Photoshop and the 'Cloud'

In case you haven't heard, Adobe will be offering their products via

the cloud. The one product getting the most rif is Photoshop. Basically

how it works is, no more hard copies of the software. You download

Photoshop to your hard drive. You're then charged a monthly fee to use

it. At the time of this entry, about $20 a month.

First, this isn't cloud computing even though this is the term Adobe is

using. If it was cloud, the software would be on their servers, not on

our hard drives.

If anything, it's more like leasing their software. As long as you pay,

the software will work and will be updated. Don't pay and Photoshop is deactivated. In other

words, it's kind of like activating your software for the very first

time. It goes out to the internet and your software is activated. Same

thing here, except it's doing it every 30 days for a fee.

I'm on the fence on how I'm going to proceed. Right now I'm trying a 30

day free trial. For $20 a month it makes sense up until about 2 1/2 years,

which is roughly the cost of the software itself. But after that? Paying

$20 a month for an update here or there seems expensive.