From A Different Angle

Creative Suite 4 (image courtesy Adobe)

It’s a fight all over again.
Creative Suite 4 is going to be released soon, most likely in the beginning of October.
Pretty much with all previous versions of Creative Suite and with many a version of Photoshop that I can remember there was a massive price difference between the US version and the European version.

When CS3 was released, and I wanted to get the upgrade from CS2 I was shocked to see the price: € 1146,- for the English version of the upgrade vs $ 599.- (appr. € 360,- at that time).
I contacted Adobe through the website. If you have an account you get a case number and everything and you get your reply through the website. I got a reply and immediately after the reply they closed the case. They didn’t even give me the opportunity to respond to that. Which I very much wanted to do, because I wasn’t completely ok with the answer I got.
Their reply was very superficial: it’s the costs for translation and marketing is a lot more expensive in Europe.
So I opened a new case, which was withdrawn without even being answered.

Now… I would buy the story about translation and marketing if it was supported by statistics.
I would even buy something like “higher average income”, if they would show me the average income of the TARGET group which primarily uses the software.
But 1) I can count the times I’ve seen any marketing on Finnish tv or radio or magazines on the fingers of my two hands and 2) if I buy the English language version I have no business with any translation, so the price difference can’t be as big as it was. I’d accept some price difference, but 4x the price is unjustifiable.

The same goes with this CS4 upgrade. The price for the US version of the upgrade is set to $ 599.- and I will have to cough up € 791,78, which is about $ 1,150.- at the current conversion rate. That’s almost twice the price. It’s getting better, but it’s still over priced!
(don’t get me wrong, I love the software, been using it ever since PS version 2, but the pricing policies are just wrong)

Translations? Marketing? Average income?
I think it’s a big pile of moose peckers!
Adobe has a monopoly in the market at this time with their whole package, so basically they can do what they want. Of course… I don’t HAVE to buy it. But I’m a freelance graphic professional, and if I want to stay up to date with what’s going on in the market, if I want to play along with the big boys and girls, I’m pretty much forced to, since Creative Suite is pretty much the market standard at the moment.

So I’ll just suck it up, pull out my plastic and eat pasta and tomato sauce for three weeks.
And make a group on Facebook, so that I can rant to others about it…