Cloud Central?

I just realized that I haven't posted anything about Adobe's recent decision to discontinue Photoshop as a boxed product, and move it (and most of Adobe's other products) purely to a subscription model.

This is a terrible decision, that I think will hurt Adobe pretty badly.

While I think that it will work for some people (purely on a dollars-paid basis), I can't see it working for very many people.

But first, let's get my biases out of the way.  I don't use photoshop.  I've played around with Elements a few times (in a couple different versions), but have never really stuck with it.  I've thought about going to Lightroom (especially with my recent problems with importing in Aperture), but have never actually used it.

My main problem with Photoshop has always been the cost involved.  I've seriously considered it a few times when I was eligible for student pricing (and even thought about taking a community college course just to get that student pricing), but never did get it.  And I've never really contemplated paying full price for it (though I might if the learning curve was less steep).

Right now, I'm fairly happy with Aperture, DxO, and lots of plugins (nik, onOne, and topaz suites, along with photomatix hdr, ptlens, and ptgui pro (not a plugin, so more of a pain)).  Photoshop would add a few more capabilities (smart removal and color correction would be the big ones, although it wouldn't surprise me if one of the plugins I have does color correction.  But also layers and masking would occasionally be useful) that would be nice to have.

So, with that out of the way, why do I think this is a terrible decision?

Well, the short of it is that I think the subscription model is fundamentally flawed.  I've never bought software on subscription; it just doesn't make sense to me.  Why would this ever be an improvement for the customer?

And for the business, it actually reduces the incentive to innovate.  They're getting their money whether they add new features or not, so there's no real push there.  It likely also screws up testing cycles, as it means new versions will probably have less testing.

And the big problem, of course, is what you do when you don't have the money anymore.  Can you get to your pictures at all?  Everything I see so far is a no.  You won't be able to open up the PSD files, layered or flattened.  So you'll have to export the TIFFs.  Which works fine, but it's a slow process (as far as I know, you can't select several hundred PSDs, and mass convert them into TIFFs).

And what if you have the money at one point, but then don't have the money?  You get screwed, plain and simple.  In the desktop model, you buy it when you have money, and then you can still use it when you don't.  No muss, no fuss.

And if you don't have a stable (and fast) internet connection?  Multiple problems here.  Potentially it could cause issues with the software's periodic phoning home.  More likely, it makes multi-gigabyte downloads problematic.

And students?  Where do they fit in?  There isn't a student pricing, but the bigger issue is that students are generally not good at things like subscriptions.  Nor do they have lots of money.  Will schools pay the requisite number of subscriptions for their students?  I have my doubts.  Will professors want to teach their aspiring artists software that comes with lock-in?  Again, I have my doubts.

And if the students aren't learning Photoshop, who's going to come along to pay that absurd subscription price in five or ten years?  This is actually the big reason why it's a very short-sighted decision.

I've heard a lot of people saying that this is Adobe's way of dealing with piracy.  And I think there's some appeal to that argument, but the real question is, how is that piracy hurting Adobe?  Every study I've seen (that wasn't paid for by the BSA, MPAA, or RIAA) says that piracy helps companies, by broadening their exposure and mind share (to people with little money now, or in parts of the world where it's difficult or impossible to pay for the software).

And to deal with the last argument, that it makes sense for some people (particularly people overseas or who are using many of the other programs in the CS suite).  Financially, in the short term, it probably does.  But it locks in those customers in a way that CS didn't.  First, there's the issue I already mentioned above, about what happens if you can't keep paying for it.  And secondly, you're at Adobe's mercy on pricing, at that point.  If you go to the subscription, and Adobe raises the price (and they will, I guarantee), you're completely stuck with paying the higher price or losing access to your files.  Either way, you're screwed.

So I really don't see this being of benefit to any of Adobe's customers, even the ones who might think it is.  We'll see; there's quite a bit of time for Adobe to try to address some of those issues (especially the end-of-subscription-access one).  But so far, they haven't (other than to say that they're thinking about it).

I think Thom Hogan has it right, from Adobe's perspective, when he says that they won't even think about whether this is the right thing to do for another year or two.  But I also think he's right that this is making a lot of people question their commitment to Adobe software, and that's never a good thing.

I think this is another example of a decision with very wide impact being taken by a bean counter unable to recognize externalities.  That is, long-term effects that don't directly show up on a balance sheet.  And I think it'll be recognized (eventually) as a huge mistake for the company.

Aper-ent Fail

A short follow-up to my post last week about equipment success and failure in the trip.

When I got back, I had a couple of 32GB CF cards with, between them, almost 3000 images of the trip (which is to say, among other things, that they were full. Glad I resisted the temptation to only get one). I knew that this would end up, with additional edits, completely filling up the hard drive in my iMac.

So I knew, immediately, that I needed to move my Aperture library off of that drive.

Happily, I had a spare hard drive sitting around. After kvetching a bit about USB transfer speeds (and, especially, that my iMac doesn't have USB3), it finally occurred to me that I did have a little-used firewire port that I could use for fast transfer. So I got a firewire 800 (and USB3) case for the drive. That has been a major win.

But, even before I got the case, I was trying to read all those images off the cards. To that end, I copied my Aperture library onto the new drive (thank goodness I didn't delete the original), and tried to import the images into that. Disaster. I waited a couple of days (until I went multiple hours without any data being written (using inode counts to verify)) for the import, to no avail. I then tried again with the whole process, hoping it was a transitory problem (and, by this time, I had the firewire case) or related to the drive and reader both being USB (one of the less-talked-about benefits of firewire over USB is that, because of its latency guarantees, firewire handles flooding of the bus much better).

Second verse, same as the first.

Ok, need to do something different. For surety (and to ensure USB was not the issue), I copied the files to the hard drive before importing. The surety part came when that made it easy to back them up.

Anyway, I tried again, this time with a new (ie: empty) Aperture library. Third verse, same as the first.

Tried again with a subset of the 1500 (ie: one card) I'd been trying to import. Fourth verse, same as the first.

Tried again with an even smaller subset (mind you, I've been using Aperture for several years now, with no serious problems, which is a large part of why I gave it so many chances); one gross of them. Appearances looked the same (it seemed hung at a certain point), but while I was waiting to verify, my son turned off the UPS to my computer. Ugh. After turning the computer back on, I fired up Aperture, and saw that it appeared to have succeeded in importing.

I tried again, with a larger subset of files; do import, wait for apparent hang. When it hung, I manually killed Aperture (one thing I'd found out during this process is that you can't gently kill Aperture. It gives a warning, then tries to undo what it's been doing if you tell it to quit. This has no more success than the import. So I used the old UNIX standby, kill), and then fired it up again. It worked again.

In this manner, I was able to get the rest of the images imported, but it took nine days, total.

Pissed me off enough that I was seriously considering switching over to Lightroom (and I really don't like Adobe, so that would not have been flippant decision). I'm hoping that the problem won't repeat the next time I need to import stuff.

The one positive indication (which I forgot about until just now) is that, after that first failed import, I did successfully import from my XQD card, some pictures which I'd taken the Sunday morning after we got home. Maybe it's just an indication that my computer doesn't like compact flash. Or me using the GPS device (not nearly all my pictures from the trip had GPS coords, but the ones that did were the first pictures I'd taken that had them).

Oh, one other thing I learned about during this. You can get a progress indication on an import job by clicking on where it says 'Importing'. Didn't get me through this, but the feedback was sometimes very useful.

Do I have a conclusion? Not really, although it certainly shows an epic fail by Aperture vis a vis this trip. Let's hope it's the last failure. One more, and I'm giving up on it, and going to Lightroom. Ugh.

Oh, and Apple?  When are we going to see a new version?  This one's a couple of years old, with the only updates being photo stream support and recognizing new RAW formats.

adobe customer service

I just got my hands on Photoshop Elements 6 for my Mac. I'd been debating whether to get it, or to wait for 7, or just to do without, but Amazon had a really good price a week or so ago. For whatever reason, it took until today to arrive (I'm guessing they got a lot of orders and ran out before they fulfilled mine, given that it was shipped overnight).

Anyway, I started the installer, and got this error immediately.

Interesting, as I'm using a bog-standard 'Mac OS Extended' filesystem, and as there's nothing mentioned in the system requirements at all, in terms of filesystem.

So, I mosey on over to Adobe's support site (helpfully linked from the readme that listed the requirements). No issue listed there, so I head over to the Elements forum. Nothing similar listed there, either, so I try to create a new post. And that takes me to this lovely page.

Scheduled Maintenance?!? At 3pm on a weekday? If they're telling the truth, then they are really stupid. And if they're not, what does that mean? They hate their customers? I'm not sure. Whatever it means, I'm probably returning the software; this is not the sort of thing to inspire customer loyalty.

Update: It turns out that PSE (and most, if not all, adobe products) can't be installed on a case-sensitive filesystem. WTF? Time to return.