See the article below.  According to Pogue: "the dawn of Software as a 
Subscription is now upon us."  Maybe this is a new thing in some circles, 
but we've been paying annual fees for software for decades in academia. 
Think of SAS, MATLAB, Mathematica -- they've been doing this forever, and 
I'm sure they aren't alone.  Can't most of us do just fine with the 
free-software alternatives?  I sure can.  I have done big projects in R 
and Octave -- I have no need for SAS or MATLAB.  R is really taking over 
and replacing SAS in academia.  I use Libre Office instead of Microsoft 
Office.  I use GIMP and Image Magick instead of Photoshop.  I actually got 
much better results by moving some photo resizing work from Photoshop 
macros to an ImageMagick "convert" command in a bash script -- it was 
faster, easier, and the result looks better.  The improved result is 
proably because it is so easy to change command-line arguments to adjust 
sharpness, for example, but working with macros is a huge hassle.

Mike

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/technology/personaltech/photoshop-cc-turns-software-into-a-monthly-rental.html

N.Y. Times
July 3, 2013

Software as a Monthly Rental

By DAVID POGUE

There's a new reason for Photoshop to be famous.

Yes, it's still the program that just about every photographer and 
designer on earth uses to retouch or even reimagine photos. It's still the 
only program whose name is a verb.

But now, Photoshop is also the biggest-name software that you can't 
actually buy. You can only rent it, for a month or a year at a time. If 
you ever stop paying, you keep your files but lose the ability to edit 
them.

You have to pay $30 a month, or $240 a year, for the privilege of using 
the latest Photoshop version, called Photoshop CC. Or, if you want to use 
the full Adobe suite (Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere and so on), you'll 
pay $600 a year.

The price list is stunningly complex. The fees may be higher or lower 
depending on how many programs you rent, whether you already own an 
existing version and which one, whether you commit to a full year or 
prefer to rent one month at a time. There are also discounted first-year 
teaser rates, student/teacher rates and a 30-day free trial.

But you get the point: the dawn of Software as a Subscription is now upon 
us.

Microsoft is conducting a similar experiment with the latest version of 
Office. An Office 365 subscription is $100 a year. But there's a big 
difference: renting Office is optional. You can still buy it outright if 
you prefer.

It should be obvious why Adobe is enthusiastic about rental software. 
First, it's big money.

Not everybody will pay more than before under the new plan. If you use 
three or more Adobe programs and you upgrade to the latest versions every 
year, you'll save money by renting.

But if you use only one or two programs, you'll pay much more by renting " 
especially if you were in the habit of upgrading only every other year, 
for example. Here's the math: Photoshop CC alone will cost $240 a year. In 
the old days, buying the annual upgrade cost $200, and you didn't have to 
upgrade every year. In three years, you might have spent $200 or $400; now 
you'll pay $720.

And Adobe could raise the rental prices at any time. Every year, if it 
chooses.

Adobe also benefits because a rental plan helps it cut down on software 
piracy. Despite its name (CC stands for Creative Cloud), the new software 
versions are not, in fact, stored online. You still download Photoshop, 
Illustrator and the other programs and run them from your computer. But 
the downloaded software checks in with the mother ship every 30 days, over 
the Internet, to make sure the subscription is up to date. If not, you're 
locked out.

Finally, Adobe benefits because it's no longer committed to a difficult, 
relentless annual release cycle. There will no longer be a big new version 
of each Adobe program each year. Instead, Adobe says that it will 
regularly slip in new features as soon as they're ready.  The company 
hasn't decided whether it will ever use numbers again (Photoshop CS4, CS5, 
CS6), but for now, the name is simply Photoshop CC.

So far, the switch to a rental-only plan may sound like a rotten deal for 
many creative people, especially small operators on a budget. And, indeed, 
many of them are horrified by the switch. A touching but entirely hopeless 
petition (j.mp/1aynMtK) has 35,000 signatures so far. ("We want you to 
restart development for Adobe Creative Suite 7 and all future Creative 
Suites," it says. "Do it for the freelancers. For the small businesses. 
For the average consumer.")

Adobe, however, points out that rental customers gain vast advantages over 
the old "you buy it" system. The big one, of course, is that perpetual 
refinement principle. You'll always be up to date with software that's 
constantly improving.

Adobe also points out that subscribing to Photoshop gets you more than 
just the right to download the software. The subscription comes with 
access to Behance, an online portfolio where you can display your 
Adobe-created documents and read admiring comments from fellow creative 
types. You also get 20 gigabytes of online storage for files, Dropbox 
style, so you can work on them wherever you happen to be.

Another perk: As before, you can use your rented programs simultaneously 
on two computers -- but now, one can be a Mac and one can be a Windows 
machine.

Finally, what you get by subscribing is a whole new version of Photoshop 
(and whatever other programs you use). And there's no doubt about it: 
Adobe is introducing CC with a powerful, well-designed, polished suite.

Photoshop looks lovely. It's still staggeringly complicated, but it's 
about as well designed as any program with well over 500 menu commands can 
be. It requires a high-horsepower, newish computer (Mac OS X 10.7 or 
Windows 7 and later), but it opens faster than before.

The most talked-about new feature is Shake Reduction, which is intended to 
fix photos that were blurry because the camera moved slightly during the 
exposure. Shake Reduction can't help pictures that are blurry because the 
subject was moving. And even in camera-shake pictures, it doesn't always 
work well, or at all. But every now and then, it performs real magic.

Photoshop is now even more impressive when it comes to resizing an image. 
It's much easier to shrink one -- and amazingly good at enlarging, or 
"uprezzing" one. In essence, it creates pixels where none existed, turning 
(for example) a 2-megapixel photo into a 4-megapixel one, without 
degrading the image as much as you'd expect.

Other improvements are liberally sprinkled throughout. Sharpening an image 
works better, and so does the Liquify command (which lets you manipulate a 
photo as if it were printed on taffy). Features for editing 3-D models are 
now built right into the standard Photoshop version. You can save text 
styles so that they're reusable across documents.

Photographers will love the fact that Camera Raw, the separate module that 
processes RAW files (huge, unprocessed photo files from a high-end 
camera), can now behave like a filter -- you can apply any of its 
adjustments at any time, not just when you open the files.

In other words, the software improvements are welcome. The new pricing may 
not be.

Because Microsoft's rental program is optional -- you can still buy -- the 
company has a steady incentive to sweeten the rental deal. And since it 
introduced Office 365 in March, Microsoft has added new goodies, features 
and software bits to its rental offering.

But Adobe isn't offering the rental plan -- it's dictating it. The 
800-pound gorilla of the creative world has become the 1,600-pound 
gorilla.

There are alternatives to Photoshop, of course. They include ACDSee, 
PaintShop Pro, Pixelmator and Adobe's own easier-to-use but less powerful 
Photoshop Elements. (Elements and Lightroom remain buyable, by the way.)

But let's face it: most professionals think they need Photoshop. So 
Adobe's incentive to keep improving these programs isn't exactly life or 
death. Nobody knows what improvements Adobe plans to add, how many, how 
often, or what the subscription rates will be next year or the year after 
that. Adobe is just saying, "Trust us."

Whether you do or not, there's no denying that the big picture has 
changed. From now on, you won't just cut monthly checks for your mortgage, 
your electric bill and your cable TV. Now, you'll be cutting one more " 
for your software.

E-mail: pogue at nytimes.com