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.'"

Comments

Soon

[SquirrelDeth]

income in the states will will be a fraction what is was. Who is going to pay Adobe then?

Re:This is why I have given up on Adobe

[Compaqt]

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.

Wasn't piracy always a part of Adobe's business?

[MagikSlinger]

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.