pixelator1 wrote:
I want to thank both of you for your help and thoughts. Yes I am a hobbyist, and photography is not one of my biggest hobbies. The possibility of an O/S upgrade breaking CS5 prompts me to think of another solution that has often been on my mind: Adobe could offer an alternative pricing model for the cloud service where I would pay per use rather than a flat monthly fee. "Per use" could be a coarse granularity such as "per day", in which case it would easily translate into dollars and cents, and to minimize credit card transaction costs it could be accumulated and charged once per month. It might also work like a prepaid phone service. Alternatively, "per use" could be finely granulated, e.g. as cpu milliseconds, maybe with micro-payments transacted many times per day using something like bitcoin. Being able to weigh cost vs benefit of what one is planning to do in the next few minutes is a wonderful way to achieve confidence in ones planned action and satisfaction in money well spent, which all encourages more business. Of course, there should be an option to lock the user interface from updating when new features are added, but that should be easy if the software is well structured to isolate the interface from the underlying capabilities.
The forthcoming Photoshop that runs on Chrome/Chromebooks might be something that Adobe might "meter" out to potential clients but right now, it's beta, is Windows-only and one still needs a Creative Cloud sub to join. Can't be out of the realm of possibility though since there's no software to install; it runs right in Chrome. It'd be perfect for the "run and gun" types that need Photoshop quickly...provided one knows how to use Photoshop.
