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Also note, Adobe's products are known to be some of the most pirated pieces of software around. During my high school and college times, everyone I knew owned

• Silhouette 11y ago
  That might be even worse news for Adobe, though. It's hard to find reliable information about how successful their SaaS model has been, but the most plausible arguments/data I've seen would suggest they have very roughly half as many CC subscribers by now as they sold full copies of the main CS6 suites. IIRC the figures did not take into account sales of individual CS product licences, nor allow for existing customers who had say CS5 or CS5.5 and had chosen not to upgrade to CS6. If that is anything close to accurate -- and I stress the "if", because the data is probably at least third-hand here -- then Adobe would have lost more than half of their previous customer base in the transition, and still not regained them several years later. If a significant proportion of those they have gained are ex-pirates, that's an even stronger suggestion that their own permanently licensed products prior to CC might still be their biggest competition. The situation with pirates seems less relevant for most of Autodesk's products, as their market is much more likely to be professionals than hobbyists anyway. But the implications of earlier permanent offerings potentially representing ongoing competition for their new subscription-only model even several years later would be just as unpleasant as they are for Adobe. Anecdotally, one of my companies has some big name Autodesk software for use with a specific part of what we do, and we've just decided that we'll make do with the existing systems and not buy any more or any updates if they're only going to rent new versions to us and won't let us buy any more copies of the existing version we already use. If significant numbers of larger businesses that already have spare capacity in their volume licensing deals decide to take a similar approach, that definitely won't be good news for Autodesk's new strategy, but I guess time will tell.
  • r00fus 11y ago
    You might be interested in this analysis: http://tomtunguz.com/adobe-saas-growth/ http://tomtunguz.com/adobe-saas-growth/ Looks like the transition has been good so far.
    • Silhouette 11y ago
      FYI, I found this one, which cites more recent data from Adobe themselves: http://prodesigntools.com/creative-cloud-one-million-paid-members.html http://prodesigntools.com/creative-cloud-one-million-paid-me... Given this one links to data straight from the source, I'm going to assume it's reliable and therefore the previous report I mentioned with lots of caveats was actually off by about a factor of 2-3. The most interesting detail here might be that while they've been steadily increasing their subscriber base for CC so far, they're also still only at around half of their previous installed base for Creative Suite even today, around 3.5 years after launch. To put that in perspective, a little under half of that previous installed base was on CS6, while a modest majority were still on CS3-CS5.5. That suggests it may become harder for them to continue growing their CC subscriber base at the same rate if they approach a saturation point within the industry or at least within those parts of it willing to keep spending money on regular updates. The other thing we should probably consider is that Adobe had almost a free ride in the early days of CC, as there was relatively little serious competition left in the industry. Now they're starting to face credible threats, albeit mostly on a small scale or in specific niches for now, and if they lose mind share and eventually the critical mass that means everyone has to use CC because everyone uses CC, that could cause them some problems. The next couple of years will be interesting for them. Presumably time will tell whether they can find ways to drive significantly more people to regular subscriptions than they used to get upgrading anyway, and whether they'll be able to hold off any emerging competition.