe policy - I suspect that this was in preparation for a migration to a cloud-based approach like CC. Although, as far as I know, FrameMaker has not yet been added to Adobe CC.

And, importantly, I am completely uninterested in paying $50 a month for the many Adobe tools in CC, that I am simply never likely to use!

So, I have been [slowly] looking at non-Adobe alternatives for what I do use (and for others in my company as well) and have come up with some that fit _our_ specific requirements - which is not to say that these would work for everybody!

For now, I will continue using FrameMaker 11 and Acrobat Pro till I can migrate fully away permanently. My goal is to be off all Adobe products within 12 months and then never look back - because I think that their new policies are injurious to small businesses and consultants. Apparently, they don't care.

For an FYI, to date, this is where we are at for now (includes not just me, but others in my company too):

- Image editing:		Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 9 (moved away from Adobe Photoshop - I stopped upgrading at CS3).

- Page Layout:		Xara Page & Layout Designer 9 is in evaluation (we were considering Adobe InDesign, but I am nixing that purchase).

- Acrobat Pro:		Still looking for a suitable alternative. Many products work from a _basic_ PDF generation perspective, but the pdfmark conversion issue that that Rick Quatro mentioned is real - at least from FrameMaker documents at the moment! The CEO of one of the companies with a PDF generation product is a high-school/college buddy friend of mine, and I am going to meet with him in a few weeks to discuss a long-term fix for these xref->hyperlink requirements for their products. 

- Video editing:		MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 2013 Plus and Final Cut Pro (we were considering Adobe Premiere, but we stopped that purchase).

- Screen capture:	TechSmith SnagIt 11 (we were not using any Adobe product for this function though).

- Presentation Capture:	TechSmith Camtasia 8 (we were not using any Adobe product for this function).

- Memos & short docs:	Microsoft Word 2013 (I have _already_ moved away from FrameMaker for these short memos and documents personally - most everyone else in the company is already on Word, and we are probably going to abandon all five or six of our other older FrameMaker 7.2 licenses, that have not been upgraded).

- Longer docs:		Still evaluating alternatives (but I am no longer using FrameMaker 11 for _any_ new documents anymore - no reason to propagate a problem). Many new documents are being created on Confluence, and we will do PDF generation (on-demand). I will evaluate Mif2Go for transitioning all older FrameMaker documents to Confluence - that project has not yet started.

- Specifications:		Considering TeX and LaTeX for alternatives and on-line Wiki Confluence pages too - have not yet started evaluations. Expect to do so in the next few months.

Hope this helps people who are as amazed (to put it mildly) by Adobe's policies as I am ... :(  It sure sounds like you are in the same camp, although others appear to be following the Adobe CC future route.

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Mike Wickham
Sent: Friday, July 12, 2013 8:31 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: OT: Adobe 'Creative Cloud' (again)

Steve, I'm with you. I used to be a huge Adobe fan. I have loved and praised Adobe software far and wide. It's not cheap, but it is very capable and works very well. Now, I find myself hating Adobe. I'm not just disappointed with the CC subscription model, I'm fuming. I complain about it every chance I get. I've started or participated in threads all over the Web. I've complained to friends. I've bored my wife to tears with my lamentations. Just yesterday, I fired off a letter to the editor of PC World in response to the current issue's article on subscription software. I am not happy.

Like you, I have no intention of subscribing to CC. EVER. I have happily (well... relatively) paid around $400 per year to upgrade my existing CC software. I have bought every CS version upgrade. But I will not pay
$600 per year for the rest of my life to keep access to my existing
files-- or to gain access to just one new feature above what I already have. It looks like CS6 is my last version. It's pretty darned good. So it's not much of a sacrifice.

I apologize for helping this topic spill into the FrameMaker arena where, so far, the subscription model has not been forced on us. 
Hopefully, Adobe won't also make that bad decision or they will find that they have lost the last bit of their revenue stream from me.

Return the upgrade path option to CS6! Boycott CC until Adobe relents.

Mike Wickham

On 7/12/2013 5:46 AM, Steve Rickaby wrote:
> I have just had a software vendor ring me to enquire about my future software needs, and to extol the virtues of Adobe's 'creative cloud', which she had just finished training up on.
>
> Boy did she get more than she was bargaining for ;-)
>
> I pointed out that I had been planning to upgrade (with full version purchase in many cases due to the age of my versions), at least Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Acrobat Pro, InDesign, Fireworks and Flash (I have already upgraded FrameMaker), but that Adobe no longer has anything to sell me. She then asked me what alternatives I was planning, and I responded that as there were no credible alternatives to many or all of these, I was considering retirement as an option.
>
> The idea that I would have to pay Adobe for the rest of my life to retain access to legacy material does not appeal, to say the least.
>
> I know this has been aired here before, but I just needed to let off steam.