Ha, yes. As a daily user of Creative Suite, the 'cloud' benefits are fairly feeble.
The file hosting is handy, but we already use Dropbox and Google Drive. The other features seem like they could have been incorporated into the desktop apps but were pulled into the cloud to make it appear more worthwhile.
I can see how moving shrink-wrap software to a subscription can be good for the company – reliable income streams, no longer having to worry about headline features to get people to buy the next version – but (especially in Adobe's case) it's hard to see it as anything but a cynical attempt to milk customers for every last drop before the whole thing crumbles.
Former Adobe evangelist here. In my opinion, what you said about headline features is the crux of the matter. Under the subscription model engineering's only job is to make the user happy, so they can focus on performance or stability when needed, but when you sell a new box each year their main job is to make sales happy, with new demoable features. The result is always bloat.
Whereas the "cynical attempt to milk money out of customers" angle is, IMO, not nearly as relevant as people expect. I mean, everything a for-profit company does is an attempt to milk money out of customers in some sense, so when Adobe (or JetBrains) sold shrink-wrapped boxes I assume they set the prices at whatever their models showed was the maximum people would pay, and presumably they chose the subscription prices the same way. I expect it's much of a muchness.
As for the SaaS stuff (storage, etc), I just see that as little extras that become possible once each install is tied to a user account, so the company tries them out to see if they work. But it's not like they're supposed to be so amazing that they justify the switch. (views my own, not those of my former employer, etc.)
> so when Adobe (or JetBrains) sold shrink-wrapped boxes
... they didn't have this wonderful option of bashing customers on their virtual heads and break their products if customers forgot to pay rent. It just wasn't an option, when it all started. Now it is, and here we are. The internet sometimes is just bad for people.
I don't follow, if JetBrains wants to rent software how is it the internet's fault? If the fact that the internet provides an enforcement mechanism is the issue, I'm sure cracked copies will get around that...
I'm with you on Adobe, but Steam is a whole different thing, even leaving out its OS aspirations. Probably most importantly, it's free -- I think of it as an unusually heavy e-commerce site that needed me to install a bunch of stuff to get it to work. Kind of like if Netflix let me watch stuff offline, but only if I put their Chrome app on my computer: It's a client for accessing their platform.
Steam cloud save (play on the living room, continue in the bedroom), friends (with game integration like invites), anti-cheat, automatic update, video driver updates, in home streaming, fps in game overlay.
Definitely not a site.
Steam isn't really SaaS as much as a platform. It supports eCommerce, the logistics of delivering product on a massive scale (even if said product is bits instead of boxes), and some social networking on top of that.
