I find it reassuring to have control of my own s**t !

geoff

@geoff - if only ;-)

meanwhile, back on the farm... i am hearing various stories of ndividuals and some organisations have nightmares with cloud computing; from the sub model of adobe where a friends password wasn't recognised anymore and he had to go through hell to get his sub back on line, to a local charity who lost all their stored data. fortunately they had it back up below ground level...

i love it, in my limited way, dropbox, gdrive, etc., have changed my workflow completely, and for the better, but i wouldn't say uploading stuff for clients to download is really using the cloud.

Valve started doing this in 2004 with their gaming system. It took YEARS to get the major kinks out. At this point, if their service goes down, you can use the games/software you purchased indefinitely w/o relogging back in to their servers. But no online stuff. Plus any saves you make when there is no internet service might not be any good: they could be overwritten by stuff on the cloud or they could overwrite the cloud.
They have other issues (like you can't use a game/program unless it's 100% downloaded, so if the net goes down with 1 byte left to update/sync, you're SOL, even if it's something not important like a config file or save).

Their solution? Servers and authorization servers everywhere, like Amazon. I have a different authorization/download server vs the the west coast, parts of EU, etc. Adobe's going to need to go the same way. The sad part is that game companies have been doing this for a decade to squeeze every drop of $$ out of customers and now that other companies are doing it they're doing it badly, like they're not talking to the companies who pioneered this stuff to avoid basic problems like this.

> "Servers and authorization servers everywhere, like Amazon. I have a different authorization/download server vs the the west coast, parts of EU, etc. Adobe's going to need to go the same way. The sad part is that game companies have been doing this for a decade to squeeze every drop of $$ out of customers and now that other companies are doing it they're doing it badly, like they're not talking to the companies who pioneered this stuff to avoid basic problems like this."

+1

It should be pointed out that this has NOTHING to do with Cloud Computing and everything to do with Adobe wanting to CONTROL their customers.

In that article, the author should substitute the words "cloud computing" with "subscription model" because Adobe could have done this 20 years ago with just a farm of FTP servers. Nothing about cloud computing forces you to logon before you can work locally. Only poorly written programs have this problem. Adobe could have implemented a subscription model that allowed you to work off-line indefinitely. They choose not to because they want to control your every move. They started this years ago when Photoshop CS2 would stop working while you were in an airplane flying cross country because it wanted to phone home and would not continue unless you connected to Adobe to validate your license at that very moment. There was no cloud back then but Adobe's desire to control was there keeping paying customers from using their software while pirates had no such problems. So this is nothing new.

Yes, relying on resources in a cloud means that the cloud must be always up. Relying on on local resources means that your personal computer must be always up. Both will never be always up and will fail at some point and that's just the nature of technology whether in the cloud or local.

Like any great technology, "with great power comes great responsibility". Adobe saw cloud as an opportunity to take advantage of their customers. That doesn't make cloud bad... it just makes Adobe bad for abusing it.

~jr

Ironically, I just get an e-mail (spam?) this morning from Adobe.
Subject line: "See what's next in Creative Cloud"

I certainly hope SCS doesn't follow this 'cloud subscription' business model.

>Like any great technology, "with great power comes great responsibility". Adobe saw cloud as an opportunity to take advantage of their customers. That doesn't make cloud bad... it just makes Adobe bad for abusing it.

JR, I generally agree with you on this. I have had Adobe's creative suite for several years. I bought a legal, but second hand version on Ebay. My use has been light but regular, and for what I paid I feel the value was good. This year I bit the bullet and enrolled in CC. For now, my usage is enough that I am getting good value for my monthly subscription cost. But here's the rub for me... as I ease into retirement and my usage drops off to very occasional I won't be able to justify the ongoing expense. I wish Adobe would make this one change to their business model: allow me, at any point, to convert my CC subscription to a paid up license which would freeze all my products at there current version. I think a fair charge for this conversion would be the difference between a "reasonable suite cost" and the amount I had already paid into CC. This alone would remove much of my concern over Adobe's CC model.

/jerry

>> sub model of adobe

The Adobe CC has nothing to do with cloud or cloud computing. Adobe offers rental-software that can be downloaded from the net. They just added Cloud to the name to appear "hip".

There are two main components to the Cloud. Cloud Storage and Cloud Computing. You could argue that CC is Cloud storage, but it isn't unless you use the online image storage facilities that was tacked on to the Adobe software. Adobe CC sure as heck is not Cloud Computing, all the "Computing" happens locally, not in the cloud.

Like or hate the CC, it may be Creative but it isn't Cloud.

I would really love SCS to chip in here and lay the ghost about the Cloud and subscription models.

I really like to hear things like this about the technology, I hope it all blows up in Adobe's face, it could not happen to a nicer company IMO.

I suspect very soon we'll not be able to even use our computers without The Cloud.

Win 8.1 seems to want a user to be approved by The Cloud before they can log in, OSX seems the same and if you're not careful what you're running in the way of synchronisation you can chew through a lot of bandwidth.

Bob.