In the past, Adobe has run on a 12 to 24 month update cycle for its Creative Suite products such as Photoshop and Illustrator. With Creative Suite 5, the company announced it would be delivering “.5” versions of certain products to increase the speed that it could get new features out to customers. There were incremental updates to the Creative Suite products but released quicker than full versions. Creative Cloud changes that again by giving users access to features as they are become available. Voltmer said subscribers will not be waiting for a new numbered version or incremental update of their product, “this would actually be new functionality, not a bug fix that Creative Cloud subscribers would get before the next package release of the product.”
The shift to a subscription model was driven in part by customers that told Adobe they would like better of its products with publishing services and easier ways for them to update products without having to absorb the big jumps to new Creative Suite editions. “Being able to get the updates on an ongoing basis makes it easier for them to manage and to start integrating those into their workload in terms of dealing with the various products,” Voltmer said.
Subscribers will also get access to tools like Adobe’s Typekit, regularly a separate subscription service, and other Adobe products such as Lightroom that are normally separate purchases not featured in any of Adobe’s Creative Suite bundles. While Creative Cloud will be launching in May, 2012, some of the additional products like Lightroom and the 1.0 version of
Adobe Edge will be rolled out to subscribers over the rest of the year.
