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Adobe Considers Withdrawing from Asian Markets
Max Groff writes "This brief ZDNet article (printer-friendly version) describes how Adobe is considering leaving its Asian markets due to the apparently high levels of piracy across the Pacific. This change would not only cut off the marketing of Adobe products to Asian markets, but also halt the development of much of the company's Asian-language software."
I see a lot of posts here saying that this will not stop piracy of the Adobe's products, because it will eliminate the only legal way to obtain the software, so people will be forced to pirate it. Adobe knows that, but that's not the point. The point is that Adobe is actually spending money to support the Asian money, and that money is wasted.
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> So paying $5 for Adobe's products means you pay for the physical cost, even the distribution cost, but not for the labor cost.
To play Devil's Advocate, if you've got a pirated copy, you're not exactly consuming much in the way of support costs!
(Of course, that doesn't apply to the labor cost - the developers and QA people who built it, and that's probably a larger cost than the support costs.)
But to carry your argument one step further, suppose it's bad to pirate Photoshop 6.0, because you're not paying for the labor that went into 6.0.
What about 5.0, which isn't being offered for sale?
Or 4.0? 3.0?
Yes, I'm going down the slippery slope to abandonware -- at some point, the money that went to the developers ought to be "fully depreciated".
Consider - if you incur a capital expense to buy a new building, you get to write it off against income over the life of the building, say, 20 years. If you incur a capital expense to buy something like a computer, many jurisdictions allow you to write the cost of the computer off over a shorter timeframe, say, 5 years, because computers decline in value faster than buildings.
The money you pay a programmer to write software is an expense -- you "write it off" in the same year as you pay it out. If we think of it as another form of capital expenditure (intellectual capital; the brainpower of a developer), and we write it off in the same year, we're basically saying what the tech industry already knows -- software depreciates instantly ;-)
Paying $5 for a 2-year-old game in the "bargain bin" at your local retailer is legal. Why can't paying your friendly neighborhood pirate $5 for a 5-year-old game, or Photoshop 3.0, neither of which can be found even in bargain bins anymore, be legal?
Any other company coming in will have exactly the same market Adobe has, and they will face the same problem.
Not necessarily. Depends on whether they're clever enough to find a way to adapt to the Asian market instead of throwing up their hands and running away.
When pirated copies of XENIX were running every bank in China, a SCO sales guy told me: "Trying to convince the Chinese not to pirate software is a waste of time--they'd just laugh. But they want to buy manuals, and the idea of paying for books is part of their culture. So let 'em copy the software if they want, but charge 'em for the doc, and you can make lots of money in China."
Photoshop Elements != Photoshop. It's a severly GIMP'd version (all puns intended).
The GIMP is ok for making web graphics. You're never going to do any serious photo retouching, CMYK color correction, under color removal, trapping, or any other necessary pre-press operation with the GIMP, though. It just isn't ready to handle the complex, precise, and finicky nature of real four-color (or more) offset press preproduction work.
Does the GIMP have monitor color calibration? Does it have color profiles for myriad pre-press proofing machines and/or offset presses? Does it have Pantone (TM) licensed color libraries? Last time I checked it didn't.
Unless China only ever produces web sites I doubt the GIMP will be a 100% useable solution.
Corel could step in with Corel PhotoPaint. It's not as good as Photoshop for the items I mentioned above. but, it's worlds better at those chores than the GIMP is. It's still not a 100% solution, though, as I will explain below.
Assuming that since the GIMP is vaguely similar to Photoshop Elements it will be able to replace Photoshop is a very slanted view on the whole situation.
Even if the GIMP could do 100% of what Photoshop does that doesn't solve the problem of providing all of the functionality of all Adobe products to China. That is, unless the GIMP has gained the ability to do short document layout (Pagemaker), long document layout (InDesign), SGML based technical document publishing (Frame), vector illustration with 100% PS3 compatibility (Illustrator), motion graphics (After Effects), video editting (Premiere), web based vector animation (Live Motion), and PDF creation and editting (Acrobat series). That list isn't all inclusive, either.
Just like GIMP != Photoshop, Photoshop != All Adobe Products.