So Adobe unveiled version 5 of their Creative Suite, right in the middle of a flame war about Apple's supposed will to "kill" Flash... And here is something that is probably going to ignite another flame war, but this one is going to rage against Adobe.
I'm talking about their price policy outside of the USA. Let's look at the Design Premium version of CS5, a full copy, not an upgrade. In the USA, it is priced at US$ 1899 for the boxed copy.



In France, the same version is priced... €2749.60! This includes 19.6% VAT, so if you want to compare fairly, that comes at €2299 without taxes.



Converting all this to €, that makes the US boxed CS5 Design premium at €1397.85 versus €2299 in France. Roughly €900 more for the French version.


The usual excuse Adobe serves customers is that the price difference comes from the cost of localising their software in all the various languages. But this is horse manure, as 1) localisation can be included in the global cost of developing the software, like most companies do and 2) if you look at the CS5 Design Premium in Portuguese on the Portuguese Adobe store, it costs €1899 excluding VAT, or €400 less than the French version. If localisation costs were the real reason, the Portuguese version would cost more because 1) there are probably less people with the required skills to localise such a software in Portugal than in France (simply because there are less people in Portugal) and 2) the market for a Portuguese version of CS5 is probably far smaller than for the French version.





And, by the way, if I want to buy the French (or Spanish) version in the USA, the extra cost related to said localisation is... zero:





 


So, Adobe is gouging their non-US customers on prices.
Then there is the strange issue of boxed copy versus digital download. You can indeed order a boxed copy, complete with (obviously) the box, an install DVD(s) and probably all sorts of paper brochures. Then you can choose to directly download the suite from Adobe servers, which means you don't get all these physical things, plus you have to back it up somewhere just in case. Logic would dictate that the digital download should be cheaper, as it costs far less to Adobe.


Not quite so: in the US, both the physical and digital copies are at exactly the same price:
In France, the box copy is €2749.60 including VAT (as mentioned above), and the digital download is... €2781.79, or €32.19 more!
I would really like Adobe to try and justify (I write "justify" because they can always explain it) this price difference. Maybe when you order a digital copy, they have to pay some Adobe employee to open a shrink-wrapped boxed copy of CS5, rip it to a .dmg file and post it manually to an FTP server for you to dowload, which would explain the extra cost? This, plus all the rest, paints Adobe as trying really hard to be Microsoft.

By Moose

I really hope that someday at least one rival application hits this shitty market.
Better, faster and cheaper. With such sales policy Adobe itself asks and supports torrent sites.

I couldn't venture a guess as to why Adobe charges so much more for the European French edition than it does for the North American French edition, but as I have many years experience in software and document translation I can tell you that you have the math backwards.

A language that is in less demand is far cheaper to have translated. Especially a language such as Portuguese where generally the translation would be done by the same people who do the North American Spanish or the European Spanish translation. European French is one of the most expensive languages (German is also fairly expensive.) Portuguese and Vietnamese are among the cheapest.

well, depends on the language, I do a fair amount of scientific translations in my work, and rates are fairly higher for less widespread languages than for, say, English to French... especially since it is harder to find competent people for said less common languages.
In any case, the price difference is simply a question of pushing the prices up to what a given national market will accept.

I can't even imagine how expensive the Klingon version of CS5 will be...

-Aaron-

Unfortunately, Adobe has had this completely strange pricing strategy for years, at least on the German market. Even if I buy the US English version here, I'll still pay substantially more than I'd pay for the same software if I'd buy it in the US. And that strange idea of making downloads more expensive than boxed versions isn't new either - not that it makes any sense, but Adobe seems to think it does.

And it gets really idiotic if you buy US versions here in Europe: I own a Windows version of Photoshop CS3 Extended, which I bought a couple of months before I got a Mac. When I contacted Adobe, they actually first responded saying that it's a Student version and that it was illegal for me to even use it. When I contacted them again, they confirmed that it was legal, but that it was a US version, and that I was not able to upgrade/cross-upgrade that to a Mac version here in Germany.

I usually use the English versions of software because some, if not all, translations are... let me put this mildly... not all that good, at least in my eyes. I just feel at home in the English version of PS or Dreamweaver.

In the end, I now downgraded to the Mac version of Photoshop Elements 8 in English, and got Elements+ for that. It offers all I really need, though the full version of PS is still nicer to use and seems more straightforward in a number of things - but PSE8 gets the job done most of the times, and if it fails, I still have CS3 running in Parallels.

Had Adobe permitted me to cross-upgrade to the Mac version, I'd have gladly paid the €300-€400 (don't remember the exact price any more) that they were asking for at the time... now they made something around €80 by selling a licence of PSE8 to me.

and how much cost the translation from US English to UK English ?

for those who do not know ...

Top 100 Languages by Population

Rank...Language Name............Primary Country.............Population

1........CHINESE,MANDARIN......China.........................885,000,000
2........SPANISH......................Spain..........................332,000,000
3........ENGLISH......................United Kingdom...........322,000,000
4........BENGALI......................Bangladesh.................189,000,000
5........HINDI........................India..........................182,000,000
6......PORTUGUESE..............Portugal.....................170,000,000
7........RUSSIAN.....................Russia........................170,000,000
8........JAPANESE...................Japan..........................125,000,000
9........GERMAN,STANDARD.....Germany.......................98,000,000
10.......CHINESE, WU ............China...........................77,175,000
11.......JAVANESE...................Indonesia, Java, Bali......75,500,800
12........KOREAN....................Korea, .........................75,000,000
13 .......FRENCH..................France.........................72,000,000

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_langu...native_speakers

I never said that Portuguese was less common as a language than French, only that Adobe probably sells more versions of CS in French than in Portuguese... anyway, that wasn't the point: the point is that Adobe rips off every customer outside of the US of A.

It seems like, once again, Adobe has given the
two fingers to the thousands of its European
and non American customers
who signed an online petition a couple of years
back on this very issue.

(Adobe said they would take the grievances of
the petitioners into consideration for future pricing)

They tried to justify the price differential on the grounds
of providing customer support throughout Europe.

As one irate friend pointed out to me, Adobe have, in fact
no customer support whatsoever in Europe – only an online
forum where Adobe customers try to figure out the bugs and workarounds
amongst themselves! And if you try to phone Adobe Europe,
this forum is where they direct you!

i think they fckd up

for example i checked upgrade price from cs3 (design standard suite) to cs5 (master collection)
upgrade to cs5 german version costs 1783 EUR
but upgrade to english version set you back for 1902 EUR

who is running this company?
Joker?

Beancounters, that's who.