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Inducement To Piracy, Adobe Style
S Vulpy writes "A post at the Social Science Research Council's website talks about how piracy greases the wheels of the Adobe Creative Suite marketplace by making it easier to deal with Adobe breaking compatibility between versions. Quoting: '... such incompatibility doesn’t involve exotic functionality, just straight text layout into columns and boxes. The kind of stuff that has been core functionality of publishing software since the early 1990s. Translate this dilemma to Brazil or Russia, where incomes are a fraction that of the US and you get a very simple outcome: massive piracy of Adobe products. In fact, go through this process in the last month of a 4-year project on a deadline and one could understand becoming extremely sympathetic to such a perspective. This, as we’ve argued, is not a defect of the Adobe business model, it is the business model.'"
income in the states will will be a fraction what is was. Who is going to pay Adobe then?
This. Of course, they're be the usual whining about how Gimp is supposedly unintuitive (i.e., it's not set up exactly like Photoshop), or how it doesn't support color separation for print (even though most people are just using it for web graphics).
And Inkspace gets better with each version, it's already much more usable (I think) than Gimp.
If you're a small company, just starting out, and you're not locked into Photoshop for some reason, there's no reason to start producing files in that format. If you're starting up a web-based company, and need to produce some graphics for your website, just create it in Inkscape.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
As an outsider looking in, I noticed Adobe never seemed to put any serious DRM on their software. Computer games put more effort into it than Photoshop ever did. I was always surprised how easy it was to install & use Adobe products with a single serial number used by thousands. I know they did make efforts to stop the distribution, but never as hard-core as Microsoft became with Office. And considering the prices they charged, I figured Adobe would.
Then it occurred to me after working with artists who trained on Adobe products (pirated in some cases), etc. that Adobe's _real_ market for the $1000+ titles are businesses: advertising companies, professional graphic designers, businesses, etc. Going after the hobbyist or the poor artists wasn't their style. And then it clicked: when the artists came to my company, they got the company to buy Adobe products. *THUNK!* The network effect. If they can get more people used to using Adobe and associating certain high-value work with Adobe products, then the more likely they are to push for Adobe at work. And thus more money they can squeeze from businesses who make money.
So to me, allowing a certain low level amount of piracy was always part of Adobe's game.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
And that is where the network effects come in. It's very difficult to use Gimp when everyone you are collaborating with uses Photoshop. Openoffice is a good suite, but when everyone else is using Office there will be compatibility issues. There is more software for Windows than any other OS because it's the OS most people use. Being popular is an advantage for software.
95%, if not more, of people using Photoshop don't need it. We tried for a major push for Adobe Elements at one place I worked at, but a lot of people wanted Photoshop just because it was the "grown up"/Real product.
That may work if you're a nerd living in your mother's basement. However, back in the real world, people collaborate, and that's when network effects come in: when your customers send you files in the latest format, you need to be able to read them.
Wait. Microsoft did a major change in their software. After upgrading to the new version of Word you discovered that Adobe's four year old software didn't know how to talk to Microsoft's brand new software. And this is Adobe's fault?
The problem is HR needs you to have experience with Adobe products or your resume is thrown in the trash. Gimp who what??
I am starting a business and I hate and oppose piracy. I feel terrible and hypocritical owning a cracked version of Dreamweaver but I need experience in using it in order to not starve. I could try to use Vi and firebug only but if my business fails (90% chance it will, given statistics) then I need to have experience to fall back on. I could use paint.net and get away and *lie* about using photoshop (dishonest as well), but Illustrator is not something you can make up or do without if your future employer sits you in front of a mac with it and says do this by 12:00???
I am praying for the adoption of html 5 so we can get rid of flash. THis has hurt my ability to earn a living as a web programmer simply because all candidates pirate it and learn it that way and it is a job requirement now to have x years of experience using it for non flash sites. I believe free alternatives are the answer to piracy. Remember people pirating Oracle 12 years ago? How about today? Zelch. People use Mysql now. Also it frees us from Windows to use non propriteary alternatives. But nothing exists that is similiar to Frontpage or Dreamweaver. Gimp frankly sucks. Paint.net is promising but it shows how incompatible Mono is with .NET as it can not be ported to Linux easily.
http://saveie6.com/
Consider also the Tacoma Narrows fiasco, now some decades ago, which in my opinion is not a mistake that competent engineers make, but one due to social promotion at the highest levels of our education system
I know you're young, but the social promotion you're talking about didn't start until the 70's and wasn't commonplace until the 90's (I remember kids flunking often enough). The Tacoma Narrows Bridge went wacky in 1940. The engineers who designed and built that bridge were probably taught in 1910-1935. They're the great-great-grandparents of the spoiled "everyone wins" generation.
Seriously, how hard can it be to not upgrade. If you're working on a huge project in-house, don't upgrade your software half-way through, unless you're prepared to update all copies of it.
InDesign, the software mentioned in the article, will automatically upgrade the format of the document when opened in a new version with no warning. This can be a problem. It also does allow you to downsave by one version (CS5 can save as InDesign Interchange format, which will open in CS4. CS4 to INX for CS3).
If you have the Creative Suite, you really should be on volume licensing - even if it's just one copy. It's not a well known fact, but individuals can purchase volume licensing and there is no minimum buy-in to their TLP licensing program. Licensing copies are cheaper than retail box copies, you can re-download your installers if you lose them, Adobe keep a record of your serial number/proof of purchase if you loose it or are audited and you can purchase maintenance if you want to keep your copies up-to-date for less than the regular upgrade cost.
Also, with licensing, if you purchase a copy of, say, CS5, but you're running all CS4 licenses in your studio, you can install a copy of CS4 instead using your CS4 volume license serial number.
There's no arguing that the Creative Suite is expensive, but if you're smart about it, you can keep the costs down a bit.
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