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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.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
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.