Hasta La Ideas

Hot off the heels of announcing pricing in the spring for a form of rental for their popular CS design software packages, Adobe looks to be further branching out into subscription models. Yesterday, the company launched a public beta of “Muse,” a codename for a product to be released sometime early next year, which sets to “dumb down” (as ZDnet puts it) the creation of websites by making the process visually-based, instead of requiring designers to learn to write code. The program is undergoing a public beta at the moment, wherein users can download and tinker with this early draft of the software. Most interesting is, after that ends, “Muse” is expected to only be available via subscription and not the traditional “you buy it, you own it” system that’s largely been the staple of consumer software since, well, the beginning of software. Some details:

Muse (code name) will be offered at no charge during the public beta period. It is anticipated that version 1 of Muse will be released in early 2012 at which time customers will need to purchase a license to the application if they want to continue authoring websites with Muse. Adobe anticipates that Muse will be available by subscription only. This will allow us to add new features to Muse regularly and customers will have access to the most up to date functionality which is critical when building standards-based content. Adobe anticipates that Muse will be available as a one-year or month-to-month subscription plan at the following price points:

One-year for US$180/year (or $15/month)

Month-to-month for US$20/month

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