I think Lightroom was already a bit of a cultural separation from Creative Suite. It's more like Creative Cloud is playing catchup with Lightroom's model, which was already fairly modern and nice.
I don't think the monthly model discourages innovation -- as a product person, more people using the new product is more motivating for the organization, not less.
I hope you are right, but I am much more cynical. With a product for professionals like this, when they don't have to come up with a punch list of new features to convince you that the new version is worth spending your hard earned money on instead of staying with your current one, I don't see it as likely that they will be spending the effort they once would have. If the users don't like it, where will they go?
>I don't think the monthly model discourages innovation -- as a product person, more people using the new product is more motivating for the organization, not less.
Well, "more people/more motivation" wasn't exactly the case with Quark. Or with lots of enterprise software companies having their customers by the balls.
I'm not strickly talking about subscription vs no subscription.
I think the key distinction, which is common in Quark of old and Adobe's subscription model, is "having the customers by the balls".
And the problem I'm reffering to with Quark was not the "Who cares about OS X anyway". It was about arrogant and complacent company, not caring about its customers in general, even in the platforms it did support.
I'd call it the opposite of complacency. I work heavily in most of their products (the entire Adobe suite), and the amount of features they are releasing and the speed at which they are doing it, is amazing given their size.
If you focus on one product (like lightroom, which is a minor product at best) then sure, it doesn't look like much, but take a look at Edge, InDesign, Flash, etc, and there is a lot of improvements taking place.
>Adobe have picked up the pace massively since CC.
Yes, but it's also the opening stage of this. They would risk a backlash if they started their CC-only period as complacent. After all CS6 still works atm.
A few years down the road though?
After all Quark was also innovating and caring at first.
I don't think the monthly model discourages innovation -- as a product person, more people using the new product is more motivating for the organization, not less.