I used to work at a college and had experience of this firsthand. When Adobe launched the Creative Cloud suite, they switched to a SaaS model in the guise of be

I used to work at a college and had experience of this firsthand. When Adobe launched the Creative Cloud suite, they switched to a SaaS model in the guise of being able to offer updates more often, along with providing some small features like storage of files in their cloud. Basically, they wanted to charge yearly since users would generally skip a version or two before seeing enough of a motivating feature improvement. (Prior to this Adobe tried x.5 upgrades) The cost of licenses varies depending upon an institution's bargaining ability. For the "benefit" of getting SaaS we could either pay an extraordinary amount over our previous license in order to get the same number of licenses, or we could get a site license for only a fairly large amount more than our previous license. Mind you that we had little warning about this change, and academic budgets tend not to follow the typical business cycle. Now the benefit of the site license is that all your users can become dependent upon Adobe, so when they raise the cost in the future you'll be more than obligated to agree. Upon hearing about this changes, which brought _no real benefit to users_, one local school actually had Adobe's salesperson ejected from campus. :) In terms of support, CC had a special enterprise edition with its own installer that generated CC packages for deployment. It was not the smoothest deployment for many institutions, it was difficult to maintain, and when I ran into a problem with licensing it took running into a higher level Adobe rep at a conference before I could make progress (our own rep eventually stopped helping). Also, there was some software included in Enterprise CC -- software that could actually benefit from "the cloud" in creating websites -- that would not work out in a mult-user environment unless you wanted your users to erase each other's Adobe cloud hosted websites. Yes, this behavior was documented, but being that it was one of the few useful "cloud" features CC offered, it was pretty disappointing for it to be unusable with our site license. Entrepreneurs, listen. I know education is a tough nut to crack. But I'm sure it's not just education that is fed up with Adobe. Remember that Quark was once one of the big guys, but their licensing and support was so bad that InDesign took over. Yes, I had teachers complaining about Quark's licensing -- not the cost, but the horrible, broken license server. These kinds of things can destroy your business. PS: You would not believe how many users ask for Adobe Acrobat just to save Word files as PDFs. Office has (or at least had) a built-in plugin to do this, and OS X supports exporting to PDFs natively via print.