With Google I/O winding down, and Mark out of the office, Steve and I decide to talk about all to hotness (and lack there of) that is the newest product releases from Google. We talk about Google plus, hangouts, voice search, Google play taking on Spotify, and I offer to wear Google Glass while on an Ok Cupid date, purely for the comedic value.

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• Google I/O
• The Best of Google I/O
• Google I/O Keynote

This week have a some special guests on the show. Recent AUX graduate Sean Smevik stops by, along with Ethan Greenspan & Joe Havelick of Hubster, to chat out the UX of TV, product design, and how the future of our TV watching experience might be broken up into an a la cart model. How can we improve the experience of TV? Listen to find out!

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• Senator John McCain pushes to end the cable bundle
• Hubster
• Hubster on Twitter
• The State of Cinema

The design world is all aflutter with the news that Adobe is discontinuing traditional licensing in favor of software subscriptions. Many predicted this eventuality when Adobe began offering Creative Cloud last year, but the transition has come remarkably soon. Despite a few pitfalls and troubling possibilities, I’m largely optimistic about this shift.

The loudest shouting seems to be over price. Though Adobe has been releasing upgrades annually or biannually over the Creative Suite’s nearly ten year lifespan, many creatives go for several years without purchasing new or updated versions. CS6 Design Standard, the entry-level suite, cost $1,300. The next price tier was Design & Web Premium, which cost a whopping $1,900. I’d imagine the majority of general use graphic artists use one of these two suites. Upgrading a suite every few years would cost about $400-700, and would become more expensive the longer you wait. Costs for a few years of Creative Suite could very easily exceed $2,000.

A Creative Cloud subscription, on the other hand, costs $50 per month. That’s $1,200 over two years, or $1,800 over three. Adobe is offering discounted first-year pricing of $30/month for those running CS3 or later. With that pricing, two years becomes $960, three becomes $1,560. The cost of Creative Cloud is significantly lower within the first few years of use, and if you upgrade your software with any regularity, the gap remains small in the long term.

The picture changes again when you consider the number of services Adobe is bundling in with the subscription. About $150 per year can be attributed to Behance ProSite & Typekit. For a vast number of print designers, illustrators, photographers, and other creatives not focused on the web, these services offer a professional portfolio site to advertise their work & services. The 20GB of cloud storage is also significant. If you’re super confident getting around your computer’s file system via Finder or Windows Explorer, congratulations.

Even in the professional creative world, however, you’re likely in the minority. A seamless method to share and transport artwork is invaluable, especially as file sizes boom and email systems struggle to catch up due to their aging infrastructure. If Adobe continues to develop small, targeted products and make smart software acquisitions, Creative Cloud subscribers can expect a continuous flow of new services and features. Creative Cloud shuns the tool kit you’d buy every few years, only to watch it rust, and replaces it with an evolving utility that guarantees continued access to the latest and greatest.

If I’d like to see one thing change on pricing, it would be a “rent to own” option, similar to a car lease. Imagine paying the subscription price for a set period, say two years, after which you could buy out the suite for a set price. You wouldn’t get future software updates and your access to online services would end, but you’d retain the rights to the software and the ability to open and manipulate your files without further fees.

Steve’s point about alternative software and services is a salient one. We give a tremendous amount of power to Adobe by being so reliant on their software. If you’re upset over this shift in policy, you can and should support alternatives. Adobe needs competition. Pixelmator & Acorn are fantastic, inexpensive Photoshop alternatives, and Sketch is a great vector design app ala Fireworks. Aperture is a counterpoint to Lightroom. Google Fonts and Fonts.com can be used over Typekit, though Typekit can be used independently of Creative Cloud. The same goes for Prosite, though Squarespace, Dribbble, and Carbonmade are also excellent portfolio hosting and creative community options. Dropbox, of course, is perhaps the best cloud storage service in town. If you’re okay with shopping around from a lot of different vendors, there’s a strong alternative Creative Suite/Cloud to be built, and its just only going to become stronger.

The markets I see as most likely to adopt these alternatives are the education and consumer markets, specifically those that aren’t design and arts focused. Yes, $20 per month pricing is available for K-12 and higher education customers. It’s still a big expense – but then again, it’s always been. Admittedly, most of my fellow art students either depended on the school’s computers or had simply pirated the software for years. It was a back alley move, but for students scraping by on tuition and young kids seeking digital creative outlets, free access to Adobe software has played a pretty crucial role in empowering young users and building future customers.

I don’t condone software piracy in the slightest – I’ve paid for all of my software and media for years – but Adobe needs to be able to address this market. With Creative Cloud likely making piracy that much tougher, I expect many will migrate to Adobe’s increasingly viable competitors. Perhaps they could explore “pay what you want” or “pay what you can” structures, which may result in lower purchasing price but significantly higher sales. It’s a thought.

In the end, I’m glad Adobe is slimming down and focusing on higher-quality products, and am excited by all the growth in the market for alternatives to Adobe software. Business model shifts like this move mountains, and our industry could use an earthquake!

After nearly 10 years, yesterday Adobe announced that it will abandon its Creative Suite entirely. It has been rebranded as Adobe CC and will be sold only as their current Creative Cloud subscription model for the foreseeable future. There will be no more boxes, no more single-purchase downloads, no more ownership. Say hello to your new subscribed-to-death future.

I’m not sold on this whole idea, but I’ll start by saying something nice: I think the biggest benefit this will provide is focus. Adobe is free to put all of their engineering effort into a single version of the software again (Win vs Mac platform versions notwithstanding), and they’ll be able to create and push updates when they are ready instead of in a yearly monolithic bundle. They can respond quickly to changes in the way their customers work, a trait sorely lacking in their software thus far.

Compatibility issues between different versions are going to largely disappear after several years too. Once the holdouts with old versions of Creative Suite disappear that will mean everyone, everywhere that’s using Adobe Software is using the same version. This has some enormous benefits for anyone who has to share files in our industry, which is essentially everyone. Now we can just expect them to work, no questions asked.

The biggest drawback for me is going to be price. The new pricing is really only a deal if you upgraded every year anyways, or if you always bought one of the more expensive versions of the Suite without upgrade pricing. I did not tend to upgrade every year, so this just doubled-to-tripled the price of using Adobe software for myself and for several other people I know. I’ve used CS3 for almost five years and just upgraded to CS6 at the cost of just over a year of Creative Cloud.

Spreading out my purchases to finite, predictable amounts was very useful for budgeting and I imagine that for those who freelance more than I do it will be crucial. Depending on how well a freelancer has planned their pricing and cost structure this could be problematic for some of them, especially the ones working on older hardware still. They may need to start planning for an unforeseen upgrade to support the versions coming down the pipeline. When your day-to-day costs are uncertain there’s a great deal of benefit in knowing something is going to cost you $900 today and you can use it for the next 3-ish years as opposed to maybe $50 per month for as long as Adobe finds it beneficial to keep prices that “low”.

Ultimately, a slightly more complex pricing structure, where you can buy access to a subset of the software instead of the whole suite, would be nice to see. I’ve generally purchased the smallest version of the Creative Suite because I just have no need for the vast majority of what it offers, and most designers I know are the same way about it. Our agency is probably never going to need something like After Effects or Flash (shudder), which represent a substantial chunk of what we’d be paying for with Creative Cloud despite never using it.

The collaboration features such as Behance integration and their psuedo-Dropbox are also pretty unnecessary for us. As great as Behance is, it’s not crucial to getting our work done. It’s a nice-to-have, if you already use it. And unless their file sharing and syncing can be made to work as well as Dropbox, which tons of companies are already using and loving, then what’s the point? I supposed someone could get rid of Dropbox and use nothing but Adobe’s solution, but that won’t allow you to store or sync anything but Creative Cloud documents, requiring you to maintain both services, so it’s a pretty poor option.

What this really underlines though, is how dependent we are on Adobe to get our work done. I’d like to see how smaller software shops respond to this. We already have some great alternative software such as Pixelmator and Sketch that was unimaginable even a few years ago. Compatibility is always going to be an issue with those, but if they let you get work done in the way that users want to do it at a price that they find far more reasonable then they should thrive.

This week we tackle the age-old discussion of which is better: Native Apps or Mobile Web. Listen, to find out why I’m shocked that this is still a topic of debate, why Mark still loves Apple (more than he should), and Steve’s elaborate (and a bit uncomfortable) feelings towards the show, Scrubs.

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• SMS on Twitter
• Device API
• Forecast App