We have choices. A person who worked in for that large entity in Redmond
once told me, "Oh, you'll upgrade. It's inevitable." Not necessarily.
There is plenty of free and low-cost software that will do the job, and
some of it is just as professional-quality as the big boys. "The Cloud"
is just a marketing term for "Other People's Servers," and a Trojan
horse to sell us all software that stops working the moment you stop paying.
I decided not to drink the Abobe Kool-Aid years ago. My main image
editor is the very reasonably-priced Picture Window Pro, and I've been
very happy with it. When I got my Leica M8, it came with Capture One LE
raw processor. I found it well worth it to upgrade to the Pro version,
and still use it for all my digital raw work. Upgrade prices have been
reasonable.
By the way, Picture Window Pro includes DCRAW as its Raw front-end, but
I find Capture One well worth the price not to reinvent the wheel.
As for that large company across the lake from me... I would have
happily continued to use the copy of Office that I purchased through
work for a nominal fee. But now that I've retired, my license to use
that copy has become null and void, as I was reminded several times
during my "offboarding process." Fine. For my writing and occasional
spreadsheet needs, the open source Apache OpenOffice is fine--it reads
.docx files and writes .doc files, and has a reasonable facsimile of the
"Office 2003 and earlier" interface.
Now, if I were a corporate scribe who who did very complex formatting,
had to hot-link other documents into mine, or collaborate across
multiple departments, I'd purchase the Redmond suite. If I were a
full-time pro photographer who worked with publications' prepress
departments regularly, I'd probably be in the Adobe camp, albeit with
grumbling. Ditto if I had spent years learning the Adobe interface--at
some point, it's worth a bit of license fee not to have to relearn
everything. That's what they're counting on.
--Peter
> On Fri, Feb 14, 2014 at 11:02 AM, Jez Cunningham <jez [at]
cunningham.net>
> wrote:
>
> > Not quite - you license the right to use it as you said, but there is a
> > concept of a perpetual licence that means when you stop paying you
can keep
> > using the software. This is how PS used to be.
> > Jez
> >
> >
> Correct. That's the one big difference. For example, my copy of LR5 is
> separate from the CC version (even though there was one bundled with
PSCC,
> I opted to not install it). If I choose not to renew, at least my
copy of
> LR5 still works. Even if they drop support and upgrades for it in a year
> or so, as long as I don't need some new feature or import converter that
> LR5 doesn't already have, I can go on using it forever.
>
> "Software as a service" has been the Holy Grail for software companies as
> long as I can remember. It's only just now that some of them, like Adobe
> and Microsoft, are forcing the issue with CC and Office365.
>
> Microsoft's big problem is that 90% of the users of Office are perfectly
> content with the feature set in Office95. Hell, some of them are happy
> with the earlier version. Convincing people to buy a new office suite
> every year or every couple of years is very difficult, especially
when you
> do things like they did with Office2007 and 2010 - take a UI that
EVERYBODY
> on the planet, more or less, knows in their sleep, and hide it behind
> layered contextual menus and goofy ribbon bars.
>
> --
>
> Paul Braun
> Certified Music Junkie
--
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