Originally posted by Hemingray
Adobe and free don't exactly mix.
You're right about that... but I wonder if their reasoning is sound. On the surface this might seem like a poor analogy, but I think it bears some consideration:
We work on hundreds of PC's a month, and dozens of Macs... I would venture to estimate that 25% of the PC's that come through our service department, and EASILY 50% of the Macs have Photoshop installed on them. As it is fairly system-stressing, I use it to test system performance before we send them out the door, if it's on a machine. MAYBE 2% of time, the name on the splash screen matches the name on the work order. To me, that suggests it's probably the most pirated piece of software (aside from Windows itself, and possibly MS Office) that we see.
Like most computer shops, we're staffed by some of the most ruthless peg-leg having, eye-patch-and-parrot sporting pirates you'd ever hope to meet... I am constantly ridiculed for BUYING software. A character flaw of mine, I suppose. HOWEVER... while all the PC gaming twerps have their burned copies of Wolfenstein, Quake, Unreal, etc.. they each marched next door to Best Buy and purchased legal copies of Serious Sam, and Serious Sam II. I asked if there were a reason for that, and they just shrug and say it's only $20. Now, I am not an economic wiz, but it seems to me that if you have 80% of the people or more buying software, at 25-30% of the price you would otherwise charge, you make lots more money than you do if you get 10% of the people to buy it at the higher price. Or maybe it's just that $20 is a magic number and people will spend that. I dunno.
It certainly would be interesting, though, to see Adobe sell Photoshop for $50 or so and see if they don't increase their legitimate userbase 20-fold or more. I won't bother to hold my breath, though... since I suspect some of their appeal is the snob-factor.
