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I just downloaded Photoshop
MKR
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Wait! Put the pitchforks down. This is academic.
I can't count the number of times I've seen a person proudly declare that they're in the middle of downloading hundreds, even thousands of dollars in software on internet forums and chatrooms. It usually comes up in the most casual of manners:
Person A: Hey, can someone help me find a good image editor?
Person B: Just download Photoshop or something.
They just say it like it's no big deal at all, and it happens anywhere (even here, though they rightfully get a nice reaming if they say it here). It's not just teenagers, it's people who are old enough to know better - people whose permanent record would show such a thing if they were caught.
What do you think has led to a culture where people will proudly declare that they are ripping some poor programmer's hard work off?
I can't count the number of times I've seen a person proudly declare that they're in the middle of downloading hundreds, even thousands of dollars in software on internet forums and chatrooms. It usually comes up in the most casual of manners:
Person A: Hey, can someone help me find a good image editor?
Person B: Just download Photoshop or something.
They just say it like it's no big deal at all, and it happens anywhere (even here, though they rightfully get a nice reaming if they say it here). It's not just teenagers, it's people who are old enough to know better - people whose permanent record would show such a thing if they were caught.
What do you think has led to a culture where people will proudly declare that they are ripping some poor programmer's hard work off?
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Software is really, really expensive - especially if you only want it for casual use.
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I always point out that for their needs there are legally free alternatives, and take flak for it. Though it probably is the case for a lot of people; if they knew of the alternatives they might not do it.
The only time I've nabbed software like that is if I already had access to it at uni, and wanted to be able to work from home as well, because fucked if I'm sleeping on the floor of the uni lab. Once I'm done with the course, its always disappeared off the HD since I no longer needed it. Basically, its a dodgy way to extend the locations at which I can access the software rather than outright thieve it. And I consider it a workaround for the currently assbackwards way we deal with licencing.
Sometimes there aren't - there aren't any stats packages that are any good, and you can forget about GIS. Same goes for a lot of systems modelling stuff. There's really no excuse for pinching graphics and Office-esque-ware or even OS's nowadays, though.
I'll leave it up to the audience whether that's justificatory.
When you aren't actually stealing a physical product, but rather just making a copy, it's easier to justify to yourself. You aren't really taking anything away from anyone.
took out her barrettes and her hair spilled out like rootbeer
Oh, and in the case of GIS systems at least, a lot of people pay extra for custom add-ons, and the official training courses are freakin' pricey. Other companies offer a yearly-fee'd product support and maintenance thing too.
Do the utilitarian calculus, young padawan!
Apparently CS3's protection is supposed to be completely unbreakable.
Marketing spin.
Show me an unbreakable protection scheme, and I will show you a very wealthy and powerful person.
I think software released for the home user, at a cost that is reasonable - say £40, the price of a brand new game - would actually prompt people to own more legal copies. I've actually snapped up quite a few programmes over the last couple of years for £20 or so (e.g. Fraps) because ultimately I do want to encourage and support the software makers. I'm just not that well-off.
But man, some stuff.. jeez.
...
Yeah.
I give it 3 months, tops.
What an average person would consider reasonable for Photoshop is probably around 50-60 bucks. Now, Photoshop is priced from $649-999 USD.........so you'd have to see the casual user market absolutely EXPLODE to make it worth their while to lower the price enough so that the average user would buy it.
They're not really looking for non-professionals and/or casual users to buy it. They're trying to get as much market share as possible in a certain consumer group, users who find the price to be a decent/good value, and to maximize profit off of that group.
I don't know, Photoshop Elements looks like it was a defensive move against the likes of GIMP and PSP.
For instance, 3D Studio max, costs like 7,000 USD. This is some pretty critical software in game design, and your proficiceny in it can make or break you as a designer. How is some kid gonna be able to afford the software to familarize himself with it? Even an academic copy costs in the thousands, and the only ones who are likely to subsidize the whole thing are game schools, or graphic arts programs, maybe. It's a catch 22. You can't afford the software to get a job, and to get a job you need to be a pro with software.
You can do decent enough stuff using Paint.NET and I've seen some friends make hilarious stuff using it.
Also, I bet students make a lot of those images; you can get student discounts on Photoshop pretty easily, reducing the price to $299 or lower.
You can go grab Maya PLE which is free, and 3DS max probably has a learning edition. The learning editions were made specifically for this dilemma.
Yeah, different market so they announced a line extension. They've identified a segmented market so they created a different product, still in the Photoshop line, to fill consumer needs in that niche.
There's no need to dilute the Photoshop CS brand name by lowering its price.
I'll give an example. Gibson tested out lowering the price of Les Paul line to see if it would boost sales. It actually had the exact opposite effect. People saw Gibson as a maker of great guitars. Price drops created cognitive dissonance ("if it's as cheap as guitar X, it's probably not any better/won't be perceived as better") and drove off consumers. So Gibson actually raised its prices a little bit.
It had a few options there; it could raise prices (which it did), keep prices the same, or create a different line of Gibson guitars to appeal to different market strata. The last is essentially what Adobe is doing with Photoshop CS and Elements. They're meant to appeal to different consumers. I believed that we were talking about the full Photoshop, meaning CS3 at this point.
I don't know if software is really comparable to the likes of Gibson (or even Ferrari). You're not locked in to formats and toolsets with a guitar or a car.
I never understood why people downloaded either. Now there's been one or two occasions where a friend that bought a full retail copy of some software would give me a copy of it and let me use his key, but I don't see the problem with that because it says on the licence that the user is allowed to install on "x" number of computers, and he's just giving one of those uses to me.
Sofware is too expensive, but just like cereal there's a generic copy of everything out there. Cat, have you seen calligari's stuff yet? They've got some great 3d mapping and imaging software that's a little low tech, but very good compared to a lot of stuff. It's all free. I've gotten a lot of good cad/cam stuff at my local office depotmax in the $20 dollar bin. Sure, it's a few years old, but it's all the same stuff imo. The only problem I've had recently is getting gimp (which rocks, btw) to work with a tablet that isn't a wacom. I can't write assembly code, and my tablet has drivers, but they're ass on linux.
... fuck you, Adobe. That's the last time you're getting any money from me.
I pay $350 a month in rent and I'm having a hard enough time with that.
Exactly. Photoshop is such a useful tool, I would gladly pay $70 to $100 for it. Maybe even $200 and $100 for every upgrade or something. Not $700. If someone can give me a dollar-for-dollar breakdown and show me that the pricing is a product of necessity rather than ridiculous markup, I'll shut up. It seems it costs $700 not because it needs to, but simply because people, for some reason, are willing to pay that much. But hey, props to Adobe for getting away with it for so long.
As for whether Adobe wants you to pay or not, I know they probably do, but I think their industry standard grip has come at least somewhat because of piracy. Most of the people in my class that had experience in Photoshop had it from pirated versions. Without that ability to use the software, I would hazard to guess we'd all have used something else (Paint Shop Pro, Gimp, something), and that would be where nearly everyone's experience would lie. Instead of switching to Photoshop, etc, we all would have probably just kept on trucking with the program that we already knew.
I'm also guessing most of the internet Photoshops and things came from not-so-legal versions of the software. That means that because of the rampant pirating of this software, it now has the name for any image manipulation; Photoshopping. Without people being able to use Adobe's software, they all would have probably went for the alternatives. Hell, what we call Photoshopping could have been GIMPing or something. As it stands now, most people think you must have Photoshop in order to photoshop something, which is a huge adobe foot in everyone's door.
I'm lucky I have a step-dad who freelances in design and needs those programs anyway. For someone who wants to focus on digital illustration, it was really nice to be able to get familiar with PS throughout high school. Most art students aren't that lucky, and dont know very many who don't have PS by illegal means. 700 is alot of paint brushes, eh?
I think that the demand for their product could lower that ridiculous price.
and CS3 is not uncrackable.
Thing is, for it to be worthwhile for them to reduce Photoshop's price to $100 (from $649), they'd need probably 6-7, probably more, of people like you to make purchases. And that doesn't factor in the additional cost of distributing the additional copies and servicing the huge customer increase (which would be substantial, considering you'd be adding a lot of non-professionals).
They targeted their market and pretty much nailed it. They're not targeting you with Photoshop CS3; they're hoping you'll buy Elements and maybe one day upgrade to the newest version of Photoshop CS. It simply doesn't make any sense for them to lower their prices only to reduce profitability.
Btw, students (who make up most rising professionals in that field) can get CS3 for $299. My gf actually just got the full adobe suite, including CS3, InDesign, and a bunch of other programs, for about $500 through her school. Sure, it's a lot of money, but you need experience in those programs to get jobs in the field. You can even get loans through the school to help pay for those programs! I think that Adobe is doing a fine job providing high quality products at decent value.
This is true; pirating helped Adobe build "mindshare," or how much people think about a specific product in a field over its competitors. This was really useful for Adobe when it was trying to get market penetration.
However, now that Photoshop is firmly entrenched in consumers' minds, Adobe needs to monetize that mindshare. This explains why they're cracking down on piracy more now.
We pay the exact same amount
There are always ways to get the stuff you need, though, legally. My gf sold a print and used the proceeds to pay for her Adobe suite. You can get additional loans through a school, or apply for a grant for the products, etc etc. I've seen how hard it is for art students (my gf is just about to get her second Bachelor's degree, this one a BFA from SAIC) to get by but she's managed to get what she needs to make a career. Her friends have all managed to do the same. They're not wealthy, most are barely scraping by but they manage.
Of course, the educational version was intended solely for familiarising yourself with the interface, meaning it was so limited as to be useless.
At the time, I remember adding it up and coming up with a figure of over £200,000 if I wanted personal copies of all of it, so I'm relatively comfortable with the fact I obtained it illegally. As a handy bonus, my uni's computer lab had some very old and creaky machinery in it, so by downloading I could run analyses in hours, instead of having to leave a publically accessible computer running overnight and hoping nobody would reset it so they could log in and check their email.