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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'?"

18 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 pbhj · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't actually find a problem with that; if someone gives me a piece of free-gratis software and it has a simply click-through nag screen then that seems reasonable to me.

      Surely that would be the only point to such a promotion for a corporation, give people chance to become accustomed to Adobe products and encourage them to upgrade to a paid install.

    2. Re: If they are smart... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      their key servers are down.. do you think they even have stable code for that one?

      Did you suspect that Adobe had stable code for one of their products even when they released it?

    3. 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 History's+Coming+To · · Score: 5, Funny

      Much of GIMP is a GUI for ImageMagick anyway.

      Got to love ImageMagick, there's nothing funnier than confusing a "creative" with their MacbookAir by batch editing a folder full of images via SSH on a mobile phone, they just can't grasp what's going on.

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    3. Re:The latter. by Brett+Buck · · Score: 5, Insightful

      the only good thing about GIMP is that it's free. Otherwise it's torturous to use. No way is it a real competition to photoshop (which is slightly less torturous) Yes, I know I could go in and help fix it but my first step would be to delete all the code.

              Brett

  3. Goof. by Bieeanda · · Score: 5, Informative
    http://forums.adobe.com/message/4974662#4974662

    It's 'free' for people with currently active subscriptions to the product, not every Tom, Dale, and Hates the Gimp, alas.

    1. Re:Goof. by omnichad · · Score: 5, Informative

      From the EULA:
      "2. Software License. If you obtained the Software from Adobe or one of its authorized licensees and as long as you comply with the terms of this agreement, Adobe grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software in the manner and for the purposes described in the Documentation, as further set forth below."

      There was an official Adobe download page that also lists all the serial numbers, and makes no mention of any other terms on that page. I'd say that satisfies the above term.

      And now, you don't even need an Adobe ID to download - they've since removed even that restriction.

    2. Re:Goof. by TheTerseOne · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "found a download on their site" isnt "obtained a license".

      But "Found a download on their site with a valid license displayed right next to it" is.

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  4. Adobe knows damn well what it's doing. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Adobe has been used practically as a case study of the side-effects of piracy to ensure their lock-in. Students pirate Photoshop/CS because they can't afford it, and when they get into the workforce employers suddenly have legions of employees who know how to use Photoshop/CS, making it an attractive choice for licensing because nobody has to be trained. Thus Photoshop/CS continues its reign as the de facto standard, and Adobe gets to set their rates to target the businesses with money without having to worry about the hobbyist market (which is notoriously fickle on legal purchasing of software anyway).

    The higher-ups (or the middle-ups) probably saw that the time was right to spike that userbase a bit, that's all.

    1. Re:Adobe knows damn well what it's doing. by kelemvor4 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Adobe has been used practically as a case study of the side-effects of piracy to ensure their lock-in. Students pirate Photoshop/CS because they can't afford it, and when they get into the workforce employers suddenly have legions of employees who know how to use Photoshop/CS, making it an attractive choice for licensing because nobody has to be trained. Thus Photoshop/CS continues its reign as the de facto standard, and Adobe gets to set their rates to target the businesses with money without having to worry about the hobbyist market (which is notoriously fickle on legal purchasing of software anyway).

      The higher-ups (or the middle-ups) probably saw that the time was right to spike that userbase a bit, that's all.

      The fact that adobe's products are usually superior to their competition (such as GIMP or paint.net vs photoshop) has nothing to do with it, right?

      If your theory were correct, then Pro Tools would not rule the audio world - Adobe Audition or some other free or less expensive software would. Pro Tools has much greater copy protection mechanisms and is not frequently pirated while (as you have pointed out) CS is. Yet somehow Pro Tools is still the de facto standard. If you search for comparisons of the two you will find many comments from professionals even indicating that protools is inferior yet is the one to use. Just as photoshop is a de facto standard for image editing despite high prices, so is Pro Tools for audio. In both cases I would submit that it is because each was vastly superior to their competition for a very long time. In both cases, as time has gone on the competing software has come close to matching the capabilities of the leader.

      My point is that your assertion that Adobe leads image editing due to high rates of piracy is not accurate. There are other far more obvious reasons for things to be the way they are.

      Cheers to adobe for supporting customers who previously paid for a product and still want to use it rather than forcing those customers to upgrade. Other software firms could take a lesson in this regard.

  5. Not on modern Macs by jtseng · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's made for PowerPC Macs, so the rest of us using Intel Macs are out of luck. :(

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  6. Re:Uhhhh.... by thirdender · · Score: 5, Informative

    +1 VMs. Also, Wine has pretty decent support for Photoshop CS2.

  7. How will this affect the industry? by dhalsim2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've been following the events closely and was trying to figure out how this will affect the industry. What has gone down is clearly a goof, not a marketing plan. Some say that it will help sales of CS5/6; others say it will hurt them. My best estimate is that the net effect on CS5/6 sales will be close to zero. However, as parent stated, if Adobe doesn't walk back their "permission" to use CS2, they have effectively killed off Elements. PS has the much higher price tag, but I'm sure that Adobe makes much more money off of Elements due to volume.

    Elements: dead
    Paint.net: dead
    GIMP: dead on Windows
    any other photo-editing software already struggling to survive: dead

    Aside from PS, the other big release was Acrobat 8 Pro. This is really bad for Adobe, too, as there are no free, _usable_ tools for creating PDFs. Acrobat 8 Pro has everything most people would need to create PDFs, so this particular goof will definitely hurts sales of the modern version.

    Adobe is between a rock and a hard spot: kill major sources of revenue or take on a PR nightmare. If I were them, I think I'd take on the PR nightmare instead of losing Elements and Acrobat. Let's see how this plays out.

    1. Re:How will this affect the industry? by filthpickle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think that the niche that Paint.net fills is still there...even if PS cs2 is free (still up in the air). I could have warez'd photoshop whenever I wanted before this...it just wasn't worth it. Paint.net does everything I need a photo editor to do. I am sure there are plenty of people that it doesn't work for...I am also sure that there are plenty that are the same as I am.

    2. Re:How will this affect the industry? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Oh, for fuck's sake. How many times will this need to be explained to the slow of thinking? The problem with GIMP is that it lacks features that are absolutely vital to professional graphic designers and professional photographers. It's not about the the GUI. It's not about keyboard commands. It's not about the host OS. It's about the basic goddamned feature set and how it works under the hood .

      I'm an open source fanboy. I grew up on Linux. I run Slackware as my main desktop OS and compile my own packages, for preference. But when it comes to my photography, GIMP is not an acceptable substitute for Photoshop. Until GIMP has those vital and basic features, I'm going to stick with Windows and my education-licensed copy of Photoshop.