Adobe CS5 Rip Off Pricing

Why the heck is soft­ware more expen­sive in Europe than in the USA? SOFT­ware we are talk­ing about. Soft­ware you can down­load or buy on a CD. The cost of copy­ing a CD or soft­ware is world­wide the same, i.e. next to noth­ing. The prob­lem is then either the dis­tri­b­u­tion or uneth­i­cal pric­ing by the com­pany in func­tion of tar­get mar­kets … com­pa­ra­ble to the phar­ma­ceu­tic indus­try. Why should Greeks, earn­ing a frac­tion of what an aver­age Amer­i­can earns, pay about dou­ble the price for CS5?

And what makes Adobe believe that the Greek is stu­pid enough to actu­ally pay the rip-off price tag? What do we get the Amer­i­cans don’t have for that addi­tional money?

Microsoft is a sim­i­lar case with their Win­dows 7 release which is noth­ing else that a finally work­ing Vista we had paid good money for a few years ago. Upgrades in the US were 50% cheaper than over here.

In as much as Win­dows is con­cerned, I just went for the Amer­i­can ver­sions since 2001. The mar­ket is global and so should be prices.

There is no point pay­ing for greedy dis­trib­u­tors, inter­me­di­aries and other “I would like to make money with­out adding value”-worms. So for­get about inter­me­di­aries, Adobe should pay them if they need them; I don’t need them nor do the other 6.5 bil­lion peo­ple of this globe. There is a thing out there called the Inter­net which allows for direct deliv­ery online at no cost … worldwide.

There is even a glob­ally acces­si­ble thing out there called the Adobe web­site which pro­vides tuto­ri­als, down­load links, tips and tricks sec­ond to none, and def­i­nitely bet­ter than any­thing an inter­me­di­ary would offer.

Yorgo Nestoridis Edit­ing and Pub­lish­ing on YouTube

So, remains the Rip off. Unfor­tu­nately I could not find any argu­ment against this one.

Or as some­one posted on Twit­ter: “It’s cheaper to fly to the US to buy Adobe CS5 for $2,599 than buy it in the UK”. The price gap is about 1500 Pounds!

Let’s have a look at one of the CS5 packs:

US: CS5 Design Stan­dard $ 1299,-
Ger­many: CS5 Design Stan­dard € 1699,-

The 1699 Euros cor­re­spond to about 2300 Dol­lars, almost double!

Oh, by the way: by buy­ing prod­uct pack­ages, you save up to 60% Adobe dixit on it’s site, which still boils down to the above.

Back in 2007, when adobe launched CS3, the Euro­pean prices where at about 190% of the US prices; some peo­ple made a peti­tion for the atten­tion of the Euro­pean Com­mis­sion. Today, may be such a peti­tion may have more impact. For sure, con­sumer pro­tec­tion orga­ni­za­tions should look into the mat­ter and use their influ­ence to tell Euro­pean peo­ple what Adobe calls them: stu­pids, for the least I can find in my rich 4-and-more-letter word vocabulary.

I hate to be taken for a ride. And I am in a global mar­ket. There is Ama­zon and there is eBay and there are many global mar­ket places which define their prices in a global way. So, let’s look at other mar­ket places and for­get about Adobe’s local rip-off out­lets. We are the cus­tomers, that is, we are the mar­ket or at least the demand side of it. We say what we are ready to pay and our con­sumer behav­ior will ulti­mately have it’s impact on Adobe as it starts hav­ing on pharmaceuticals.

Thanks Adobe for a great prod­uct; if you would add a pitch of ethics to your pric­ing pol­icy before being forced to do so, you will see many more smil­ing faces out there.

• adobe rip off
• adobe ripoff
• Adobe price ripoff
• adobe is a rip off
• adobe sc5 greece taxes
• adobe is a ripoff
• why is adobe soft­ware in us cheaper than in europe
• why adobe is more expen­sive in europe?
• adobe pric­ing rip off
• adobe rip-off

Related posts:

1. New Adobe CS5 Mas­ter Collection
2. Resiz­ing Pic­tures in Photoshop
3. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy and Photo Edit­ing II
4. Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy Ycad­emy 4
5. The Pur­pose of a Website

Tags: Adobe CS5 Price, Adobe CS5 Rip-off, Yorgo Nestoridis

This entry was posted on April 14, 2010 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Design, Editorial, Graphic Design, Media, Media Marketing Publishing, Photo Editing, Web Design, Web Services, Yorgo Nestoridis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.