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Adobe's Strange Software Giveaway: Goof, Or Clever Marketing?

Posted by timothy on from the all-leaks-look-like-plants dept.

dryriver writes "Yesterday, Adobe put up a mysterious webpage from which its now seven-year-old CS2 line of products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Premiere and others) could be freely downloaded by anyone. The page even included valid serial numbers that will unlock the CS2 apps for anyone who wants to. This strange 'giveaways' page at Adobe.com quickly went viral on the internet after a few tech bloggers reported on it. An Adobe spokesman said initially that the CS2 downloads are for existing owners of Adobe CS2 software only, who may not be able to activate their software anymore, due to the CS2 activation servers having been shut down by Adobe. But the internet at large took this webpage as meaning 'Free Adobe CS2 Software for Everyone,' which was probably not what Adobe had in mind. It seems that at this point, hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded their 'free' CS2 products and installed them, and started using them. So Adobe is in a bit of a PR pinch now because of this — Do you tell all the thousands of people who have downloaded CS2 products in the last 48 hours that 'you cannot use these products without paying us'? Or do you accept that hundreds of thousands of people now have free access to seven year old Adobe CS2 products, and try to encourage some of them to 'upgrade to the new CS6 products'?"

6 of 385 comments (clear)

  1. If they are smart... by DaemonDan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They'll try to turn it into a marketing strategy, with constant reminders to update to a newer version every time you open your "free" version.

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    1. Re:If they are smart... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They'll try to turn it into a marketing strategy, with constant reminders to update to a newer version every time you open your "free" version.

      I suspect that their problem is that CS2 is more than adequate for most people who haven't already upgraded to CS5 or 6(in particular, it should curb-stomp any version of "Photoshop Elements" which Adobe doesn't exactly give away...

      Adobe does add some interesting features with each new revision(their software engineering people are exactly as good as you'd expect, given the sordid histories of things like Flash and Acrobat Reader; but they have some genuinely interesting machine vision/image processing people); but a lot of the core tools don't change too much, both because there isn't too much to change and because the Pro users get touchy.

      It probably won't hit existing CS5/6 customers hard; but allowing free CS2 into the wild will murder 'Elements' and make upselling harder.

  2. The latter. by Samantha+Wright · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Adobe's creative suite has always had high piracy rates due to their high prices. Like Office, poor version compatibility and deliberately breaking file formats is standard operating procedure; otherwise no one would ever upgrade Illustrator or Photoshop, and the company would be out of business already.

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    1. Re:The latter. by kimgkimg · · Score: 5, Interesting
      It's like what Bill Gates said:

      "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."

      Seemed like a good move considering they're having to deal with market erosion from things like Paint.NET and GIMP.

    2. Re:The latter. by gamanimatron · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I did. Immediately. My professional use of paint and page layout programs is now limited enough that CS2 does everything I need and most of what I want, and there's no way I could justify the outlay for CS6 or their cloud service. Heck, I used PS CS2 for pro photography work for a couple of years. It might be seven-year-old software, but it's still miles better than anything else you can get for less than a few hundred bucks even today.

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  3. Re:How will this affect the industry? by tibit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Paint.net and GIMP dead? HUH?

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