If you are thinking of upgrading from CS6 to Adobe Creative Cloud, think again.

Upgrading has cost us hundreds of hours in lost productivity. And, sadly, we did not benefit one bit by saying goodbye to CS6.

Creative Cloud isn’t really a cloud — it’s just a term the Adobe marketing people use to describe their subscription-based software. The monthly fee is actually reasonable. It’s the hidden costs that will kill you. Previously, you bought the software, installed it, and used it. Now, you need to manage the software too. And that process is fraught with problems, little niggly things that take you extra hours to fix (like when you update an app, the small icons on your doc or toolbar must be replaced too; extra minutes for something that should be automatic). Plus, Adobe hasn’t provided enough servers to support all the people running their software.

To be clear, you download and run the software from your office computers. But the app on your computer needs to stay in touch with Adobe via the web. So loading them takes longer; sometimes a lot longer. Adobe updates their apps every week or so now, but that process is problematic. We’ve found that updates fail about 65% of the time. The result is that we sometimes spend whole days updating the 8 machines in our office. It’s such a nightmare that we draw straws to see who gets the onerous task. It’s not fun.

We have 9 Adobe apps installed on 8 computers in our Vancouver office. The math works out like this: 9 apps x 8 computers x 5.5 minutes = 396 minutes. That’s 6.6 hours if everything goes well. But, it never does. As I said, about 65% of the downloads fail and we have to wait and restart them. That’s an additional 4.3 hours. So, add 4.3 hours to 6.6 hours and you get a new total of 10.9 hours. And that’s about right. We do this approximately every other week.

Of course, you should do whatever you want, but my advice is to delay your upgrade. The new Adobe CC apps are
not going to do anything that CS6 won’t do. Adobe will figure this stuff out eventually.

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