Adobe commits suicide

[jonazen]

Jonazen, no that unfortunately won't work. This is for people who have a license for one of the qualifying Adobe CS products. If you click on the 'Adobe product owned' dropdown menu you'll see what CS products qualify.
http://mc.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=register

You don't seem to be able to upgrade your version at all.
You need Graphics Suite X4 or X5, or CorelDRAW® Premium Suite X5 to be able to upgrade to CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X6.

Thanks... I wasn't holding my breath, and it definitely seemed a stretch to get a significant upgrade discount applied to such an old product!

Somewhere in my office, I think I actually have an old copy of Aldus Pagemaker -- must be from about 1987 or 88. I have a suspicion that this wouldn't qualify for any upgrades either!

I have vague memories of a sweet spot in the history of some of these products (pre-Xara). I think I just have started with the first version of CorelDraw and Paint for Windows, and upgraded faithfully each time new releases came out. I also used PhotoImpact pretty heavily, beginning with V3 in the late 90's, for a number of projects: not the right tool for precision graphics perhaps, but the included features made it incredibly easy for me to prepare and modify numerous graphics for business and website use over the years. Between CorelDraw, CorelPaint, PhotoImpact and PaintShopPro, we were able to tackle an enormous variety of projects. We kept upgrading these each year for a few key reasons:
- new features were added, explicitly, to each new version -- there was a genuine improvement in value with each version
- the tools generally had a pretty short and simple learning curve
- the annual outlay (avg time for an upgrade) was pretty small
- if a particular upgrade didn't make sense, I could skip it -- and still "catch up" with later versions down the road when it was more appropriate

[jon404]

Jon -- besides XDP (and P&GD 9), I can recommend Paint.net ... a cool bitmap editor, and free. I recommend Oloneo Photoengine, for very fast photo editing, RAW and JPG files, straight and HDR. And, very worth acquiring, an old copy of Photoshop 7. As you said, with just a few low-cost programs, you can do almost any job.

Almost any job where you can avoid round-trip collaboration with others, that is. And that's the Adobe racket -- yearly upgrades that make it confusing and sometimes impossible to pass working files back and forth without each party being on the same upgrade level. At a price, the Creative Cloud solves that. But for those of us who NEVER let anyone else touch a work file, this is a horrifying glimpse of the future Adobe wants for us. Art drones, endlessly passing files back and forth, quibbling over each minor change. Mindless art by committee; an end to individual creativity.

But I'm sure that the very wide world of non-cloud artists will survive and prosper. As I said at the start of this thread, Adobe's committing suicide. Large corporations will keep buying Adobe products... but will bargain for even steeper discounts. A few contractors will be forced to go the CC route to keep selling to their clients. But the rest of us, the REAL market, will avoid Adobe as we would a fairy princess with syphilis, and move on to other alternatives.

[jonazen]

I remember paint.net - a friend had recommended it, but I never got to downloading it. Never heard of photoengine but will definitely look it up. Also just downloaded Photoscape and started to experiment....and this reminds me of Gimp and Inkscape too.

You raise interesting issues. I'm personally not at all comfortable with the idea of a cloud-only / subscription-only model, for all the reasons discussed in this thread already. Also, as you note, the larger and more distributed the team, the greater the impetus to be on the same version of the same tools, fitting the cloud model well. I'm intrigued, and a bit horrified pondering your vision of art outcome becoming the result of impersonal teams collaborating to create "team" art. We see a more mundane version of this concept in the "genuine oil painting" factories that literally follow an assembly line like process to crank out "hand painted" copies of cheap oil paintings by the hundreds (thousands?). First painter may lay down a background, next easel adds trees, sun and clouds. Another might add small flowers and animals, etc. The prospect of this happening with a cloud-based collaboration approach to graphic art is scary. Also - having been in IT 30+ years, it's easy for me to expand on this model with the idea that some members of this virtual team could be offshore, in India, Russia or China perhaps. As electronic tools continue to improve, this becomes more feasible. I've already watched and lived through the demise of a once-strong US-based IT industry, and would hate to see the same greed-driven mistakes being made in this one.

[Know1]

[...]But the rest of us, the REAL market, will avoid Adobe as we would a fairy princess with syphilis, [...]

Haha, a bit off topic but I just HAD to Google that phrase to see if anyone else had ever put those words together before. I see it's from Richard Condon's book The Manchurian Candidate.

[jon404]

@know1 -- thanks for the reminder! I knew it was from one of Condon's books, And now I'll remember which one. A good book and a great movie. Angela Lansbury!

Jon raises further implications of distributed artwork, made possible by Adobe's Creative Cloud. Where I began by likening it to a cow fart, it is more like a Sarin nerve-gas attack. It will be easy now to produce commercial artwork via different work groups around the world, 24/7, year round. Same as software programming... the team in Vilnius hands off to the guys in Bangalore, who then pass the code for integration by the group in San Jose.

But I'll still place my bet on individual artists, using programs like XDP to create the breakthrough ads, brochures, and websites of the future. You can't 'can' creativity. And any ad agency that takes a modular 24/7 approach to concept development will fail. Guaranteed. On the other hand, in-house Fortune 500 artists will be stuck with the Cloud for quite a while, it's a management w** dream, sorry, Angelize. But then, you don't really need cutting-edge design for all those intranet and PowerPoint graphics. If you want those corporate benefits, get in with a defense contractor... just for security, they probably will be the last to offload your job to Shanghai.

[pauland]

Man, that's a lot of hysteria in the thread.

[iamtheblues]

Hardly hysteria, Paul...a lot of extremely pissed off people, yes. It strikes me that the lack of choice for current Adobe customers is causing the dis-hotment with the path they have taken. Take-it-or-leave it isn't a great business model as far as I can see.
Bob.

[pauland]

Just for a few moments I imagined that Adobe's servers had melted and Adobe had disappeared - hence the rush to come up with wannabee lists of competitors.

Adobe may have to backtrack on their plan, but maybe the number of people climbing onboard will have greater effect than those who don't see the advantage of a subscription model, and don't wish to continue with Adobe.

Time will tell.

[pauland]

cgntoonartist, why did you pull the post?

[jonazen]

@Paul (et al) -

Definitely not hysteria. But there are legitimate concerns here re: licensing, ongoing ability to access / modify an artist's own documents if, for whatever reason, people can't get access to the new cloud solution. In the past, if an artist or developer stopped upgrading their tools, he could still open and modify his own source documents with the older tools. The limits would pertain to sharing the source docs with other artists, developers or clients who depended on features in later tool versions. I don't want to rehash the entire thread, but small shops and individual contributors could do very well in many cases without shelling out for annual upgrades.

I suspect that your reference to "hysteria" may be in response to my comments about overseas outsourcing. Whether or not that's the case, I can assure you that this is, in fact, a very real prospect that's worth understanding. If you were to run a google search with just 3 keywords, "artwork outsourcing india", you'll see about 6.5 million hits in response. As always with a search like this, many results items won't pertain exactly to what you're looking for. However I just scrolled through the first several results pages, and saw dozens of firms that specialize in precisely these services.

My industry and much of my expertise revolves around software and product development, advisory services, and service delivery. I can remember, vividly, how people in the US software industry used to sneer at Tata (TCS) and firms like Wipro in the early 1980's, confident that "it couldn't happen here". A few executives, hyper-motivated by the chance to replace employees (with fully liquidated costs estimated between $150k and $200k) with $15/hour rent-a-coders, jumped at the new model without understanding the complexities of outsourcing. There are numerous horror stories and cautionary tales about the downsides of outsourcing -- BUT an awful lot has been learned about best practices over the last 25 years. With experienced management, the proper procedures, and proper expectations, established in advance, there are an increasing number of success stories.

Some of the impact on Information Technology, once a stimulating career path with endless growth possibilities, has been severely compromised except for a few shining exceptions like Google. Billions of dollars that once was directed to US salaries and consulting fees is now directed overseas, and the number of out-of-work US/domestic IT professionals has grown dramatically. Compensation and consulting rates are, today, SMALLER than they were 20 years ago in this field -- and that doesn't take into account the shrinking value of the dollar. There are exceptions of course, and some types of client interaction that still require face to face contact and a close collaborative environment. But the impact on IT careers has been nothing short of devastating.

Of course this model, as it matures, can be generalized to other disciplines and professions. Radiology was the first medical specialty to encounter this. Increased bandwidth and super high res equipment makes it extremely feasible to have the radiology team, or a large part of it, in India. A few short years ago, X-Rays, CAT-scans and SPECT scans might have been transmitted to the building next door for analysis -- now, with the same click, the images are sent to India, where professional services cost 1/5 of what they cost here.

I personally believe that the most effective relationships between artist and client, or artist and team - whether it's for a game, movie, ongoing ad campaign, etc - happen in a highly interactive and collaborative atmosphere that's difficult to replicate when the team is separated by ten thousand miles, 10 time zones, and a significant cultural learning curve for parties so widely separated. But I've also seen that these are NOT insurmountable issues, and corporate management becomes highly motivated when there's a perceived (even if inaccurate) chance to cut costs to such an extreme.

Try the google search I mentioned at the top of this post. The firms we see listed in the results are just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. And...in an attempt to stay relevant to the forum and thread topic - a cloud-based collaborative model such as the one we've been discussing can be a major enabler of a move to overseas distributed artwork collaboration, for good or for bad.

If this still sounds hysterical, I suggest you reach out to a few of the IT veterans who've lived through having a once superb career become a daily struggle to stay employed.