Re: Thank you very much Adobe
Re: Thank you very much Adobe
- Subject: Re: Thank you very much Adobe
- From: Peter Karp <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 09:04:24 +0200
> You can see just how much respect Adobe has for its UK and European
> customers by comparing the prices of CS3:
> Sterling Prices US UK
> CS3 Upgrade £224 £465
> CS3 Full £916 £1,409
> Dollar Prices US UK
> CS3 Upgrade $440 $912
> CS3 Full $1,799 $2,766
> Why do we have to pay more than double the US price to upgrade?
That's simply because of the localisation and the distribution. It's
_very_ expensive to substitute 'color' with 'colour' in the help files
and to download a file from a server from the states... ;-)
I surely understand that it can happen that prices in the "home
country" are _somewhat_ different (mostly lower) then in the foreign
countries, but I join in the ring of people complaining about this
huge difference. I think it's because Adobe can simply charge mostly
whatever they like, because you have no real choice. For doing graphic
and color work you have at least two real-world options when choosing
an operating system, but for prepress and graphical work it's
practically not possible to ignore pdf, Photoshop and Co. :-o
When I was a student nearly all my fellow students used a "backup
copy" of Photoshop, while I was using a cheap non-Adobe program. I was
the only 'ignorant' not knowing how to use Photoshop, when we had to
use it in the labs. I wrote several mails to Adobe asking how I can
get a student copy, but never got an answer. At this time student
versions where available in the states, but not in Europe! I made the
suggestion to buy a university 10 license package and find 9 fellow
students to part the licenses. After still getting no answer at all I
wrote another letter telling them that I assume that Adobe does not
answer my questions, because for home use for educational purposes
they seem to tolerate using "backup copies". Very fast I got an answer
that I must not do this, that would be using a 'pirate copy'.
Regarding my suggestion to buy the university 10 licences package I
was told that would not be possible for home/educational use, but
Adobe did not offer me any other options or ideas how to help me. So I
was still using an older Picture Publisher release I got for a few
bucks.
Since this time I hope that some day a real alternative for
Photoshop might become available, but I don't hold my breath... :-(
Another part of the puzzle: In germany you could buy pirate copies of
'Photoshop 6 OEM' for many years on Ebay. Adobe made it possible for
the users to "upgrade" to Photoshop 7, CS or CS2, although they always
denied officially that this would be legal. So many users had bought
an 'update', although this did not made their first purchase legal
software. I'm sure it would have been very easy for Adobe to stop
distributing those faked Photoshop 6 OEM versions through Ebay, but
they did nothing to prevent this. So it seems very obvious that Adobe
wanted to get the money from the "upgrades" and choose to let people
buy pirate copies of this 6 OEM version. Adobe always tells the users
that they should be honest and buy the software, but it seems that
Adobe itself does not act according this and tolerates the business
with the pirate copies to get money for the 'updates'. This is not
really faithfull in my opinion! Even many months after an article in a
well respected german computer magazine (c't), pointing to the problem
of many users buying the pirate OEM version and not knowing that this
where pirate copies, nothing changed for many months. The last time I
looked (maybe around January this year) it seems that finally Adobe
has stopped this channel, because it's much harder to find a pirate
copy of Photoshop 6 OEM now on german Ebay.
Sure Adobe's products are good in many aspects but the above mentioned
points leave a bitter taste for me.
I'm personally looking forward when Gimp allows colormanagement for
the monitor. I have taken a look at a beta last october, but there's
still much to be done. But Sven and the others are working on this!
I don't think Gimp will become a real alternative for most
professional use, but for home use _with_ colormanagement this might
become an option.
To summarize this posting is not meant to bash Adobe, but to point to
some problems. Maybe Adobe finally will lower the prices for non-US
countries. I also hope that softproofing will become available in
Photoshop Elements. I think today this is a basic function and should
be there. End users can get decent quality by profiling their monitor
and getting a canned profile from their labs using a Fuji Frontier,
Agfa D-Lab or whatever.
On the other side I welcome Adobe being more open with the betas of
Photoshop and Lightroom and offering the Adobe CMM to be integrated in
other applications. I think this is a step from Adobe where in the end
the users will benefit.
Happy pixel-pushing!
Peter
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Colorsync-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden