ROCIE - the game they all love to play
In a briefing last week by Adobe, members of the press were told
outright that the company was going to be "levelling" the prices of its
software between the USA and Europe - with prices in Euros being pegged
far closer to those in dollars. The upshot of this should mean - as we
understood it - prices of Adobe software in Europe
will no longer be a whole lot more that in the USA.
Trouble is, the people who briefed the people who briefed the
press couldn't have given them chapter and verse on
what the
relative prices on each side of the pond would be THIS week
because, it looks to us, like
Adobe is continuing to play that maddening old game
ROCIE - Rip Off
Customers In the EU.
Last week's briefing was in preparation for the launch a few days after
(Monday, January 17 - the start of this week) of new versions
of
Adobe's lead moving-image and audio editing programs -
Premiere
Pro 2.0, After Effects 7.0, Encore DVD 2.0 and Audition 2.0.
All are available separately but the company
is clearly
hoping that many copies will be going out in bundles, rather than being
sold individually. The savings, if you need or want all elements of the
suites, can be considerable.
Initially there will be three suites - Production Studio
Standard,
Production Studio Premium and the Video Bundle - each centring
on
Premiere 2.0 and After Effects 7.0. The two Production Studio suites
are pitched in the UK at exactly the same price as the suites
they replace and that was something that rather
surprised us
given Adobe's price-levelling pledge. Production Studio Standard
- taking over from Video Collection Standard 2.5 - is being
sold
by Adobe UK's online store for £915 ex-VAT
(£1,075.12 inc).
Production Studio Premium, replacing Video Collection
Pro 2.5, goes out for £1,335
ex-VAT
(£1,568.62). The Video Bundle - with no
direct
predecessor - is priced at £1,619/£1,902.32.
Prices of Adobe's
now-discontinued Video Collection 2.5
Production Studio Standard consists of three substantive
programs
- the Premiere Pro 2 video editor; AE 7.0 Standard for special
effects; and image editor Photoshop CS2. In
contrast, its predecessor, Video Collection Standard 2.5, had four -
Premiere Pro 1.5; After Effects 6.5 Standard; the sound editor Audition
1.5; and disc-authoring package Encore
DVD 1.5. So Photoshop comes into the suite and purchasers loose the
audio capabilities of Audition and the DVD-creation features
of
Encore.
However, Encore DVD 2.0 and Audition 2.0 are
included for
the extra £420/£493
that Production Studio
Premium costs, and so are the graphics-creation app Illustrator CS2,
Photoshop CS2 and the
Professional version of After Effects 7.0, as well as Premiere Pro
2.0. So that's six substantive programs, compared to the five
that
came for the same prices with Video Collection Pro
2.5 - Premiere Pro 1.5, After Effects 6.5 Pro,
Audition 1.5,
Encore DVD 1.5 and Photoshop CS.
The Video Bundle is priced at
£1,619/£1,902.32 and adds one further
program to those provided in Production Studio Premium - Flash
Professional 8.0, a prime piece of web-action-creation
software
from Adobe's most recent company purchase, Macromedia.
Across this trio of suites, Production Studio
Standard might
already be starting to look to you to be over priced, especially
compared
to the far-better-spec'd Premium package - and, doubtless,
Adobe
wants things that way. However, each of the three
suites does offer substantial savings if the alternative
is buying
individual programs piecemeal. For the Standard suite, the saving is a
not-to-be-sniffed-at £770 (£904.74 inc VAT), while
for PS
Premium it's a rather staggering £1,625
(£1,909.35).
With the Video Bundle, the figures are truly amazing
-
£1,830 (£2,150.22).
The savings from buying Adobe's
suites can be massive
Of course, there are lots of other ways of buying in
the UK apart from Adobe's web shop, so hopefully,
there will
be some price competition on this side of the pond for the suites and
the individual programs within. And that's potentially good news.
But it's only half the story.
If you dive over to the next page, you'll see that, as we said
at
the outset, Adobe still seems intent on flogging its programs to us at
far
higher prices than it sells them for in the USA. And things
would
have looked far worse if we'd also included VAT but we didn't
- all the comparative calculations use pre-tax figures.
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