http://paulgraham.com/road.html
This trend has been going on for a while now, long before the term 'the cloud' was popularized/bastardized. It provides some advantages, you can get access to your applications and files from anywhere and any device, it provides a lot of advantages to development and allows companies to roll out new updates quickly (that in the old CD-rom model you would have had to wait months for new features and bugs to be fixed, and then often had to pay for an updated version anyways).
Applications that don't require a subscription are still available from app stores for a one time fee then go to all your registered devices, and I think most apps that work with files don't require you to register for any service, I've never needed any subscription service or had trouble saving and sending files with Photoshop so I'm not sure what you're talking about there...
If applications are cloud-based, there really isn't anything you can do to alleviate that since none of the code/executables are downloaded, everything runs from the companies servers. There's no way to move software that runs behind their walls and move it onto your computer...