Trust Adobe to make a mess with the naming of the new product. They have already been pathetically referring to "Lightroom" as "Photoshop Lightroom" just to cash in on the widely known "Photoshop" name.
Now they are apparently trying to use the popular "Lightroom" moniker to push a new online photo storage service which has some editing capabilities. BTW, you'll get 20GB of storage. For getting up to 1TB of storage, you'll have to pay $20/month ($19.99/month to be accurate).
Now why did they not just call the new service "Lightroom Mobile" or similar and leave the old name alone? That would have been a lot less confusing. Think about it, their current move is analogous to introducing "Lightroom 1.0" as "Photoshop" and renaming the real Photoshop to "Photoshop Classic". Perhaps they are believing that by stealing the name verbatim from Lightroom, they get a maximum adoption rate for their new online service (which isn't that new, BTW, Adobe tried very similar things with "Carousal" and "Revel" before. They'll just keep pushing it at us till it sticks).
Using a lame name like "Lightroom
Classic" signals that Adobe does not intend to put much effort into it in the future. For now they are stating that the product will continue but they said that about
keeping the stand-alone version alive as well. Arguably "indefinitely" does not mean "forever", but if Adobe had wanted to avoid that interpretation, they could have used a less ambiguous phrasing.
The statement about "
additional testing needed for perpetual licenses" no longer being "
economically viable" is pure BS. Any software engineer knows that with a decent versioning control system, you can have variants like "CC" vs "stand-alone" for free. Such statements are an insult to the public and demonstrate that Adobe will lie into your face.
For those arguing that subscriptions are so much better for customers: Why do you think Adobe is killing stand-alone versions then? Adobe is forcing everyone into the subscription-based model because they make more money like that. If the stand-alone versions were more expensive for the customer over the long run, Adobe would keep them in order to get more money out of this customers. This simple fact tells anyone who is trying to work out that subscription is the cheaper route that they are not doing their math correctly. Businesses may be a different story, but the average enthusiast does not need updates that frequently. That's the reason why Adobe came up with the subscription-based model in the first place.
BTW, once Adobe has everyone converted to a subscription-based scheme, guess what will happen next? If you have trouble guessing it, here are the explanations Adobe will use: "
Partially account for inflation. Reflect the increased value subscribers receive through the much extended portfolio of products. Allow the development of new world-class features, etc.".
There is the temptation to ride the LR6/LR-Classic avenue as long as possible, but my advice would be to switch now. This way, any effort you put into organising and processing your images will have a chance of being a long-term future investment. With LR6 you know that it will come to an end and with LR-Classic, the writing seems to be on the wall.