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Adobe Makes Products Harder to Use, More Expensive

Posted by michael on from the extracting-monopoly-rents dept.

An anonymous reader writes "This is a follow-up to an earlier story on slashdot about Adobe releasing their Creative Suite package. It seems that Adobe has decided to go they way of Intuit's TurboTax last year and add activation to their products. Legitimate users are up in arms. For Adobe, they follow the steps of other companies, macromedia, quark (who coincidentally shipped their entire engineering offshore) in the graphics biz. Now since in theory they'll be making more money, I hope at least the price goes down (oops, it did not, looks like the upgrade price even increased)."

3 of 616 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How about the GIMP ? by arvindn · · Score: 3, Informative
    No it's not. GIMP for Windows (and possibly for all platforms?) can't (won't) save as GIFs. That's a pretty big gap for a product that professes to be an alternative for Photoshop!

    Just checked on my linux box, it saves them just fine. Don't know about Windows though, don't have one. Can't see why it won't on some platforms and will on others. Perhaps it has been enabled after the GIF patent expired.

    Do you think the people who sell multi-thousand dollar ads using Photoshop give a crap about the $900 sticker price?

    That's true. However there is a large audience to whom $900 matters a lot. eg:
    1. Students
    2. Companies that want to purchase several licenses
    3. Most of the third world

    The few days I spent fighting with the GIMP, on the other hand, it crashed several times.

    Never crashed on me. Maybe you used a development version? (odd minor version number ==> development version)

  2. Re:The problem with activation for legimitate user by flappinbooger · · Score: 3, Informative

    Man, if it was me, and I was in a business situation with a very very close and important deadline, and this junk pops up? I'd have that key piece of software cracked so fast it wouldn't know what hit it. The software is meant to serve ME, not the other way around. If I've got a license sitting RIGHT THERE, and I CAN'T USE IT? Crack it, not worth the time to play their silly games.

    --
    Flappinbooger isn't my real name
  3. Re:looks like i am not upgrading by Shadowmist · · Score: 4, Informative

    GIMP is worthless to the commercial advertising and print field. It's fatal weaknesses are.

    * Lack of color profile support
    * Lack of CMYK support
    * Lack of LAB color space support

    Just one of the above is a deal breaker, not to mention the power editing features of Photoshop which have made it the Quark of image editing. If you're only doing web quality/RGB work then you can do okay work with GIMP. But to say that GIMP is a drop in replacement of Photoshop betrays an utter ignorance of the professional prepress requirements.