Would you pay monthly for Photoshop or Microsoft Office?

Up to now, customers had perpetual access by paying a single fee for Adobe's Creative Suite. From next month, continuing access to the programs, either individually or as a whole, will demand a monthly fee. Standalone versions will still be available but will not be upgraded. The change was announced at Adobe's annual Max conference, at which it details the latest updates to its products.

At Max, Adobe said the standalone version of its Creative Suite, which bundles together 16 programs, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Audition, Dreamweaver and Premiere, would be frozen at version 6. Bug fixes would be made available for this version but new features and enhancements would not. Currently, the standalone version of Creative Suite 6 costs about £1,800 from Adobe.

Those who want to keep up with upgrades and changes to Creative Suite would have to take out a subscription to Adobe's Creative Cloud - a web-based system through which customers can manage what they do with the different tools. In return, customers get access to the software as well as an online storage system and project management tools.

In the UK, access to all programs in the Creative Cloud costs £47 a month provided customers agree to pay for at least a year. If customers opt to pay month-to-month the cost is £70. Access to individual applications costs just under £18 a month if customers sign up for a year.

The move to a subscription model is the culmination of a long experiment by Adobe to see if customers would pay monthly for access. Adobe said it now had 500,000 subscribers for Creative Cloud after running a pilot programme for a year.

The move to subscriptions marks a big change for Adobe

Adobe is the latest in a number of large software firms that have moved to a cloud-based or subscription model. Microsoft has also introduced Office 365, a subscription version of its set of office productivity programs.

This raises questions with me because having an online based web application is fine if you have good internet and broadband connection. But what if you are in an area that you don't have good internet or broadband connection or if you are using a Wi-Fi hot-spot? I am sure that you will start to run into problems. Like it running slow or it wouldn't even open because of 'insufficient bandwith'.

The internet is getting faster and faster and for the normal person using the web, we are able to do more online. But we are starting to find that there are more and more things that are put on the world wide web and companies are starting that they are able to take even more money from the customers by using what is called 'cloud storage'.

These companies will have more control over who and how people use their application. It will restrict the customer to be online constantly 24/7 (which is not possible because their will always be a time or place that you will get no internet connection).

Another problem with having web applications and having everything in the 'cloud' is, what if you do not have internet or broadband? What would these customers do if they want to use there product?

Or is it that I am old fashioned and I need to update my thinking.