Earlier this week Adobe announced it was abandoning traditional boxed product in favor of Creative Cloud, Creative Suite’s digital and subscription-based equivalent. Although Adobe maintains that many customers have already made the transition to Creative Cloud and have no intention of looking back, the comments on the coverage across the web have been notably negative on the move.

VentureBeat sat down with Adobe Software Marketing Executive Scott Morris at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles to discuss the reaction to the controversial announcement.

VentureBeat: In all of your time with Adobe, has there ever been a more divisive announcement than the one made this week about moving to the cloud?

Scott Morris: I don’t think I’ve ever had a time in my career, at Adobe or Macromedia or any other company I was at, where we’ve been going through as massive a change as what we’re going through at Adobe right now. The introduction of Creative Cloud last year was huge for Adobe, but even then, even though we had two very discrete and different offerings, both new and both available at the same time with the introduction of CS6 and Creative Cloud, it took a while for customers to really understand what Creative Cloud was about. We’ve done that now, but this is definitely a huge transitional moment for Adobe.

From a controversy perspective, we know that a lot of customers are ready for Creative Cloud, because they’ve moved there in really big numbers already. But we definitely know that not everyone is ready. It was 10 years ago, in 2003, that Adobe introduced the idea of Creative Suite. There were some similar reactions at the time, where a lot of customers were upset or frustrated or angry and didn’t understand what Adobe was doing. They thought this was just Adobe’s way to get more money out of them and things like that.

Then, what they saw over time was that the value they were actually getting from the Suite was high. They were spending less than if they were buying multiple individual products. The value we could give them by integrating the tools really tightly, where work flows between the apps, was significant. Now fast-forward to 2013, when pretty much everyone is on Creative Suite, or now Creative Cloud. We’re going through something like that. We’re going through a change that is at least as significant and probably more so, because we’re also pretty dramatically changing the whole model.

VentureBeat: Not only on VentureBeat, but also on TechCrunch and pretty much every site that I checked, for the announcement of Creative Cloud, there were hundreds and hundreds of comments of people complaining, with maybe literally one or two people who stuck their neck out to defend it. Did you feel the reaction to the Creative Cloud thing kind of overshadowed all of the features that were announced for CC? How does Adobe plan to work around that?

Morris: Yeah, that’s a great question. You’re the first person to ask me that, and also, since we’re doing this a [couple days in], you’ve had a chance to see those comments and that reaction, so you have kind of a unique perspective. We expected there to be some of the community reaction that you’re seeing. We’re introducing a huge change for our customers. There are a lot of them who are already on board. They’ve already moved to Creative Cloud. There’s a bunch more who we know are excited.

What I also saw was, there were very specific examples of people who’ve been complaining about the Creative Cloud model – customers of ours on very public forums, like on Creative COW. If you actually look at those, some of those same customers are saying, “All right. I like what I saw with CC so much, even though I’m hesitant about this, I just signed up.” We have a specific example of that with this one guy who was really, really upset on Creative COW the last couple of months, and then just yesterday, one of my colleagues showed me his tweet. He’s like, “I gave in. I signed up. I love what the CC apps have in them.” So I think there definitely was some of that negative community reaction from people just not being ready for this big of a change.

I don’t think it overshadowed all the goodness that we released. I’m sure, to a certain extent, it did. I’m sure there are customers who right now are so focused on the change that they’re not taking a good hard look at what the actual offering is. But that will come over time. It’s going to be part of people’s process for figuring out what they want to do moving forward. Some of them will just sit on CS6 for a while, some of them will move immediately to the cloud, and some of them are going to wait and see what happens and then take a deeper look. We hope that then they’re going to move, because we think it’s a pretty great release. But everyone has to be on their own path.

VentureBeat: Did Adobe look at something like Steam or any similar digital distribution service to reference what works and what doesn’t for Creative Cloud?

Morris: We’ve definitely looked at all the different models and the different examples of what other companies have done, peer companies. We looked a lot harder at what Autodesk does and what Microsoft has done and what some of our competitors or peer companies in the creative space have done. We also have a lot of people who have joined Adobe in the last two years who came from some of those companies and worked on those businesses, companies that transitioned from a traditional shrink-wrapped software business to a services-based business.

We brought that knowledge in-house to help us with the transition and we examined what other folks had done. What we’re doing is unique. I think even if you look at Microsoft, they offer their subscription offerings, but they also offer their perpetual… The subscription offering actually hasn’t been as successful. We decided that splitting ourselves like that actually didn’t make sense for us. Evaluating companies that had to do that, that had to manage the traditional shrink-wrapped software and the new model of services… That’s really tough to do. It was tough for us to do in the last year. That’s why we said that we’re just going to focus on one thing.

VentureBeat: I come from the games industry, where every year, especially at E3 — which is kind of like the Adobe Max for the entire games industry — a lot of CEOs and suits and businessmen get up and tell you what you’re supposed to be excited about for the holiday season and the coming fiscal year. It’s always extremely forced and usually extremely awkward as a quick search on YouTube can attest to.

Yet when I watched the keynote and the Sneaks from MAX, everyone from Adobe was very genuine and really enthusiastic about what they were talking about. Not only are these the people who make it and make decisions around it, but they’re also people that use it, which is not always true of other companies and industries. So with that said, when the entire company make such a dramatic shift in one direction, who is involved in that decision?

Morris: The business decision, in terms of the path that we chose forward, is made at a pretty senior level, but with input from people all throughout the company. But actually, having that change be socialized throughout the whole company and getting the whole company on board is a huge effort. Everyone takes part in that. So in terms of the decision, do you mean how we get the whole company aligned like that?

VentureBeat: Correct. Was there alignment, or was there just kind of like a memo handed down? “Hey, guys, by the way…”

Morris: [laughs] No, it actually didn’t work that way at all. We were very deliberate in terms of getting feedback from employees, from customers, from partners all over the last year and a half. Even before we launched Creative Cloud, we announced that it was coming. At Max, actually, a year and a half ago. So it’s been 18 months that we’ve been talking about Creative Cloud. We spent a lot of time getting feedback. We didn’t know, back then, that we were going to choose one path 18 months later and basically stop any further development on Creative Suite to only focus on Creative Cloud. It caught us by surprise in terms of… We knew Creative Cloud would be successful, but it was even more successful than we thought it would be.

And so you really see that, as an employee, without someone telling me what we’re going to be doing… For me, one of the reasons why it’s been so exciting working at Adobe is because customers who are moving to Creative Cloud really, really love it. They’re very vocal about how much they love it. So while this whole change is difficult for some, when you look at the enthusiasm that the people who have moved to it have… Just look at what they’re putting on social media, like ratings and reviews on our site, or things like Yelp reviews. We don’t control what people post. They can give us one star or five stars. Creative Cloud has a higher star rating than Photoshop, which is unheard of. Just by a little bit, but that’s unheard of. And you read what customers are saying about it.

I think that as a company, it’s been so thrilling over the last year to see that happen and have customers just love Adobe again. When the decision went down throughout the organization that we were only going to focus on this, I don’t think it surprised a lot of people. I think it was easy for the company to get on board, because it feels like a different place even internally now than it was a year and a half ago. It really does.

VentureBeat: Everyone from starving students all the way up to Disney animators use Adobe’s products. Recently, in the past year or so, crowdfunding has surged in popularity, especially on Kickstarter. You see a lot of creative projects popping up, whether it’s an indie film or a game or even an artbook or whatever. Because Adobe’s products do play such a large part in the projects that are being made through crowdfunding, do you have any initiatives that might be of interest to creative teams with really small budgets, such as a sponsorship program for particularly creative indies? For example, Epic Games will still license the Unreal Engine to smaller dev teams who can’t pay for the fees up front. The backend arrangement changes, but they don’t want to exclude anyone from being able to use their product.

Morris: You know, we actually don’t, because that’s a really interesting idea, especially with things like Kickstarter. In fact, someone who is a big influencer for Adobe in the video space just had a Kickstarter project funded on Sunday. He was telling me about it, and it really made me think. I have other friends who’ve put creative-related projects there. They wanted to get a documentary film made and stuff like that. I think that’s something interesting that Adobe probably should look at doing. We do have a program, a community involvement program, where we actually give free software, and in some cases funding, to community organizations or people who are doing really interesting projects, non-profit things. But we don’t really have anything formal beyond that. We don’t. That’s actually a really interesting idea.

Adobe is announcing today a set of cloud-based tools for game developers.

The tools take advantage of the new cloud-computing trend, where web-connected data centers host subscription-based software. Hosted in the Adobe Creative Cloud service, the tools enable developers to access a centrally located suite of tools for making their titles. The aim is to streamline the game-development process from creation to final deployment.

Adobe says that developers who use its tools can access an audience of 1.3 billion worldwide on PCs and more than 500 million on smartphones and tablets, 20 times the reach of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console.

Among the new tools is Adobe Scout (pictured below), a tool for profiling that “uncovers granular internal information in ActionScript-based mobile and browser content to unlock significant performance optimization opportunities.” In other words, it helps games run faster. Adobe Scout will be available for free to members of the Adobe Creative Cloud, a subscription service. Other tools include the Adobe Gaming SDK, Adobe Flash C++ Compiler, and trial versions of Flash Professional CS6 and Flash Builder 4.7 Premium.

A year ago, Adobe acknowledged that it would give up on a Web version of Flash for mobile devices. But Adobe allows developers to create native versions of their releases for those devices instead. More than 25,000 mobile versions of Adobe Air apps exist, and the majority are games.

In the past nine months, Adobe launched version 11 of its Flash Player, making the leap from 2D games to hardware-accelerated 3D games and its Stage 3D applications programming interface.

Diana Helander, group product marketing manager for Gaming Solutions at Adobe, said that 600 million people have chosen to opt in to a feature that updates Flash in the background. That means a game developer can issue an update for a title and get it to 600 million people within 48 hours.

“With these new tools, we’ve got a single work flow for game developers,” Helander said in an interview with GamesBeat. “The costs of developing games and acquiring new users are rising. We’re helping developers to deal with that.”

The Adobe Gaming SDK lets studios create and monetize both 2D and 3D ActionScript games on Web browsers and mobile devices.

The Adobe Flash C++ Compiler is a new tool that lets developers take a native game and recompile it for the Web. That is, it takes offerings coded for game engines on the PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and iOS and then converts them to run directly online across browsers using the Adobe Flash Player.

Meanwhile, Adobe Flash Professional CS6 is an authoring tool to create animations and games, and it includes support for delivering animated assets ready for use with the open-source framework Starling. Adobe Flash Builder 4.7 Premium adds support for the new ASC 2.0 compiler and the ability to test and debug apps directly on Apple iOS devices.

Those who pay for Creative Cloud memberships can use full versions of Flash Professional and Flash Builder, and they can use future versions of Scout following the introductory promotion.

Adobe argues that using Flash makes developers more productive when it comes to cross-platform experiences. Helander said that Flash has powered popular games on Facebook including SongPop, FarmVille 2, and Diamond Dash. Some of the top Flash implementors include Zynga, Wooga, Kixeye, Ubisoft, Northway, and Damp Gnat. Rivals (and occasional partners) include Unity Technologies, Epic Games, Microsoft’s Silverlight, and a variety of other game-development platforms.

Helander said some cool new users of Starling and Stage 3D include Incredipede and Smart Aliens. She said that Zynga used Adobe Flash and Air for its mobile version of Ruby Blast, and Rovio used Flash for the Facebook version of Angry Birds. Square Enix also released Crystal Conquest using Flash. Helander said Adobe is doing a series of game jams in different cities to support game developers.

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Every new launch of Photoshop is an incremental upgrade of the last, so if you use CS5, this won’t be mind-blowing. But if you’re using CS3, for example, you’ll really love all the things you can do with CS6. It includes a darker default theme, new tools, a video editor, and more. It also boasts better performance with under-the-hood tweaks and the ability to use some computers’ graphics chips to make it run faster.

Digging in

After downloading the 1.7 GB Windows (984 MB on Mac) installation file, I quickly installed and booted up CS6. Immediately, I noticed the theme has been changed to a dark gray interface by default. I rather like the color scheme, but if it’s not for you, you can make it darker or lighter with four different theme choices. The tweak helps match Photoshop with the themes of other Adobe products like Premiere Pro and After Effects.

On the left side, you’ll notice that Adobe has redesigned the menu icons slightly. Like CS5, you can hold down on a design tool and see other similar options pop up. On the right, the Properties panel now includes Adjustment layer and Mask settings in the same pane. Thankfully, the panels are no longer all uppercase lettering, so each option is more legible.

Testing out a few tools I use often, I noticed other changes as well. When you crop a picture, the program tries to guess what you’re cropping with its own rectangle. Then you move the sides of the rectangle to adjust the crop. As someone who crops a ton with photos, this actually was annoying and jarring. On the plus side, there is now a “background save” option that makes saving your work a faster process. After tapping “Control + S”, you can continue to work on other projects instead of waiting around for the save to finish. Another handy addition is the ability to search layers.

While we didn’t get a chance to play with it, there is also a new basic video editor included in CS6. This likely won’t be used by serious video editors but it’s nice to have another option for cutting videos. And if you’re just looking to do a minor edit and Photoshop is already open, why not?

New tools

The addition we like most so far is Patch, which is similar to the Clone Stamp tool. It helps you select an area and copy it to another part of the photo, except it also blends the colors and patterns. This means you can move objects around the photo with less hassle. In the example above, I was able to duplicate an out-of-focus tennis ball and move it to a different position very easily.

There’s a new Adaptive Wide Angle filter that lets you straighten objects that are slightly curved because of using a fish-eye or wide-angle lens. There is also a Blur Gallery consisting of “Field Blur, Iris Blur, and Tilt-Shift” and a new Paste Lorem Ipsum feature, which can help you fill up dummy text as needed.

Conclusion

Overall, I like the feel and love the look of CS6. The 64-bit beta version runs noticeably faster than my 64-bit version of CS5 and the new tools will come in handy. The new version of crop was the only thing that really agitated me.

Photoshop CS6 will be available before the end of the “first half” of the year. It will cost $699 brand new, but there is an upgrade option for $199. You’ll also have the option to sign up for the Adobe Creative Cloud, which allows you to pay $50 each month for a full subscription to the Creative Suite.

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Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Adobe today announced its Adobe Creative Cloud service, a new way to share creations as well as access the company’s applications and creative services. The service will launch in early 2012 and be available for a monthly subscription fee.

Creative Cloud members will be able to sync, collaborate, get feedback and share work they create with Adobe software, including its six new mobile Touch Apps, the various Adobe Creative Suite applications, and its HTML web design tool Muse (currently in beta). A subscription will come with 20GB of remote storage.

In addition to sharing features, Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions will give users access to the full Creative Suite — including heavy hitters such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, and InDesign — and any software updates as part of the monthly fee. The software itself will be installed on your computer or mobile device, not hosted in the cloud. These applications will still be available to buy as standalone products.

The final element of the Creative Cloud is access to services such as Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite, Adobe Business Catalyst and the new web-based font tools that the company acquired with today’s purchase of Typekit. These three services will be included at launch, but the company plans to add more over time.

“The move to the Creative Cloud is a major component in the transformation of Adobe,” said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch in one of today’s many press releases from the company.

The announcement, made today at Adobe Max, the company’s annual developer’s conference, didn’t include details on how much the service would cost. A beta version of Adobe Creative Cloud will roll out in November for mobile app users, though it will be limited to the sharing features. Adobe promises to release more details on the service in early November.

Image via Adobe

Jeffrey Veen (pictured left), chief executive of Typekit, and Adobe chief technology officer Kevin Lynch (pictured right), said the announcement will make it much simpler for artists and designers to get access to cool fonts without having to worry about digital rights issues.

Lynch said the Typekit technology will be part of a larger service known as the Adobe Creative Cloud. The new Adobe service is aimed at letting authors create content in the cloud (web-connected data centers that can host a wide array of services). The Adobe Creative Cloud will have pre-built services for content creators such as e-commerce, customer relationship management, and social network integration. Typekit ensures that a font will work not only with a web site, but with mobile phones as well.

Veen said that Typekit started two years ago as cloud computing was coming to the fore. Typekit created a subscription service to host fonts in the cloud. Designers and developers can pay a fee and get access to a whole library of fonts that will be backward compatible with all sorts of publishing technologies. It also simplifies the process of getting access to the rights for fonts.

Typekit is already used by more than 250,000 customers, including some of the largest sites on the web such as The New York Times, Conde Nast, and IGN. Typekit will be offered as a stand-alone service as well as a part of the Adobe Creative Cloud.

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