Why does Adobe hate non-Americans so much?

[RSL]

They are not obliged to pay

Ah ha! A fellow free-marketer. Join me, Slobodan, in raising a glass to the memory of Adam Smith. (Clink!)

[stamper]

Not one of Scotland's finest. If you want to see his grave it is in a church yard just off the Royal mile in Edinburgh.

http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/2009/02/28/fury-as-vandals-wreck-graves-at-historic-royal-mile-kirkyard-86908-21159078/

Pity he came into this world.

[RSL]

I don't know about one of Scotland's finest, Stamper, but certainly one of the world's finest. Smith could see what actually was happening, beyond the fog of academic theories that simply "must" be true, since they're so beautiful.

[Rob C]

I have a long-standing distrust of the beautiful: it often ends up concealing a cesspit. Which has me thinking about the difference (if any) between weeds and flowers.

However, as a photographer, I'm concerned with surfaces, and so I feel no guilt associated with what I sometimes manage to achieve.

Beauty is also the principle motivator in many lives. It causes pairings, jealousies, weddings, divorces and murders and probably contributes highly to the birthrate. (Though I don't suppose looking around in general would support the latter point - more the prize should be awarded to accident or desperation.) Beauty is great just as long as you allow her to remain a quest rather than a reality, a realisation, because then you can get too close and personal and discover much you didn't really want to know. Isn't the hamadryad, the king cobra a beautiful creature?

Rob C

[Slobodan Blagojevic]

Not one of Scotland's finest.... Pity he came into this world.

Stamper, that's a new low, even for the ultra-left

EDIT: Especially taking into account that Adam Smith, together with David Ricardo, is considered one of the "three sources and three components" of Marxism. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate that a bit more.

[RSL]

Isn't the hamadryad, the king cobra a beautiful creature?

Sure is, Rob, and when I was stationed at Ubon Ratchathani in Thailand there was a wat up to the north on the Mekong river where people worshipped a king cobra. Unfortunately the cobra didn't worship the people. It killed one of its worshippers fairly often. There's a similar principle that applies to the Keynesians who worship a theory and insist on doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Instead of people they kill economies.

[Justinr]

Sure is, Rob, and when I was stationed at Ubon Ratchathani in Thailand there was a wat up to the north on the Mekong river where people worshipped a king cobra. Unfortunately the cobra didn't worship the people. It killed one of its worshippers fairly often. There's a similar principle that applies to the Keynesians who worship a theory and insist on doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Instead of people they kill economies.

Talking of clinging to disproven economic theories may I be the first to coin the word austerityism? Rob C is going to hate me for that. 

[Rob C]

Talking of clinging to disproven economic theories may I be the first to coin the word austerityism? Rob C is going to hate me for that. 

Neologisms aside, I have practiced 'austerityism' for years! Came in very useful after the pretty girl calendars died - for which I suppose I have to thank the Association of Ugly Sisters who took the bread from the mouths - mouths? - yes, mouths of their sweeter siblings.

Oh well, in the fulness of time one can forgive even them. Well, I suppose that I can, but I certainly don't speak for the girls!

Rob C

[Farmer]

Chris - the downloads are handled out of Adobe Ireland, which means there's no GST.  You'll remember the recent media storm about no GST for online shoppers and how various retailers (like HN) in Australia responded.  Selling out of Ireland has become quite common, particularly with downloads.

[stamper]

Stamper, that's a new low, even for the ultra-left

EDIT: Especially taking into account that Adam Smith, together with David Ricardo, is considered one of the "three sources and three components" of Marxism. I thought you, of all people, would appreciate that a bit more.

Are you saying that Russ is in thrall to a Marxist? You learn something new everyday.

[Chris Pollock]

Chris - the downloads are handled out of Adobe Ireland, which means there's no GST.  You'll remember the recent media storm about no GST for online shoppers and how various retailers (like HN) in Australia responded.  Selling out of Ireland has become quite common, particularly with downloads.

That makes sense. I was guessing that they got out of it by having the server physically located outside the country. It makes the higher Australian price even harder to justify, however. If their 'Australian' store isn't even located in the country, the only possible excuse for the higher price is the allegedly higher cost of maintaining an office here. I think we can agree that this could only account for a small part of the difference. Do you know if Adobe's telephone support is based in Australia, or have they moved to somewhere  cheaper like India?

Having calmed down somewhat, I think the biggest reason for the higher prices outside the US is the depreciation of the US dollar in recent years. As you mentioned in your first post, the non-US prices would have seemed a lot better when the US dollar was stronger. With no real competition (most of us seem to agree on that) Adobe aren't going to think "The US dollar is weaker now, so we can give our foreign customers a discount." They're more likely to say "Great, the US dollar is weaker, so we can expect more (US dollar denominated) profits from our foreign customers." I imagine that foreign customers are less likely to complain about the price (in their currencies) staying the same than American customers would be if Adobe decided to jack up the US price. Their pricing policy is hardly fair in the age of software downloads, but I think I understand why they maintain it.

In case anyone didn't guess, I never actually thought Adobe hate their non-American customers. The title was a bit of hyperbole to express my displeasure. I rather regret my choice of title now - something like "Why does Adobe think non-Americans are rich?" would have been better.

BTW, am I the only one who thinks it's odd that free-market ideologues favour free trade when it benefits large corporations, but oppose it when it would reduce corporate profits? (Is it free trade for Adobe to prevent companies like Amazon from shipping their products outside the US?)

[Tony Jay]

Chris, there is no such thing as "free trade" despite the hyperbole.

Without going into details most sovereign nations impose trade tariffs and other mechanisms to either facilitate or inhibit trade in various items.
This may be done to protect local industries or merely for revenue raising if demand is strong.

Individual companies, even multinational ones, will lever all sorts of issues that impact on their business to maximize profits. Since the playing field is not level (Australia is a wierd example of fairly extreme socialism and apparently free enterprise working side by side - many European countries are similar in this respect) from country to country retail prices, as an end result of the process, will differ.
Sadly, downloadable software is still subject to the process, or at least informed by it.

I don't necessarily agree with what hapens but it is a reality.

Regards

Tony Jay

[Chris Pollock]

I've been trying to download a trial copy of Lightroom, but nothing is happening. I hope someone at Adobe hasn't noticed this thread and blocked my access as punishment.

I tried three Windows machines without success, but was able to download it on Linux. I think Adobe's Download Assistant is just a bit flakey. So much for my image of Adobe's bosses as corporate supervillains, with an army of minions to detect and punish any criticism...

I played around with Lightroom on my laptop today, and my intital impressions are moderately favourable. I never considered it before because I had Photoshop, but with its current low price it might be a worthwhile addition.

I've thought of a possible way to use Adobe's software and still punish them for their pricing policy. How about I buy the software from their Australian store, and then make a long call to their tech support a few times a week? I'm sure I can think of enough plausible-sounding issues to keep them busy. Eventually the cost of tech support (even at Indian salaries) would exceed the profits that they made from the sale. Would that be childish? (I'm not being serious of course - I have better things to do with my time.)

Just out of interest, does anyone know if Adobe (or other companies) have a policy to deal with people who use tech support too often? With millions of customers, they must get a few who keep bugging tech support because they're too lazy to read the help files, they just can't understand computers, or even because they're lonely and have nobody else to talk to. Would tech support politely tell you to bugger off after a while?

[Farmer]

It depends what you mean by telephone support.  They definitely have offshore call centres, but they also have some really excellent and experienced folks in Australia - it really depends on what sort of support you're after and, to some extent I'm sure, who you are or more so whether you're a corporate client or an individual user.  I don't know any specific policies or anything, but that's pretty common.

Support covers a lot of things, including running seminars, roadshows, show stands, presentations, co-sponsorships, education support, Twitter, email, telephone, website, etc etc.  There are real people employed here doing that, as well as assisting customers with product decisions, implimentations, intergrations and such.  A lot that most photogs would never need and never see, which makes it seem difficult when "all" you want is Photoshop.  Of course, if you just need photo processing, they do offer a cheaper alternative in both Elements and Lightroom (as an aside).

The thing with currency movements is that they continue.  It seems like the price should be super responsive, but in reality companies set budgets and targets and agree to certain things (like paying salaries) for periods at a time - usually a year but sometimes longer in a cycle.  The AUD is now under parity with the USD because fears of a Greek collapse or exit from the Euro are causing investors in Europe to "flight to quality" which means they're shifting their investments to the USD - that increases demand for the USD and increases the price.  In Australia, we have some downward pressure from lower interest rates and an expectation that the RBA will continue to reduce official cash rates.  Most markets and commentators are locking in another 25 basis points as an absolute certainly by July and many are talking about 50, with an expectation that the banks will pass on around 70-80% of that (which reflects the reality of their funding mix - there will be pressures with European liquidity drying up at the moment).

Anyway, the point is that within the last year and likely within the next year, there's quite some movement of the rate (around 10% from high to low) and you only need to go back to this time in 2010 and it was around 0.87 as the monthly average.  There's talk that if China finally loosens its ties to the USD that you could see the AUD seeing much higher prices against the USD as the USD falls (not at all a bad thing for the US economy, but that's another story).

Yes, of course, there's also going to be some "hey we're making more now, awesome" but ultimately they will be tracking their total revenue and deciding whether a change in price will generate more through higher demand (look at the price drop for Lightroom - you have to assume that wasn't done with the intent of reducing revenue or just to make customers feel warm and fuzzy, although that's a nice bonus).

Finally, and this is a real kicker, when was the last time you saw a tech product have a price rise?  It does happen, but it's not very common.  In other words, once you lower the price, it's lowered.  The chances of you ever putting it back up, even if there's a massive movement in the exchange rate, is limited.  There are perceptions about price increases that are extraordinarily difficult to overcome.  We're so used to tecnology costing us less and less which means either the price has to drop or we have to get a lot more new features for us to accept the value.  Even if it maintains the price, it's being eroded by inflation.

Companies like Adobe preventing Amazon from exporting has something to do with ensuring that local markets maintain local revenue, it has to do with support issues, for physical products it can have some legal (warranty related, for example) issues and so on.  It also has relationships with other contracts and agreements concerning distribution.

Again,  I think it's currently a little over priced, but it's going to take a lot to push it down without have a significant effect on the local operations (which in turn will tend to hurt overall revenue when you don't have local people driving sales - remember, it's not just photogs we're talking about).  That said, I think that it will come down if we see Europe settle down (one way or the other), China loosen its currency locks with the USD (and perhaps even push for some role as a replacement global currency) push the USD down considerably and the AUS likely to maintain or even apperciate on the strength of Asian growth.

We are blessed and cursed to perhaps be living in interesting times :-)

[Farmer]

The Adobe DLM recommends not using IE, although I've personally never had a problem with IE9 (and 8 and 7 before it), but I know some folks do run into trouble.

I wish they supported third party download managers like Free Download Manager.

[Justinr]

BTW, am I the only one who thinks it's odd that free-market ideologues favour free trade when it benefits large corporations, but oppose it when it would reduce corporate profits? (Is it free trade for Adobe to prevent companies like Amazon from shipping their products outside the US?)

Capitalism itself is hardly the purest of ideologies. Inefficient or poorly managed companies should go to the wall or be displaced by better run businesses the theory goes, except of course when it comes to massive welfare payments to careless and profligate banks in the form of bailouts. That's different of course.

[Tom Frerichs]

I played around with Lightroom on my laptop today, and my intital impressions are moderately favourable. I never considered it before because I had Photoshop, but with its current low price it might be a worthwhile addition.

Personal experience only....
As a long-time Photoshop user I recently started to use LR. What I've found is:

• For photographs it works much better as an asset manager than Bridge. No, it doesn't support InDesign documents, Illustrator files, text files, but then I don't expect it to.
• For common post processing work (adjusting exposure, WB, cropping) is is very fast and convenient.
• Printing, especially now that soft-proofing has been added, is much less of a bother than printing out of PS. I did spend a little time setting up templates for my commonly used papers/sizes so I expect even more convenience printing out of LR in the future.

I'm still wandering off to PS from LR when I need to use layers or things like content aware fill. (Damn, where did that wire come from? I sure didn't see it in my viewfinder. )  However, I'm finding that I can do 95% of everything I need to do in LR, and LR's workflow, for me, is faster.

I think you may enjoy using it.

Tom Frerichs

[Rob C]

Capitalism itself is hardly the purest of ideologies. Inefficient or poorly managed companies should go to the wall or be displaced by better run businesses the theory goes, except of course when it comes to massive welfare payments to careless and profligate banks in the form of bailouts. That's different of course.

It is different, Justin.

Why it's different is that it isn't simply a corporate entity that goes down if the bank goes down: it's the guy whose money was sitting there until it wasn't any longer who goes down with the bank.

Can you imagine the scenes in the UK if the Bank of Scotland, Northern Rock, Royal Bank of Scotland etc. suddenly couldn't pay out their customers anymore? Everything would stop, go into reverse, and the only survivors would be those chaps with the private sub-machine guns. Starvation and crime would kill the country in less than a week. That's the part that few seem to think about in the context of bank bail-outs. I suspect there's very little governmental/business love in the act.

Rob C

[RSL]

For a preview of this show, keep watching Greece.

[jeremypayne]

It is different, Justin.

Why it's different is that it isn't simply a corporate entity that goes down if the bank goes down: it's the guy whose money was sitting there until it wasn't any longer who goes down with the bank.

Not in the US ... Depositors have $250,000 of insurance - per account.