Acrobat strategy coalesces into Adobe Document Cloud
Add Acrobat to the growing list of Adobe products relying on the software as a service model.Subscription Acrobat isn'tnew, but now that entire end of Adobe's businessfollows another big step down the road its design- and marketing-oriented compatriots have traveled. It joins Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud with Document Cloud as the hub that ties the Acrobat products together. The"perpetual" version of Acrobat -- Adobe's term for what most people think of as 'bought' software but is really just a non-subscription license -- will remain available. Reader, of course, will remain free.Adobe assembled some research to back up its decisions about how the product should evolve, but really it all boiled down to the obvious: people hate paperwork, think it's handled inefficiently and blame it for much of their misery at work. IDC's more helpful research also states what we all know -- there's a gap between paper and electronic document workflows -- but provides more useful business-case numbers.There are two differentvariations of Acrobat DC -- Pro and Standard -- each with perpetual and subscription options. I suspect people will find it confusing to figure out which they'll need.As far as I can figure, you'll need to subscribe to Standard at minimum for e-signature and document tracking or for creating PDFs on a mobile device; you'll need a Pro subscription if you want to edit text and reorganize pages on an iPad.The perpetual Pro version retains its differentiators from Standard. These include important design features such as PDF/X and PDF/A validation and preflighting; audio, video and interactivity;version comparison, redaction and Bates numbering; and creation of accessibility-standard PDFs. Two new features debut in Pro only: the ability to turn scans immediately into editable PDFs and (sorry Mac folks) creation of more faithfully formatted PDFs from Word for Mac.And for each of these there are both individual and enterprise plans: Acrobat DC with Document Cloud (end users) and Document Cloud for Enterprise. The latter adds more advanced electronic signature handling, workflow, user controlsand support for third-party APIs to interface with real document management systems.Creative Cloud subscribers -- except for the $10-per-month Photography program -- will automatically gain DC access via Acrobat DC.If you subscribe to Acrobat starting now for the next 30 days or so, until DC launches, you can get it for $180 for the year, the same cost as the current Acrobat XI Standard subscription. (Adobe says it's $15 per month, but you have to commit to a year and pay it all up front, so that's pretty disingenuous.) I hope that will transfer to an Acrobat DC Pro subscription, since the Pro will be the same price. A Standard subscription will run $156 per year/$13 per month.The prices will be the same in the UK and Australia, obviously adjusted for local currency. That means about Â£106 per year/Â£8.80 per month for Standard and Â£120 per year/Â£10 per month for Pro. For Australia, Standard will be about AU$204 per year/AU$17 per month and Pro will run approximately AU$240 per year/AU$20 per month. On the upside, these are all cheaper than the current Acrobat XI Pro subscription.As a comprehensive solution, Adobe's Acrobat strategy is still missing some important parts.Plus, given what we've seen of the Creative Cloud strategy, I don't expect the full versions of Acrobat to have perpetual options for more than a couple of years. As soon as subscriptions reach some magic number, and I don't doubt they will, the company will feel comfortable enough to cut the cord. I'll be able to give you a better sense of how well the system works, as well as what you may end up sacrificing in the non-subscription versions, when it's available in early April.