Boycott Adobe Software as Service for Creative Suite

An anonymous reader over on Macintouch wrote this post that clarifies exactly why the software-as-service methodology is completely wrong for its user base. Having Adobe update creative suite automatically, along with any license changes and additions threatens the business model of much of its customer base.

I wish I could attribute who this came from, but it was an anonymous post. Sorry this quote is so long, but its rich with information and all the reasons why you should not be upgrading Adobe Creative Suite.

Adobe updated Adobe CC automatically today. Today’s payload updated InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop with new features. What joy this is.

Instantly I began receiving “plug-in not recognized” errors on Adobe’s own plugins. But that’s not the bad part.

Indesign’s font manager has been replaced by Typekit now forced into this update. Typekit is Adobe’s automatic font manager and place to purchase fonts, and it automatically connects to find fonts when missing from documents. Typekit also makes a distinction between Web fonts and Desktop fonts used in printing. And Typekit is free for 30 days. Wow, what a joy to get this new feature? Not. https://typekit.com/plans

As a printer who accepts client files for output, Adobe just jammed itself between me, my client’s files, and “Automatically” went and checked for missing fonts via Typekit – shut off my Franklin Gothic local fonts and tried to find them on Typekit.

I am not surprised Adobe has injected another way to extract monthly fees from us. It’s not that I don’t want to pay for needed services or items, like fonts; the rub is that this was just *forced* onto me, inside of InDesign and in the middle of a project. I now get to see Typekit do its font checking every time I open a document.

I reaffirm my disgust toward Adobe with CC’s “always connected” ability to dive deeper and deeper into our lives, giving them 100% access to do anything to us they want, at any time, and at whatever cost they think is due them. My choice is zero. Take it or leave it. If I could leave, I would, but a handful of clients are sending us CC files now. I do hope negative blowback on this SAS test continues. I can’t want to see what other joys I find from today’s update.

There is just so much wrong here. As you can see with this update, as a vendor, Adobe has decided to modify this customer’s methods of doing business with their customers. Adobe has in fact done the following:

• Removed or modified features that the customer relies on to do their day-to-day business – something that can happen with any update
• Used their application dominance to try to force its customers to switch from a previously “costed” or included tool (font manager) to yet another service – one that will be hard to evaluate since it will come with its own service agreement
• Asserts these changes under the umbrella of a service, which they can modify at any time
• Make it harder for competitors to provide better services and products that better serve customers

There are classes of software that can best be described as infrastructural. The entire infrastructure of your business is dependent on the software working exactly as you need it to, when you need it. That applies not only to server type technologies that have little or no direct customer interaction, but also the tools you use day to day.

Companies like Adobe and Apple have grown more aggressive over the last few years in their attempts to control and monetize each and every aspect of their products and how their customers use them. The ultimate goal of this strategy is to measure the cost-value of every feature and every change to that feature, and to ensure that each and every feature is profitable in a way that is optimized towards profitability of the software vendor. This will continue if they continue to make money from doing so. Certainly other companies have been successful at doing this, but many who have – such as Intuit with its jamming of new service options and binding unnecessary inter-application dependencies to their upgrades – rarely deactivate or modify their products to such an extent.

This is the direction software is going if customers accept it. Don’t accept excuses or statistics such vendors supply; those are simply going to be colored to support their desired business model. If you are invested in Adobe products especially, what you need to do now is to boycott service linked updates from Adobe. Cut off their revenue stream until they make a public commitment (read legal agreement) to support the traditional software approach for any new versions of their software for the next 20 years. As a publicly traded company, bad press and reduced revenue will drive them to deliver what you want.