Adobe explains Aussie CS5 pricing

Dear Editor,

You recently wrote about the launch of Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5), the biggest product release in Adobe's history — spanning five suites, 15 applications, five services and approximately 85 million lines of code.

We are very proud of CS5, and believe it is going to add enormous value to our extensive customer community in Australia, New Zealand and globally, by broadening their ability to bring their creative concepts to a range of media and saving time and money through faster, easier execution. CS5 epitomises Adobe's promise to revolutionise how the world engages with ideas and information.

In your article, you highlighted the area of pricing outside of US and why that pricing appears to differ between markets. We wanted to respond to this as Adobe takes seriously its commitment to making sure all customers, wherever they are, have access to Adobe's tools as equitably as possible.

We establish our prices for Creative Suite products in US dollars, Australian dollars, Euros, Yen and British pounds on a regional basis using a consistent methodology which takes into consideration local market conditions, how we deliver and support our products in that market, and local market research.

Local market conditions significantly influence our pricing. These conditions include the costs of doing business in different regions. In Australia and New Zealand, as in many other countries outside North America, we conduct the majority of our business through our retail and licensing channels.

We depend on our retail partners in local markets to help us reach as many customers as possible, support those customers, and much more. In the Asia-Pacific region, we set prices in US and Australian dollars, and generally try to avoid price changes through the product life cycle.

In fact, the pricing for CS5 offers good value for our customers in a number of areas:

• It is now more cost-effective for customers to move from a suite, to the entire Master Collection — we have lowered the price of this by 20 per cent
• The full price for Design Standard is lower than for CS4
• For existing suite customers, we have lowered upgrade prices by 5 per cent
• Special pricing is available for Acrobat Pro customers who wish to move to Creative Suite
• We also continue to add astonishing innovation to our products, adding new value to the suite without increasing the pricing. For example, in CS5 we have added Flash Catalyst to CS5 Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium and Master Collection.

In addition, CS5 customers can enjoy five online services, free of charge for the first year. We believe these innovations, together with the value represented by the quantum leap product features now available in CS5, make it genuinely good value for those professionals who will be using it.

What Adobe delivers to creative professionals, is mission-critical software. Our products are priced appropriately for the value that is delivered, and to reflect the investment we make in research and development; as well as the cost of bringing the software to markets globally including Australia and New Zealand.

Kind regards,

Calum Russell
Group Marketing Manager, ANZ
Adobe