Could it be the price?

It seems unbelievable that Apple can sell professional music software for £329 yet Adobe wants £1-2k for graphics software!!!!

If Adobe want me to purchase their products they should let me subscribe for... £15 a month or something... some kind of freelancer rate. There's no way the Master Collection is affordable at £2500... except for companies...

If their software was actually getting any better, maybe it would be worth buying. But it isn't. It's getting worse. Far from the old, apparently lost value for money and quality ethos infiltrating the dreadful collection of half-baked unstable hacks they acquired from Macromedia, the opposite took place.

Just now, before being sidetracked into this foaming rant, I was using a $100 app, Lineform, to create graphic objects that I then need to paste into Fireworks, which alone costs over twice the price, and has neither the stability, feature set or vision of the former.

Adobe is flatlining because it is a bloated company trying to push crap products nobody wants on a ridiculous synchronised upgrade schedule which means at least half of the upgrades at any particular release point are of zero use to anybody. And the ridiculous prices seem to be driven mainly by the endless, pointless and confusing rebranding overheads.

Customers were getting sick of this CSx bollocks well before the economy went titsup.

I went looking at upgrade prices for CS4 and my jaw dropped! How on earth do they expect people to afford it, or even bother to fork out for it?! I did buy Studio MX a looooong time ago, but apparently that is now no longer an upgrade path so I'd (presumably) have to pay full whack - a grand for Web Suite? F*** that!!

Seems to me that ever since Adobe acquired Macromedia, the prices have only ever gone up, even for things like Contribute.

Perhaps Adobe should update their report to say: "...our profits are flat because we are too f**king greedy!..." *grrr*

"With every dime you remove from the price, a whole nerw stratum of customers is revealed"

Adobe need to remove quite a large number of dimes from the price. I speak as one of the few people to have actually *bought* their damn software...

It seems everybody agrees!

Anyone know a good alternative that works on Mac (or multiplatform) for Adobe After Effects??

I found out how much of a con the price was depending on where you lived. In most other countries, if I were alowed to buy it, I could purchase it far cheaper than the UK even taking everything into account.

Photoshop CS4 - USA price: £381

Photoshop CS4 - UK price: £561

They lost me a customer the moment I knew I was being robbed blind and nothing will ever change my mind now!

Almost all of Adobe's new "features" in Flash either depend upon or pre-suppose use of the AS3 language which is _fundamentally broken_ if you want to make timeline-based (i.e. smooth and flowing) animations controlled by code (as opposed to generating all content using Flex which is largely impractical for complex animations and defeats the necessity for the Flash IDE).

As their latest products therefore offer me no edge over their older products (quite the opposite - added bloat for starters) there's no reason to upgrade my installations until they both (A) acknowledge that their AS3 Virtual Machine (AVM2) contains serious drawbacks and bugs when compared to AVM1 and (B) fix the issues. It's a shame because AVM2 shows all the promise of being a powerful tool :(

A disappointed (ex?) Macromedia/Adobe customer of 5+ years only pleased to have saved the $50k or so that upgrades would have cost...

I'll give my recommendations on the 2 pieces of software I use regularly.

Flash CS4 is really good for animators, it's finally got rid of the last annoying UI features of Macromedia (tedious and ineffective motion/shape tweens), and replaced them with much better "drag and drop" After Effects-style timeline editing. I bought it.

Photoshop CS4 on the other hand... do not go near this. I'm running a quad-core system with a midrange graphic card and 4 GB.. and there is LAG in the line drawing, even if I'm using a simple black 1 pixel brush.

Free trial uninstalled and back to version 7.0 for me. I haven't seen a new version of photoshop since then that was actually worth the upgrade cost.

NT

I agree with the above posts - price is the issue here. As a long time buyer of macromedia suites and a former customer of devnet from macromedia, the number one issue here is PRICE. You would think they would want to floood the market with their tools but instead they are forcing us all to look elsewhere for tools to do our jobs. I think they have a powerful suite of tools - but most people don't use all of them all the time, but the option should be there for when we want to use em. Lower the cost to around $500 and they would sell MUCH MUCH MORE. I hate buying adobe software as well because by the time we decide to go with the new version the next one is almost out the door, so we buy CS(x) and then see the new CS come out and then they want even more money. I think market will bring change in their pricing structure soon enough, and competition from other sources such as Google, Microsoft, and open-source. I don't think this upgrade was as poor of an upgrade as Office 2007 ( I like adobe's new apps ) - but as some users are starting to feel it not worth the upgrade they will and already have started looking for alternatives which means less adoption for flash and our toolsets..

Shane Menshik

D2 GLOBAL INC