> Over the last couple of years, there has been an increasing amount of overlap in the functionality between Fireworks and both existing and new programs like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Edge Reflow.
Because we'd all much rather have to work in and pay for all three of those applications than to have the one tool that does it right?
As a customer I don't feel it's a good deal for me at all as it forces me to pay for upgrades and products many of which I don't want, and divorces the money I pay from any specific product, so that I can no longer choose to reward products which address my needs, and ignore those which don't. I have no particular attachment to Fireworks for example, but Adobe streamlining their product offering and making it into a subscription suite only subsidises things like Adobe Bridge which simply shouldn't exist, at the expense of apps and features which customers actually want. It's around $80 a month in the UK for Adobe CC, and of course they will increase this gradually over time as more customers are locked in.
Given the CS updates of the last few years, I have trouble finding reasons to upgrade from CS5, which works fine for me currently, and have no interest in paying them money every month to change the UI around arbitrarily and add more misfeatures like 'Save for Microsoft Office' in CS Illustrator, or reinforce the lack of working interchange between InDesign CS versions (in order to force upgrades). As a long-term customer it feels like Adobe updates are now more focussed on forcing participation in the upgrade treadmill than adding features or improving performance, and this move to subscription pricing with a 'creative cloud' just reinforces this trend - Adobe is now all about customer lock-in and forcing customers to pay in-perpetuity, rather than producing great products. The last great product they produced was Lightroom, and I've seen nothing impressive in the CS since that (for my use). One telling result of this move is that they have now withdrawn the 'perpetual license' that they started selling last year - that lasted 1 year it seems.
Perhaps this is inevitable in the mature stage of a corporation, but I'm sad to see what was once a scrappy underdog fighting the likes of quark become focussed on keeping wall street rather than their customers happy.
Because we'd all much rather have to work in and pay for all three of those applications than to have the one tool that does it right?