Right now if I wanted to buy the Creative Suite Standard, it would cost me about $1130 for just Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign.

And you know what? So far it’s better for me as a consumer. You may not be a fan of it, but you can’t blame Adobe because it makes business sense for them to do this. The way the business is leaning just oozes desire to move entirely into a cloud. Updates come more quickly to the Creative Cloud, and the support for Creative Cloud members far surpasses that received by standard disc users. So Adobe fought back with the Creative Cloud, and it’s pretty obvious that eventually Adobe plans to phase out the discs entirely. On the other hand, an enormous chunk of that demanding audience simply acquired that software without paying because it was easy. On one hand, they had the best software that everyone wanted, creating a huge demand for their product. These things were working both for and against Adobe. It’s also probably why the software is so expensive, as the skills of the people it takes to build the software are expensive and they still need to be a profitable company.

How much money do you think Adobe has lost over the years to theft? It has to be millions. I’m pretty sure that this is a monkey on the back of Adobe that they have been trying to shake since they started as a company. It’s really, really hard to justify that kind of cost when the temptation to steal the software is fed by the ease of thieving. Like I recently brought up regarding a story in Australia, the Creative Suite on disc is cost prohibitive for nearly every normal person. Like I said, when Creative Cloud launched it slipped under the radar for most, and it was easy for us to let that happen because the method with which we were used to ingesting Adobe software was still the norm: giant packs of DVDs.

It’s instant access to what you want right away, and in a society that seems to respond only to instant gratification, it’s hungrily accepted. The idea of what the Creative Cloud is doing isn’t new, rather it’s a concept that the Apple App Store proved years ago: it is ok, nay, better to have access to something immediately with no need for a physical copy of anything.

Adobe package price