Like many of you on this forum the new lightroom situation has left me with some heavy choices to make.
I have put together a little writeup of my analysis of the situation. I have been working with commercial IT and infrastructure development for 25 years. Maybe my analysis, thoughts and reasoning can help you making your decision?
You can find it here:
http://wolffmadsen.dk/articles/rip-lightroom/
One of your basic premises is, I believe, very wrong. You're basically saying that Adobe is going to eventually kill off a standalone version of LR that people can run on their machines in favor of a cloud only application.
No, I'm saying that they will not develop Classic much; it will not get the love and attention that Lightroom CC will. Perhaps when CC catches up with Classic they'll merge the two as Jim B suggests, but they may just leave Classic eventually with little or no further enhancement. No need to kill it off.
That's a common thread one sees around these forums, but it in order to buy that, you would have to believe that Adobe is willing to ax one very large segment of its user base in favor of another.
As I say, I don't think that's a correct understanding of what I'm suggesting.
Typically, that's just not how companies do business. The goal for most companies, Adobe probably included, is to expand their user base.
Not always. Sometimes they decide that some sector of their customer base isn't worth supporting. However in this case more likely is that they encourage users to migrate to CC simply by not enhancing Classic.
The point here is that they don't need to do much to keep Classic customers, at least in the short term. As an illustration: they've done very little to enhance Classic for several years, but AFAIK they've increased the customer base. More useful to Adobe is to expand their user base into new areas by launching new products, such as Lightroom CC.
As it stands now, most enthusiasts and professionals who use LR use it on their computers as part of a development flow. A cloud based flow just isn't viable. That's not going to change for some time. Notice I'm not saying will never change. As we all know, when it comes to the information technology age, the only constant is the constant change. But, for now and the foreseeable future, the average pro/enthusiast/prosumer with thousands of files, the new CC version won't fly. And Adobe isn't going to dump them.
Whether you agree with it or not, the subscription model makes a lot of sense from both a consumer...
I don't agree. They may put it at a lower price point (which they have with the LR photography package) but I don't see any inherent benefit to consumers from the subscription model.
...and business standpoint;
I fully agree with that. It means that they do not need to innovate in order to secure recurring revenues. With perpetual licence, they need to launch new features from time to time to get more revenue from existing customers. With a subscription they can do didly swat and still get monthly revenues - provided they are market leader, which is the case for Adobe. Eventally the competition will have a better product if Adobe don't continue to enhance their product, but at they moment it's questionable whether there is a complete, equally capable competitor to Lightroom and Photoshop.
especially from a development standpoint.
It also makes it a lot easier for people to come into the ecosystem. The increasing numbers of people using both LR and PS since the advent of the subscription model seem to bear that out.
As far as the new CC, cloud only model, that also makes a lot of sense. It enables Adobe to expand their base into an otherwise ignored yet growing segment of potential users. But the notion that it's at the expense of an existing base is, in my opinion, absurd.
I don't agree, for the reasons I've explained.
They're basically creating options for more people in order to expand their user base. That's basic business growth 101.
As I say, I don't think that's an accurate representation of the position. But who knows? Your analysis might be right and mine wrong.
