Things might be on track for Team Adobe, but there are a few tensed times, being faced by Adobe Photoshop users because of team Adobe. The urge has come straight from the president of the National Association of Photoshop Professionals, which was made late last week. He cried out the harsh plans, as mentioned to the Adobe Systems’ upgrade policies for Adobe Photoshop and the Creative Suite.
The call was made because the new path would not require owners of older versions to purchase the current Creative Suite 5.x before upgrading (and paying for) the next version. This seems to be a check-mate for most of the owners, who know that they will have to purchase it, otherwise their work load will come to a standstill. The remaining can still be divided into two more categories. One is of those, who are frozen, thinking that should they opt for it or no, while the other group might just plan to stay happy with their current version.
For the upgrade, which has a uniquely strange policy, it was noted by Kelby that the owners of the popular Version 4.x will be required to “repurchase” Version 5.x at full price before moving to the next version, presumable Version 6.0.
His long “open letter” to Adobe executives, has a few suggestions for Adobe, which hint or rather request Adobe to go slow with such an aggressive pricing strategy. The extracts of the open letter is as follows:
I have always felt that Adobe was very customer centric, and that their decisions were based on what’s best for their customers, but in this particular instance I can’t see how cutting off CS4 and CS3 users, and making them either pay two upgrades in a row, or pay the full retail price to get CS6, benefits anybody but Adobe.
It should even be noted that the price involved is almost the price of a 64 GB iPad 2, that is $699, wherein the users get just an upgrade to a software they already own. Agreed the upgrade would be dual, but making the owners of the current marketed software pay the full price seems really harsh. Keeping this point in his mind, Kelby noted the following:
With that said, here’s my plea to Adobe:
If you really want to be fair to your customers, at the very least don’t start this policy yet. Start it with Photoshop CS7. Make CS6 your new upgrade pricing transition version, and tell everybody now, up front—–at the start of the product’s life cycle, that everybody will need to upgrade to CS6 at some point because the next version (CS7) won’t support older users. That way, we’re not spending money just to spend more money again. Adobe, you can still have what you want—-you can still get everybody on the current version, but it gives us time to save, time to plan, and anybody still left behind at that point will have had more than fair warning.
Another option I feel would be very fair to Adobe customers would be to offer a tiered upgrade which rewards your best customers (customers who upgraded to CS5 or 5.5) by giving them the best upgrade deal, but then offer CS4 users a reasonable upgrade path (they would pay more for their upgrade, but they’re getting all the features added in CS5.5 as well, so that’s fair) and then why not even offer an upgrade path to CS6 for your CS3 users? They would certainly wind up paying the most in upgrade fees, but at least it wouldn’t be the full $699 (or even more if they’re on the CS3 suite). This tiered approach gives everybody an opportunity to stay on as an Adobe customer, but still gives your best customers preferential upgrade pricing.