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Has Adobe Lost Its Mind?
Apparently, Adobe’s Creative Suite 4 was launched the other day, and I am absolutely astounded by the significant price of the software.
I have always thought that Adobe’s products were severely over-priced, but I don’t even remember CS3 costing nearly as much as the retail price of CS4. Has the company lost its mind?
Are people and businesses, especially in today’s economy, really going to pay $2,500 for the master suite, $1,800 for the Design Premium suite or $1,700 for the Web Premium or the Production Premium suites?
Will people actually pay more for Adobe’s software suites than most spent on the computers on which they will be installing? Will they shell out five to ten times more for the design/development software than they did on the operating system on which they will be running the software (the current price of Windows Vista Ultimate - full version - is $319 - most Linux builds are available for free, and the boxed versions usually average between $50 and $100)?
Are people truly still willing to shell out $1,000 just for Adobe PhotoShop? Is PhotoShop really still that much better than Corel Paint Shop Pro (which retails for ~$99 - $60 for the upgrade) or GIMP/GimpShop (which is completely free and works completely cross-platform)?
Because I work for an educational institution, we are able to get a discount, but Adobe’s educational discount is a little strange. They only offer the full version of each product to educational institutions, and they sell it at the cost of the upgrade package. They do not offer the upgrade package to educational institutions.
When CS3 was released, we picked up the Design Premium suite for around $300. The educational edition of the Design Premium suite is now selling for twice that price.
Do you think that this pricing structure is a result of the massive software pirating that occurs with Adobe’s products, or is it possible that it’s the other way around?
Curtiss Grymala is the full-time Webmaster for a community college in Virginia. In his spare time, he runs a freelance Web development company called Ten-321 Enterprises, is an active participant in the HTMLCenter Forums and offers small snippets of code and bug reports to the developers and modders of the YaBB Forum system. He has been developing Web sites and applications for nearly 15 years.
Adobe is out of their mind but what other real choice do us web designers have? gimp isn’t the same.
Umm. No. Photoshop is the industry standard. It is the lifeblood, the brush, the paint, the canvas for an entire industry full of professionals that uses it to make their living. If I as a graphics designer, web designer, photographer, creative, or even video production staff, make $30k, 50k, 70k, or 100k a year using this software on a constant basis then the price tag pays for itself.
Alternatives to Photoshop come and go but they all die out. You want to know the secret why? It’s because of the rampant piracy. It’s the best thing to happen to Adobe and they know it. Legions of little kiddies crack it and learn their trade on it and when they go get corporate jobs they’re provided with legal licenses. It cements Adobe as the standard.
The question isn’t why is Adobe CS4 so expensive, it’s if it’s worth an upgrade at all. So far having used my cracked copy for the past month: no.
piracy
I did - 10 yrs ago & paid for upgrades along the way. When I called about all that ROI to me the consumer, I was told it did not matter - my response “right, that’s why I will no longer purchase your software”. Not sure where the value add exists but hey let them milk their cows so that other can innovate like all good capitalists.
the price tag is too high.
Curtiss you say you picked up the CS3 Design Premium for $300? I walked into my community college last August and bought the Mac Design premium at the educational price for between $600 and $700. THAT was the price and that was the list price on the Adobe site at the time. It was never $300 like you are saying. What you have said is innacurate, or your pricing was based on bulk educational orders and you aren’t revealing that. I can assure you that the prices are pretty much the same as last year for CS3. I think it only went up a couple hundred from Master Collection CS3 to CS4.
With that said, I think yes it’s all very expensive. But much of it is very good too. It’s WAY expensive and yet versions of Maya 3D in the past have cost over 10,000. And other 3D packages are often between 2 and 3 grand. So I guess we’ll see where this trend goes. I personally think the educational price should probably be the full price of everything, but people buy it so what are you gonna do. It DOES take a lot of work and man hours to create this stuff. Adobe has really done well here, including being pretty transparent and listening to needs. They also have better web services and support than they ever have with movie tutorials, online help, a plugin community and all the openness of flash and flex.
Another thing you have to do is compare it to other video editing packages, other 2D animation packages like toonboom, and video packages such as Apple’s Final Cut Studio avid, and audio stuff like protools.
I believe that the cost is based on a wide range of things, justified by other competing products in many categories, based on past pricing, inflation, what people will pay, development time, support fees and probably piracy.
My main complaint with Adobe is that I’d really like to use it both on Mac and PC back and forth without buying 2 versions. And I’d like this stuff on Linux so I can dump Microsoft OS’s for good. Adobe is the only reason for me to stay on Windows. I have a Mac, but I like Linux better and I like Adobe. I can’t have them both yet.
Once you get used to software and like how it works, it becomes nice to keep having it and upgrading to new versions.
You’ll definitely see some interesting things over the next decade in graphics and media software. It’s really exciting and Adobe is doing well to push things forward in their own way. If you want a good representative of Adobe, just follow John Nack’s blog. He’s a really nice guy and provides great information about the software and development processes. Read his posts and you’ll start to see how hard Adobe is working to provide good software for it’s clients.
I am using Photoshop CS3 every day and I never saw any production software that can do what Photoshop can do - for me it is a must have. Also, when you worked over 10 years with that produkt it is not easy to switch. Also, when you work with a group of designers - they all use Photoshop and you can’t exchange files that good when you use something different. I payed 990 EUR for my Photoshop CS3 version - thats much money I know but when I see that I use it every day its ok for me.
Its even worse for us in the UK as we pay almost double for the same product.
Adobes argument for this is that they charge what local markets are willing to pay I just call it a rip off!
In these days of global trade it does not wash with me.
I am looking at silverlight instead of flash for a forthcoming project as the price of buying flash cs3/4 compared to that of free with my current toolkit or if I want blend a little bit more.
Microsoft could attack flash on price point alone. They should give blend free or for a massively discounted price to vs2008 owners.
I like flex and the price of that was acceptable so adobe should look at that.
I hope they get their asses handed to them in the current down turn due to over pricing in the UK!
What I often find with their “upgrades” are many little things that should just be part of the regular (free) updates all along, offered as plugins and such. Many in the user community build these plugins as share/freeware, but Adobe senses a revenue stream there and just on it. When you ask your user base to dig into their pockets to shell out not only for the upgrades, but the cost of learning all the new things, you’re really asking more than necessary and too frequently. The timing of this is atrocious and while you’ll get those folks that can’t wait to get the “newest and latest”, you will have more prudent buyers hold their cash a bit longer.
It’s sad how disposable and consumable we allow things to be.
FWIW, the full suite costs the equivalent of $3,575 in the UK.
I must admit, I find it a bit surprising that Adobe hasn’t done some sort of amnesty with the millions of pirates out there. I understand the business arguments, but if they allowed people to buy the software for the upgrade price only for, say, a week or two, it’d probably sell like hot cakes and get people on to the continual upgrade boat.
Heck, perhaps Adobe should get CS4 on the next MacHeist ;-)
Last night on twitter I made the point that this pricing would make more sense if you considered it in relation to what a mechanic pays his Snap Tools sales person. You pointed out in response that tools have materials costs.
While I agree with that, I don’t think the price of tools (wrenches or image rendering) pricing is set by the cost of materials or even the embedded labor. In situations like this, where you have an industry standard product that is often a key component of someone’s ability to make a living, it’s going to be priced based on value rather than cost plus a margin. If this tool let’s a designer make a living it’s going to be priced like that. In that context it’s frankly a bargain. Ask auto mechanics how much they have sitting in that big red tool box next to their work station.
In the case of Photoshop Adobe has poured a decade plus of labor into it and the result is a sometimes frustrating but altogether pretty amazing piece of software. That labor plus the degree to which it has become an industry standard represents a huge barrier to entry for competitors. If it’s priced too high someone will eventually replace it, and things like Gimp and maybe a.viary.com will continue to eat away at the edges, but it would take a significant investment and a lot of time to replace Photoshop altogether. If you work in the space there simply aren’t a lot of options.
If Adobe is smart they will continue to make a variety of derivative products at lower end that are cheap or even free (advert based maybe online?) so that they can quietly do airline style value discrimination and also provide an onramp for future power users that isn’t reliant on the piracy model.
Adobe has to keep raising their prices to keep their stock valuation high. The only products that make any $$ for the company are CS and Acrobat (but don’t tell anyone - Adobe wants Wall St to think their business is more diverse than that). You’re right - they are out of their mind. And out of step with their customers and the market. ADBE shareholders should be worried - it’s going to be a rough road and I do not think Adobe will be an independent company in 2 more yrs
Only the market performance of the product will tell. How many customers do they loose on pricing? How many stay on? How many upgrade? How many new ones come onboard? etc.
If it is qualitatively far ahead of the competition (free or otherwise) according to its core users and paying customers and is considered worth the price (maybe web designers are rich :-)), then it can pull this pricing model off, else as said let us see after 1 year.