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back to article Adobe can't penetrate punters' tight wallets: Users holding out for CS6

Adobe's first quarter profits took a bashing as customers of its legacy desktop software deferred purchases in anticipation of forthcoming Creative Suite 6 and Creative Cloud. The maker of reassuringly expensive software saw net income slide 21 per cent to $185.2m for the first quarter ended 2 March. Total sales edged up 1.3 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Incremental upgrades

    If Adobe weren't so obsessed with releasing small incremental upgrades every year they might sell more copies.

    Creative Suite is a big investment. The paid for jump from CS5 to CS5.5 wasn't huge but the upgrade price was. Many people just hang back and keep on using old version (often unaware that Adobe charge even more for an upgrade if you don't have the previous version).

    Ideally they'd like us all on the subscription model but I can see serious user resistance especially in the video industry. People like to get an edit setup that works and stick with it rather than upgrading every 12 months.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The subscription Model really sucks. I know a lot of people that just won't do it.

    The upgrades just aren't all that desirable either. There really is little reason to have moved from CS4, not no reason, but little.

    As they cram in more features, the interface is really starting to struggle. Especially as Menu's and commands are moved around and keyboard shortcuts changed. This has always happened but it get's worse every time.

    I want to use Photoshop, not relearn it every 12 months

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  3. StooMonster

    Waiting for CS6, maybe

    I'm still on CS3 suite, which (mostly) works without issue.

    There's a few things I'd like in later versions, but it's just not worth the price of the upgrade to me (not my core business, but I do use it heavily every so often).

    Definitely not going subscription route either, nor pay-as-you-go.

    Guess I'll stick with CS3 until it stops working due to OS changes or Adobe have a more reasonable upgrade policy.

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    1. qwarty
      Reply Icon

      Re: Waiting for CS6, maybe

      Also stopped at CS3 thanks to the onerous upgrade policy. CS no longer a crucial toolset for me either, handy from time to time but not worth paying to walk the upgrade treadmill.

      There must be a lot of us who have found CS useful but not essential, the Adobe approach of milking those who can't live without their software shrinks their potential market enormously in my opinion.

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    2. Ivan Headache
      Reply Icon

      Re: Waiting for CS6, maybe

      Yup. CS3 here too.

      I really haven't seen any need to upgrade. It does everything I need it to do.

      I got fed up of spending money on upgrades that brought fabulous features that I never found a use for. (Not just Adober there either.)

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      1. Spearchucker Jones
        Reply Icon
        Go

        Re: Waiting for CS6, maybe

        Lol :-) I'm still on Photoshop 7. That and Blender (which is happily free) are about all I need to produce the artwork I need for my web site and my dev projects.

        When 7 stops running on Windows (it's very happy on Windows 8) I'll consider an upgrade.

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  4. Tom 13
    Facepalm

    Guess they missed the memo:

    There's a recession on in the US, and it's affecting the whole world. As a result, businesses are trimming expenditures.

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  5. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    Quality for price ... ?

    Adobe should try making applications other than Photoshop that are rock solid and do what they're supposed to. Photoshop is a superb product but any Adobe product involving audio or video is likely to be unstable and defect ridden. Encore being a prime example ... using it is like playing Russian roulette with days worth of time. And don't get me started on why Premiere does NOT come with multichannel audio as standard (you have to purchase a hideously expensive plugin from a 3rd party supplier on an annual basis!) thereby making it all but useless.

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  6. jason 7
    Unhappy

    Still waiting for fixes for CS3/4/5 etc.

    Adobe are hopeless at fixing stuff for what is stupidly expensive software.

    You just expect better service for your money.

    You jump to a new version and god knows what howlers you'll find with no hope of them being fixed.

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  7. Matt 75
    Thumb Down

    each upgrade brings more problems!

    What do they expect when each 'upgrade' just introduces more problems (and doesn't fix existing ones?). We're still on CS4 as we found that CS5 often breaks content written in ActionScript 2.0. Would have preferred to stay on CS3 but it became impossible to obtain more licences without resorting to piracy.

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  8. Brent Longborough
    Pint

    I'm really happy with The Gimp

    That's the one from gimp.org, *not* Pulp Fiction...

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    1. Paul Crawford Silver badge
      Reply Icon

      Re: I'm really happy with The Gimp

      So am I, just add in UFRaw for camera's raw files, and you have most of what you might need for non-professional camera work.

      Photoshop is simply too expensive, and complex to use, for the basic image editing I need and I suspect that applies to a *lot* of folk (even if they don't realise it). Also you don't get Photoshop for Linux so my choice would be getting a copy of Windows and the sucking AV software, bloat, etc, that comes with that, or the additional expense for a Mac.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
        Reply Icon
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I'm really happy with The Gimp

        If it wasn't for a few items, I'd only use GIMP. Unfortunately, GIMP just doesn't do it all. I use CS2 at work and CS4 at home. There hasn't been a decent change to warrant going to anything beyond that.

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    2. Gritzwally Philbin
      Reply Icon
      Devil

      Re: I'm really happy with The Gimp

      Also very happy with using GIMP - for the price, it's unbeatable and I find it's got better color management - I get much warmer skin tones - which is very good for the fakes..

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  9. jason 7
    FAIL

    Oh and another thing...

    ...while we are at it.

    Adobe are just simply not a nice company to deal with.

    They just treat you like dirt. Overly complicated upgrade paths that stack the apps and cost against you. You can never get the combination you want for a reasonable price. If you start off with the full bundle and then find you only use two of the suite you are then locked into the suites. We found a few years ago we bought what we thought was the right upgrade (seemed reasonable/sensible) only to finds it didn't work. A call to Adobe just resulted in some bitchy woman at the other end telling us "tough titty!" even though we'd bought £300 of their product. Had to search out a unused copy of FlashMX (whatever) on Ebay for a further £75 to get it working. That then scuppered us for future upgrade paths etc. becuase we were now out of sync.

    Then when you have finally stumped up the hundreds to buy the new version its really stressful to make sure it goes over the top okay, doesn't destroy your PC or previous settings, has a major 64bit bug etc. If it does, then you'll find sod all in the way of support and fixes.

    My heart sinks whenever I hear "I think we need to upgrade Adobe ********!"

    It shouldn't be that way should it? Adobe is the only company I really detest dealing with and find stressful.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Gimp

      Re: Oh and another thing...

      I will say one thing about Adobe having switched from Premiere, to Final Cut and back to Premiere. Adobe might treat customers like dirt, but at least they acknowledge they exist.

      With Apple/Final Cut, end users seem to be an inconvenience unless they are are prepared to sit within the Jobs reality distortion field and just gobble down whatever Apple tells them is best.

      I jumped back to Adobe running on Apple hardware because I'd rather be an oppressed serf who gets the crap kicked out of him on a yearly basis by the man in the big house than a brainwashed cult member who is supposed to adapt his whole production workflow just because Apple tell me to.

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  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    UK/US pricing disparity

    Great to see Adobe are still making a special effort to rip off UK customers with hefty pricing compared to the US. They will probably tell you the reason is a smaller market size and 'localization' costs. A download is a download wherever you are and they make no changes to the CS products for the UK market. If they charged half as much they would probably triple their sales. All the CS users I know (including myself) are sick of being gouged by Adobe and do everything possible to avoid upgrading.

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  11. mraak
    Thumb Down

    Whaaaaaa????

    I just paid for Web Premium 5.5 a month back. Now again?

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    1. Test Man
      Reply Icon
      WTF?

      Re: Whaaaaaa????

      Eh? No one is forcing you to upgrade. In fact, seeing as you've just paid for a suite, you don't really need to.

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  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Where's My FrameMaker?

    We used to use FrameMaker under Windows, Mac, and Solaris.

    Once they killed Frame for Mac, it slowed our upgrading, to try to retain as much cross-platform compatibility as possible. MaxOSX was a must-have upgrade.

    With Solaris stuck at Version 8, why would we want to upgrade to Frame 10 under Windows?

    We love Frame's responsiveness and LARGE compound documents, we hate Adobe's policies on cross-platform products.

    As long as old versions will continue to work, there is no compelling reason to upgrade, since new features merely make our documents incompatable with the other publishing platforms.

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  13. Mike G
    Trollface

    While I generally agree that Adobe deserve a lot of criticism, there's a lot of whining about price for what are professional tools meant for full time creatives.

    If you're a target professional (as opposed to a part-time bedroom hero 'designer' working from mommy's basement) then you can make back the price of the suite with one small website, one corporate video, one brochure. A few days work a year will keep you in upgrades, big deal.

    If you're a bedroom hero, or whiney skinttard, then as others have mentioned above there is plenty OS software like the gimp, audacity, inkscape etc for you to fiddle with, you could even probably use open office for your birthday invites and the like.

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    1. asdf
      Reply Icon
      FAIL

      if your a target hack

      >If you're a target professional

      Ok as long as you call yourself a designer and not a developer maybe I can buy shelling out for Adobe's tools but in my experience people who use mostly use Adobe tools and try to pawn themselves off as real software developers are pathetic joke hacks.

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  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Tombo

    ...as opposed to a part-time bedroom hero 'designer' working from mommy's basement...If you're a bedroom hero, or whiney skinttard...

    Angry little man is angry.

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