Looks like “crowd-voicing”—as in large numbers of people complaining very pointedly and loudly—can sometimes have an effect, even on really big companies.
If you use an Adobe photo editing product, you’ve probably followed the mini-firestorm of debate that ensued after Adobe announced some time ago that Photoshop CS6 would be the last perpetual-license version of that venerable tool (as well as for other programs included in the Creative Suite). The time has come and gone to sign up for Creative Cloud at special introductory rates, but today another package has been offered for photography enthusiasts (as long as you own Photoshop CS3 or later) that I suspect will be relatively well received: it will include Photoshop CC, Lightroom 5, a Behance Membership with ProSite, and 20GB of Adobe Cloud storage, all for $9.99 a month (limited time offer).
There’s little doubt the industry momentum is decidedly toward a cloud model, and there’s not much an individual can do about it even if one wanted to. Learning to make it work for you (while keeping copies of your most important data under personal local control) is the challenge. At first blush this new package offer looks to be a bit of an olive branch by Adobe to a huge installed base of photographers. Time will tell how well it’s received.