Adobe customers avoid it to buy Creative Suite 4

[remi]

Adobe is in trouble, because their customers aren't willing to invest money into their software. Fewer customers than expected bought the Creative Suite 4.

The consequences are heavy: Adobe plans to cuts 600 jobs.

see also: Adobe issues disappointing outlook, will cut jobs

Remi

[Regular]

I have no reason to up grade creative suite 4. I have creative suite 3 and it does everything I want it to do.

I can't see putting out a thousand bucks to upgrade on a lot of features I'll never use.

[steve.ledger]

Maybe Google will buy Adobe

[michaelbuddy]

It's too bad, because this upgrade is really good. If it's too much for somebody, just sign up for a $60 community college class and buy it as an educational price. It's so much cheaper and you can use it commercially according to the license.

Adobe has gotten into my heart over the past couple years because I've seen that they are doing good work and have great people working for them. They don't support Linux across the board, just with flash player, flex stuff and I think frame maker, however, I do think that given what you get out of the software, though it's expensive the potential is there to make anything you want. Sure Xara is better than Illustrator in my opinion for 95% of the work I do in it, the 5% where illustrator wins is format conversion.

I think it's gonna take a free or cheap cross-platform flash killer for linux and a linux video editor to convince adobe to lower prices to compete with it and to support Linux. Xara too.

[ss-kalm]

No matter how good it is, price is very important to the majority of users. As a non-professional, there is no way I can justify paying that sort of money for something I use for fun. Therefore I don't now and probably won't in the future use Adobe products.

Although I would love to have the creative suite (even an old one) - short of winning the lottery - I cannot see myself ever owning a copy .........

[handrawn]

I don't think Adobe are any more 'in trouble' than is to be expected in the current climate

[Albacore]

I think may be you're wrong there Steve! Up to CS1 all of the products were sold as individual items and they were in an expanding market so most products sold easily an upgrades took about three years to come out so no huge demand for developers of the product. But now with the huge product range of the Suite and the upgrade demand from Adobe for every two years the need for developers have increased but the demand of CS4 is so poor then Adobe has no money to pay for the development that has been done and certainly no money for any future improvement. In the current financial situation the first thing to go is jobs and skills which will be hard to replace and if this recession continues Adobe will be on a sticky wicket.

[geminiguy]

In all honesty, and with strategic marketing in mind... they should launch a campaign which lowers the price significantly during the current financial crisis... A move like that might help both their own, as well as the consumers at the moment.
Show the general public they are "in-tune" with them and it would attract a lot of attention. Cutting all those jobs will bring very poor PR.
All companies "project" or list what they think their profits will be for the upcoming year... and then, when it's not up to par... it is considered a loss. I have always hated that form of figuring... it causes many problems.

[handrawn]

I think may be you're wrong there Steve! .

I take the point

But - will I be upgrading to anything [including 'lets do photos and HTML' Xtreme] in 2009/10..... I don't think so

The current climate means upgrading not to what we would like - but what we really need - across the board

[a4hire]

Who needs it ? I still have a copy of Photoshop 7 and illustrator 8 and they work fine, I get tired of paying for silly upgrades all of the time.