UPDATE – Adobe Changes Mind on Upgrade Price By Scott Fresener

By Scott Fresener on Jan 21, 2012 with Comments 0

Adobe announced plans to offer subscription based pricing in early 2011, but it was in November with the unveiling of the pricing for Adobe CS6 that the company really irritated long time users/supporters. In addition to the new subscription services, they announced that to qualify for upgrade pricing for CS6, you needed to have purchased CS5 — a policy which was a major shift from years prior. Adobe had previously offered upgrades for three years of older editions, rather than just one.

A popular movement by Scott Kelby of Photoshop Users/Magazine fame was aimed at the pricing change by Adobe, calling for a more liberal policy. It appears Adobe has listened, and the company has expanded the upgrade pricing for a limited time. Until the end of 2012, users of CS3 or CS4 also qualify for upgrade pricing. The details on what this deal exactly amounts to hasn’t been revealed yet, Adobe is promising more information when CS6 is released later this year.

Thank you Adobe for listening. NOW…. if you would only bring back the “Screen” button in CS6 we would all be VERY happy.

To put this in perspective here is my editorial from November 27, 2011.

On November 9, Adobe (you know…. the guys who make Photoshop and Illustrator), announced a new – and very unpopular – upgrade policy. As any Photoshop or Illustrator user knows, you could be back a couple of versions in the past and still get a discounted price on an upgrade to the latest and greatest version.

Well folks….. the party is over. Adobe has gone full circle and become a little too arrogant. First, starting in version CS5, they removed the beloved “Screen” button that thousands of us used every day to set the halftone frequency, angle and dot shape. It has force a LOT of users to stay on CS4 just so we have this feature. Adobe’s response…. “people should not print that type of stuff from Photoshop – they should use Illustrator.” Duh! A LOT of us do Simulated Process and CMYK separations IN Photoshop and we want to press the “Print” button and walk away.

Now, they just announced that they would no longer let you be a few versions down to upgrade. If you want to upgrade to their “soon-to-be-released” version CS6.0 in early 2012, you MUST have already upgraded to CS5 or CS5.5 to get an upgrade price. If not, you will pay the full $699! Holy “magic wand tool” Batman! For a company that just walked away from Flash and is laying off 750 workers to “realign” things it sure seems like the wrong time to piss off hundreds of thousands of users. Read their recent layoff news at Reuters here.

All you have to do is type a search of “Adobe Pricing” and you will find all the message boards ablaze with unhappy users who think Adobe has gone too far. But hey, they grossed just over $1 billion last year. What the heck. The ARE the 1000 pound gorilla.

Click here to read the Adobe Featured Blogs post from November 9 that started all of this.

Here are the paragraphs from the post that sums it up:

“We are excited to announce that membership to the Adobe Creative Cloud will be available in the first half of 2012 at a price of $49.99 per month for individuals and $69.99 per month per seat for workgroups, both for an annual plan. Our move to this membership model allows us to keep our customers up to date with the latest Adobe innovations in our tools and related services. Creative Cloud will provide maximum flexibility, offer lower cost of entry, and add cutting-edge innovation on an on-going basis to keep our customers ahead of the changing technology and device landscape.

For customers who prefer to remain on the current licensing model, we will continue to offer our individual point products and Adobe Creative Suite editions as perpetual licenses. With regards to upgrades, we are changing our policy for perpetual license customers. In order to qualify for upgrade pricing when CS6 releases, customers will need to be on the latest version of our software (either CS5 or CS5.5 editions). If our customers are not yet on those versions, we’re offering a 20% discount through December 31, 2011 which will qualify them for upgrade pricing when we release CS6.”

In other words – get your checkbooks out and upgrade by December 31 or pay the full price afterwards.

An Open Letter to Adobe
A guy who has made a great living off of Adobe is Scott Kelby. He is the editor-in-chief of Photoshop User Magazine, the president of NAPP – National Association of Photoshop Professionals and owner of Kelby Training.

He also has a blog at www.ScottKelby.com and wrote an EXCELLENT and LONG “Open Letter to Adobe” that you must read. He pleads “our” cause and has some good advice for Adobe. I doubt they will listen but who knows.

Read Scott’s letter by clicking on the graphic below.