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 p.2 #15 · Adobe is not going to allow upgrading from older versions with CS6 | |
RustyBug wrote:
Not so sure that the 'demise' of Adobe would reinvigorate things ... it might make for a Wild West, Gold Rush for all the other player to race to develop things to become the "New Adobe". Exciting times, probably ... more cohesive industry, hmmmm.
I said "reinvigorate," not "more cohesive." Increased competition makes for more consumer choice. Not necessarily all those choices will be better, but it certainly will have an effect on product pricing as competitors will seek out niches that are not being adequately served. New technologies and features would be offered, as well as more flexible pricing. Consumers may not actually appreciate those choices, as it may become confusing to decide what to use, and deal with issues of software interoperability, but I would imagine that for most small business owners, these problems are preferable to having no choice but to pay Adobe huge sums of money every time a new version comes out.
One thing that people lose sight of when talking about high dollar business software ... is the number of seats that are allocated in conjunction with it. Granted, for most of us, PS is a single seat usage.
I'm not sure you realize just how expensive some of those applications I mentioned actually are. A single-user professional license for Mathematica is nearly $2500. That blows the entire CS5 Premium out of the water at a mere $1900, and you get several apps for that price. A Mathematica site license costs a few orders of magnitude more.
But note that even Wolfram offers a full-featured "Home Edition" for something around 10% of the professional license price. You're not supposed to use it for commercial purposes, but it's perfectly fine for personal and student use (they offer a student license for even less). That's smart. They know there's a market for casual users, like myself, who don't need or want to use their software for business purposes, but are willing to buy it just for its own sake. Adobe, on the other hand, is pretty much all or nothing. To an extent I can understand that, since they correctly assume people would use a personal license to do commercial work. But what they ignore is the idea that by pricing their product significantly lower, they could earn far more revenue from people who are otherwise just pirating their software. They have repeatedly shown they don't care about the small-time consumers. Buy it if you can, otherwise do without.
While $70 might be a bit on the low side, I agree that they could absolutely strangle their competition via market share dominance if they would get their PS pricing more in line with their LR pricing ... something like $179 for LR & $249 for PS ... with a bundle priced @ $389.
Then, make your upgrade pricing @ 75% of your first offering price ... and they'd have a 'choke hold' on the industry as never before.
More aggressive pricing would more or less ensure their market dominance. But it would also make for happier customers, which is ultimately what matters the most. It's not that Adobe's products are bad; it's that their business model is not that dissimilar from those of drug dealers--which causes a great deal of resentment and frustration on the part of users who feel trapped and locked in.
I get that PS is Adobe's bread and butter. I get that they want to price as high as they feel they can get away with, because they rely on revenues from commercial enterprises with entire graphic design department budgets for buying licenses. But in doing so, they totally screw over the small business professionals, such as the self-employed photographer. LR doesn't have the retouching capabilities of PS, and it never will. And then their upgrade pricing and software bundling policies are again a slap in the face. Sure, it might work for them...great. But Adobe is fat and lazy and full of executive managers who are just riding the gravy train built on the backs of countless photographers and small-time designers who got the first hit for free and are now hopelessly addicted to the Adobe workflow.
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