A few months ago the tech trilogy of Adobe, Apple and Microsoft got hauled in front of and tried to avoid the ACCC Australia’s corporate watch dog. (Australian Competition & Consumer commission)  After they had been summoned their day in court came and went all three of the corpulent corporates thumbed their nose at the ACCC. The issue at hand as you may be aware is that these three (and they are not alone) gouge the consumer and the government like the corporate arrogants they are. More Info
In the case of Adobe it was possible to take a budget flight from any of the eastern states capitals to Los Angeles or San Francisco buy the Adobe creative suite and fly back to Australia cheaper than the suggested retail price for Adobe CS6 in Australia. To rub salt into the bleeding wound Adobe charged not much less for the downloaded version and the great Australian Taxation Office also lost out on the the GST. If that is not price gouging I have no idea what is.
I personally started using Adobe products in 1986-7 with Illustrator and Page Maker then Acrobat. When Illustrator became too expensive at one point and I switched to Freehand because there was a ‘Deal’.  At a rough guess I have probably spent about AUD12,000 over the years with Adobe in original S/W licence costs. Adobe have always produced good products there is no question about that but they have had their problems with piracy and their support system. I remember being in KL in the 1990′s and seeing on open display pirated broken fully operational copies of Photoshop 3 for about $20 and that was without bargaining. And with regards to support don’t ever, ever loose a serial number…
This news today is a real kick in the guts for Australian photographers, artists designers and creatives in general because at the present time the broad band system here is so hopeless. It’s good thing I live in W.A. because my broadband slows to crawl and hiccups when it rains. For my American readers W.A. is one of the driest places on this island continent, it doesn’t rain much.
The overall costs for the  S/W works out to be less than the two yearly upgrades but as all the serious processing takes place in the cloud the work speed rate will slow with crappy telephone lines. Wireless! Been there done that, almost no service between 6am and 9am and 3.30 and seven!  I’m guessing that there will be less need for high spec’ed computers with all that really slow cloud processing, that could be a saving over time. More on creative cloud  Just read some of the letters phew…
Adobe Lightroom users don’t seem to be affected as LR is not included in Creative suite and the fact that users libraries will reside on local drives. I’m comfortable with back ups in the cloud but not everything!
Adobe again kicks sand in the face of the ATO by actually saying on their site No GST payable. When American (republican?) corporations don’t like a foreign governments policies they really like to rub their noses in the poo.
It was silly short sighted John Howard and Costello that gave us the GST. Why the heck didn’t they make it a percentage transaction tax so that every bank transaction and online payment collected a few percent. That would have curbed the rorting generally and especially the corporate arogants like Adobe.
If and when the Liberals come to power in September their half baked fraud broad band solution will likely not provide the bandwidth necessary to run big applications like Photoshop and inDesign with Fibre To The Node.  So we as creatives will be forced to run optical Fibre To The Home where most small photographers and creatives work from. At five thousand dollars for the installation it could likely prove to be a big financial obstacle which will be hard for many us.  Who ever said the libs were pro small business, but then again they have not been known for any degree of creativity. So between arogants like Adobe and half baked fraud broad band solutions the future is starting to look a bit murky. On the other hand if enough of us decided not to take on the cloud solution and stay with our present versions it just might send a message to Adobe and their share holders might not like it!

Addendum. In the Petapixel report Adobe state that Adobe Camera Raw ACR will have major upgrades but only on creative cloud. This would suggest to me that it is possible there will be no more support for any new cameras. Hmm I think we are really having our arms twisted.