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Adobe rip-off
For many years now, I have used Macromedia Fireworks. Dreamweaver and associated products like Flash to design and code web sites. About 2 years ago, just as I purchased Studio 8, Adobe and Macromedia merged and are now known as Adobe. Yesterday I received an email from Adobe announcing their latest revision of the suite, which is called CS3, and comes in two web versions, CS3 Web Standard and CS3 Web Premium.
I went through the demos and decided that they seemed to be a good product and decided to purchase the Premium edition as an upgrade to my Studio 8. I was looking at the American Web site and the price for the premium edition was $1,599.00. I clicked on the Buy button on the Adobe Shop, and was redirected to the UK site. The price was now shown as £1,404.12! At the current exchange rate of circa $2.0 to the £, that meant that the cost had suddenly increased from $1599 to $2808.24 – almost double!
I checked the cost of CS3 Standard and found that the UK version was $740, whilst the American version is $399, again almost twice the price in the UK. Surprisingly, the carriage cost of £5.11 compared to $8 does not show such a marked exchange rate differential.
I spoke to the sales people at Adobe, and asked them why such a great cost differential. I was told that the staff had been asked this question many times, and had passed the question up to higher authority but had had no answer. They were totally embarrassed because of this, and could not understand why the price differential was so great. I also asked whether I could buy the US version, and was told that it would not run as an upgrade because the serial numbers would not work.
Previously at Macromedia, there were cost differentials, but one had the opportunity to pay in whichever currency one wanted. This seems to be another instance of rip off Britain!
Adobe will have to reduce their prices before I purchase CS3 from them. There are other similar programs on the market at much lower prices.
Howard Walker
I am presently working on a site to sell Adobe software to teh people in UK for about the same price as the US. The only catch is it will be shipped from the US
Posted by lloyd Thomas | May 8, 2007 4:50 PM
I thought the Vista price saga was a mishap of greed, laziness and Neanderthal business attitude.
This again is a situation of company directors burying their heads firmly in the sand knowing full well yet again they are going to get away with it.
Tony Blair's Office was recently petitioned on the Vista pricing and this week the answer came back from 10 Downing Street.
"No price controls operate in the UK and no restrictions are placed on the prices which business may charge consumers. Retailers are free to set their own prices, but they are required to display them in an unambiguous, easily identifiable and clearly legible way in order to enable consumers to compare prices in different outlets and so obtain the best value for money".
Number 10 then passed the buck, as it always does with it's 'guinness bottle shoulders' from being a Government intervention by basically saying ~ "If you've got a problem, don't contact us, contact the Office of Fair Trading (OFT).
So..... I expect we will continue to see these extortionate price differences going on between the pond for many a while still.
Meanwhile the ever-so-ripped off British public will once again have to continue this query alone.
Posted by Mike Paterson | May 11, 2007 11:59 PM