I'm sure you've all heard of Adobe, or used some of its software. Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American multinational computer software company, headquartered in San Jose, California, mainly engaged in the development of multimedia production software, marketing applications, financial analysis applications, and other software development.
Adobe has been most criticized for its pricing strategy, most notably when the same software package retails for more than twice as much outside the US. Buyers of Adobe products in Australia have reported that buying an Adobe suite in the United States plus a round-trip air ticket costs less than buying the same suite in Australia. It was also pointed out that the poor revenue of Adobe products in developing markets was also the result of this failed pricing strategy.
Adobe's Creative Suite 3 Master Collection was sold for £1,000 more in the UK than in continental Europe, so more than 10,000 UK users of the older version of CS filed a complaint against Adobe for "unfair pricing". But in June 2009, in response to the weak exchange rate of the pound against the dollar, Adobe increased the price of its software products in the UK by 10%. Adobe also banned British users from buying its software from its stores in the US and cracking down on other cross-regional purchases.
Adobe's behavior let users in developed countries cannot afford to pay their high price, so most of them choose to buy pirated software or switch to the same type of software.
Since adobe has been the market leader in many of the products it has acquired, it has been financially profitable for the company, with the main revenue coming from software royalties in schools and large organizations.
Adobe's unfair pricing has been criticized by many private users as too expensive for students or young users. To be honest, I personally think the price is a little expensive, and many of my friends also choose to use cheaper pirated software (although this is not the right approach).
I have personally dealt with this issue, and I can tell you that Adobe is a really annoying company to work with. If you don't know, Adobe created and controls the .pdf image format. This format is extremely popular today, but it's surprisingly hard to work with unless you have an adobe license. Sure, some simple software allows you to edit the top of a pdf simply, but Adobe has purposefully set up barriers to prevent people from being able to edit the text or content of a pdf that has already been created. In doing so, Adobe has essentially monopolized themselves by creating a nearly impossible barrier of entry for this filetype. The only way to break that monopoly would be either to create a newer, more open image file type or to force Adobe to become more flexible.
ReplyDeleteI have worked with Adobe for many years primarily for photography purpose and never realized the how problematic their market strategies are. Despite their unfair policies in other countries, within the United States they have a heavily discounted license for student users that is beneficial for younger consumers. The regular licenses can go for $53 while the same access for students is only $20. This shows that Adobe is trying to make their software more accessible to students like us.
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