Yesterday at its MAX conference, Adobe announced that buying Photoshop is coming to an end. This is a major strategic shift for the software maker and will change the way athletic departments have to pay for their photo editing software.

How it works

This is primarily a licensing and pricing change rather than a functionality change. You get online storage with the cloud account and you have to create a membership account to use the software. However, the way you open and edit an image will be very similar.

We currently use both in our office and have found it's taken no effort to transition from one to the other.

Budget impact

This change will impact how you budget for Photoshop and other tools in Adobe's suite. With the new method, you are required to pay a monthly or annual subscription and no longer own a specific version of the software. This means you cannot skip versions to save money by buying every few years. You will need to budget for this as a regular line item. This can hurt the casual user and those who quietly share a license at the office.

Below is a chart of the pricing for educational licenses with an annual commitment:

We could find no educational discounts for single-app licensing, so if you've found out, let us know so we can correct this.

We expect most of our customers will license Creative Cloud with their annual commitments and do so at an educational (institution) discount. All products are paid monthly and get a lower rate with an annual commitment. Your price may go up or down as follows:

• There are first-year discounts based on the version of software you already own
• You can get first-year discounts for signing up by June 25
• You pay more without an annual commitment
• You might have further discounts with volume institutional licensing programs

Ongoing trend

Adobe is only the latest tool that has moved away from boxed software sales to a new Internet-centric model. Excel is slowly being phased out by Google Spreadsheet because the price is much better and it gives you collaborative abilities. Some adventurous SIDs used to use PC Anywhere to work as if you were on your laptop remotely, but this is being replaced by using Dropbox as the way to have all of your files wherever you are. Certainly we're hoping to be the free online replacement for Stat Crew with better pricing and more collaboration like Google Spreadsheet.

Outside of these major products, we've switched from lots of freemium/shareware Windows utilities to smartphone apps or mini-service sites like Doodle.com, SurveyMonkey, Screencast or Evernote.

We're curious how much you see this affecting your department and would love to hear about any other mini-service sites that you might be using.

Further reading:

• http://www.adobe.com/products/creativecloud.html
• http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/06/rip-cs/
• http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/adobes-creative-suite-is-dead-long-live-the-creative-cloud/