Beware of Adobe's new subscription pricing

The newly released Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 has a smattering of new features, including boosted support for mobile devices and HTML5. But buried in the announcement is a new pricing model that is akin to a siren's song: enticing, but best avoided.
The suite -- as well as its individual components -- can be had via a typical software license or a monthly subscription. Although the monthly subscription may look like a good deal, some quick calculations show otherwise.
Take Photoshop, for example. The most popular part of Creative Suite, it costs $699 as a regular license purchase. That seems like an expensive piece of software, especially next to the $35-per-month subscription price. So why plunk down $700 when you could just kick Adobe a modest $35 each month? Well, if you plan on using the software for two or more years (and who doesn't?), the $699 license is the cheaper option.
At $35 per month, subscription pricing costs $420 a year; for the first year of use, the license is more expensive than 12 months of subscription use. However, after two years, subscription users will have paid $840, whereas license users will still have paid $699. And on it goes -- $1,260 for three years, $1,680 for four years. The unfavorable ratios for the subscription plans work out similarly for its other products and suites.
The curveball is that Adobe issues a major upgrade about every 24 months, and then offers the upgrade at a discount (the most recent figures tab the upgrade price at $199). But even with that cost factored in for the third and fourth years of use, licensing comes out to be the cheaper option: $1,260 (third year) and $1,680 (fourth year) for subscription, $898 ($699 + $199) for licensing -- and that's assuming users even opt for the upgrade.
Another curveball: Adobe says it will issue "midcycle" upgrades for some products, meaning a new update a year after the major version update. It's yet one more opportunity to pay Adobe a license fee, making a 24-month upgrade cycle into a 12-month one -- for some of the products some of the time.
Check out InDesign -- if you bought InDesign CS 5.0 and paid the $699 full license two years ago, then buy the $119 CS 5.5 update this year and the CS 6.0 license a year from now for presumably another $119, that's $937. If you bought the CS 5.0 version, skip the minor new features in the CS 5.5 update, and get the CS 6.0 upgrade a year from now (presumably for $199), that's $898. The subscription for the same four years of usage between 5.0 and 6.5 would cost $1,440 via subsription.
In other words, paying a license update every year to always have the latest version is still cheaper than subscribing.
If you only need the software for a short while, then clearly subscription pricing is the way to go. But if you want to actually keep the software and use it over a longer term, then do your wallet a favor and buy the license.