Adobe goes subscription-only, rebrands Creative Suite as Creative Cloud

In abandoning the Creative Suite label for Creative Cloud, Adobe signaled its intent to move fully into the mobile and Internet era, abandoning individual standalone editions of its products and moving toward a subscription-only model. That model will see users subscribing to the $50/month Creative Cloud system and receiving updates through that subscription.

Adobe will continue support for its existing Creative Suite 6 products, but the company has no plans to release further Creative Suite products.

A Creative Cloud membership will include access to virtually every product Adobe makes, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Typekit, and more. In addition to Adobe's software, a Creative Cloud membership will include access to services like Behance, an online creative collective. Behance will be tied directly into a Creative Cloud membership, allowing for a streamlined process for sharing to one of the larger collections of creative professionals on the web.

Monday's announcement also included a demonstration of Creative Cloud's capabilities in document sharing across mobile devices. Creative files can be stored and accessed across Macs and PCs, but also iOS and Android devices with near-instant updating of changes to the material. Adobe's demonstration of the sharing capabilities used a notebook, iPad, and Nexus 10 from Samsung in order to show off the constant updating capabilities of the service, with each device displaying changes as they were made.

The new Creative Cloud will roll out in June. Customers that own a Creative Suite product already will be able to get their first year of Creative Cloud at the discounted rate of $30 per month. Students and teachers can get also get the service at that price, and there are promotional prices available for CS6 users. Creative Cloud for teams will run at $70 per month per seat, and comes with 100GB of storage and centralized deployment and administration capabilities.