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Adobe rip-off
I work as an IT technician in the education sector in a local primary school. I was asked recently about running a lunch time computer club for the Gifted and Talented children in key stage 2 classes.
I decided that this was a good idea and that I would teach them to use Macromedia Dreamweaver so that they could produce material for our website and also our intranet.
Macromedia had brought this out for primary schools at £299 for studio 8 with 17 licences 15 student and 2 teacher, a bargain!! I placed an order for this through a reseller, who contacted me to tell me that this was not available since the Adobe take over of Macromedia even though it is advertised, and that Adobe had school licences available as site licences.
I already knew about this as having worked for over 10 years in education I had encountered this in secondary schools where I have worked. Looking at the new pricing I found this was going to cost us a minimum of £1699!!! Over 5 times as much!
This is the price for secondary school, colleges and universities – fine if you have a large budget to play with (most primary schools can’t afford this kind of expenditure and don’t need 500 licences as they are lucky if the have 100 PCs and probably would only use Dreamweaver with the more able pupils in small groups anyway).
I contacted Adobe customer services to check the situation and was directed to their education website once again which I had already seen, and let them know this and pointed out the fact of the price change and the use in primary schools.
Once again this is some corporate big wig who knows stuff all about the education market, grouping everything together under one umbrella (bit like our government – don’t get me started).
How can Adobe justify this massive price increase saying they are “restructuring” their prices. I suspect that this will back-fire on them as most primary schools will look at alternatives, which may lead to the decline of the use of certain pieces of software as the next generation of programmers and designers will be used to using products they learn at school from an early age.
Microsoft had to learn this lesson in schools, restructuring it’s licence prices for education as it came under threat from open source software as schools simply couldn’t afford the extortionate cost of corporate like pricing and began moving away from Microsoft products.
Perhaps some of these other companies for once should take a leaf out of Microsoft’s book.
Sean Hindle
April 21, 2006 in Vent your spleen! | Permalink
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Comments
Have they tried looking at www.pugh.co.uk which has the choice of purchasing individual licences of various software at a more affordable price than a site licence.
Here is the Dreamweaver software page
http://www.pugh.co.uk/Products/adobe/dreamweaver-8.htm
There is also the option for staff and students to purchase the software for personal use at a reduced price.
Posted by: Stuart | 21 Jun 2006 17:05:21
