Re: Four sprung duck technique
DRM indeed, this really all boils down to a marketing exercise so that Adobe can change it's pricing/licensing model. I even expect as others have mentioned that the 'phone home' task will still be performed every 30 days with another 30 days grace if no net connection is available as it is now. The marketing surrounding this though is setting the expectations for the customer, smaller more manageable reoccurring cost to use but you must make sure you connect to the net a bare minimum of every 60 days seems to be the general gist of their campaign.
It might be in part due to the fact that PS is quite widely pirated that Adobe have thought that by increasing revenue they can offset the cost of the Piracy whilst still sticking with the same DRM model. And as every SMB will state the original suite licensing cost was largely prohibitive as it was an upfront cost which also put people off the upgrade cycle even with the previous suite discounts available (understandably so).
By the way I'm not trying to defend Adobe's move as I will more than likely stick with my licensed copy of CS6 for a number of years to come, I think it's got enough for my needs that even when they withdraw support it will still be useful to me but then this is the sort of attitude Adobe is trying to defeat.
This area of software definitely needs some serious competition and no GIMP isn't serious competition.