Adobe: no more buying software and maintenance

Speaking as someone in the industry, most large format print companies I know absolutely loath getting Corel files instead of AI or EPS files from Illustrator, or even high resolution pdf’s. They are a source of constant problems with color and extra junk in the files. We’ve actually recommended clients buy old versions on Illustrator off Ebay instead of using Corel.

Somebody must like it though, because it’s popular enough that 15-20% of our clients still use it.

Perhaps it’s the “They don’t know better” demographic?

I picked up the Creative Cloud subscription (full) a couple of weeks ago and think it’s a great deal for all of what you get (even if you use only a few of the products). The thing that struck me, though, is how often the Creative Cloud itself has been having performance or connection trouble. Multiple times a day the service status has “incidents” that make the cloud unavailable. If you actually relied on it for access to files, you’d be out of luck. That doesn’t give me any confidence in using the cloud itself for file storage.

I’ve not used the cloud anywhere for much storage because of these sorts of outages. For those that have used it for a while, is this normal? Love the products, not caring for the cloud right now.

Google Drive seems to fail all the time… for everyone except me. Never had a problem with it at all even when there is a widescale outage reported for other people. When I was actually working at Google, my gmail account died for a full day, though. That was kind of weird.

Needless to say from offering to offering “the cloud” is whatever some random company wants it to be in terms of quality of service. You can whistle in hell for a SLA that means a goddamn thing even for expensive enterprise services much less for consumer and small business subscriptions.

If you’re a Venezuealan who’s paying a subscription for Creative Cloud or Photoshop or other Adobe products: congratulations, you’re hosed.