Adobe logic
We have repeatedly pointed out that piracy in developing countries is part of the business model of software makers, because, as Jeff Rijks of Microsoft put it :
In middle-income and low-income countries (and, for that matter, in the low-income segment of developed countries) this installation base is created by piracy.
This logic seems clear enough if you look at a company like Microsoft . The company benefits from massive network effects arising from an almost monopolistic position in the market of operating systems and office software. A vast and precious software ecosystem is built around Windows, and Office is the de facto standard. This situation has a huge impact on consumer and business decisions when acquiring software. No wonder Microsoft owns 90% of the operating system market (despite the revival of Apple).
But Microsoft is not unique in this; These factors play a role for companies without monopolistic positions, but trying to enter new markets. As LogMeIn executive director Michael Simon noted (echoing the words of Bill Gates of previous years), “If people steal something anyway, we damn want them to steal ours” ( New York Times , 2010). Of course, the value of LogMeIn is not 222 billion, but 300 million, but the point here is not only in scale. Rather, LogMeIn wants to become the standard; and, acting in this way, becomes it in countries where it cannot invest enough in marketing and distribution (and does not reduce prices).
Of course, the software sector is very diverse; and we just scratched its surface, studying what such dynamics would lead to. One of the curious cases is Adobe , which occupies an uncompromising position in the fight against piracy.
')
My general assumption was that Adobe is just a variation on the same topic. Although the Adobe Creative Suite tools as a platform do not function like Windows, they undoubtedly benefit from network effects, crowding out competitors. They also undoubtedly require serious training in order to use them properly. Thus, piracy helps maintain Adobe’s tools as a standard, and at the same time brings a significant portion of the training costs associated with them into the informal sector — at home, at school, or into a small business environment.
Since Adobe gets $ 1300 to $ 2,600 for Creative Suite, it can expect a high level of piracy in this context, up to 100% in developing countries, where the price-earnings ratio reaches absurd values. And this strategy seems to have some meaning for Adobe. She earned $ 3.8 billion in 2010, a 29% increase from 2009.
I thought, that's probably the whole story. But then I connected to the release of the MPEE report . Like many publishing projects, the release of MPEE was a small collaboration, including the assistance of freelancers with layout, maps and reading. After the text was verified in the publishing program (in our case, InDesign), all the other stages were most easily done in InDesign.
Here we got a bitter lesson. Adobe has released 3 versions of InDesign for 4 years. All of them broke compatibility with the previous versions. When the designer responsible for the layout (he has CS3) handed over the document to our map illustrator (CS4), and the document was saved, the first one could not read it. In our office at the University of pcs. Columbia, we acquired CS5 (not at an outrageous price, but for $ 300 under an academic license), but the original layout used Macakov fonts that were displayed differently on the PC. In the end, everyone had to upgrade to the trial version of CS5, then the counter began to tick, and we had a month left to finish everything.
If you go crazy with these problems, ask for help on the Adobe website, you will receive advice like this :
Or a “community support specialist” who offers:
And here is one of the loyal customers who clearly expressed the dilemma:
Let me remind you, this incompatibility affects not some kind of exotic functionality, but just the layout of text in columns and callouts. These are things that have been the basic functionality of publishing programs since the early 1990s. Transfer this dilemma to Brazil or Russia, where revenues make up a small part of the US level, and get a simple result: the mass piracy of Adobe products. In fact, after going through the whole process in the last month of a four-year project, before the deadline, you begin to understand all the sympathy for such a perspective. This, as I noted earlier, is not a defect in the Adobe business model; this is the business model itself.
The fact that Adobe will not support inter-version compatibility for such basic functionality seems to be very anti-consumer; but obviously he is very good at business.
PS One more thing, since I'm complaining here: the old version of InDesign will never say why it doesn’t open a newer file. Instead, it will ask you to update 10,500 plugins. What you can not do!
[Next come quotes from comments from the discussion on Slashdot. I did not translate them all, because there will be enough of the same :).]
In particular, they cited a similar example with another vendor, Intuit, which produces financial software (Quickbooks, Quicken, Peachtree, and others). Also noticed the difference in Adobe prices in different countries. For example, the CS5 Master Collection in the USA costs $ 2,599. And in Norway, which Adobe refers to the "rich" countries, already costs $ 5436, twice as expensive. And in Sweden, so generally $ 6,100. Conclusion - Adobe pays damages for piracy in poor countries at the expense of rich clients.
[The following is a quote from Adobe’s official position on piracy.]
By the way, in Europe, Adobe itself seems to pursue mostly intermediary businessmen who sell pirated copies. As long as the concept of “commerce” is not interpreted so broadly that responsibility arises for such marginal sources of income, such as Google Adwords (or even worse, the wording from the NET Act “acquisition of something that has value”), it suits me.
On the other hand, the Business Software Alliance (in which Adobe is a leading member) spends a lot of time harassing small businesses for license violations, and also seeks to criminalize the “violation of the end user in the organization” by entrepreneurs (which in the US is already a crime according to ). I find this figure in the dance around piracy causing objection, and with the above dynamics, bordering on extortion.
If Adobe really wants to enforce its licenses, let it provide this through strong server authentication, and forget about all the benefits of the mass pirate market.
If she values ​​the benefits of piracy more than the additional income from licenses that she receives by enforcing them, then she should not allow the BSA to pursue entrepreneurs by filing lawsuits or seeking an agreement (with payments). But definitely, the resources of a society should not be wasted to allow it to have both.
1. The work, which the author writes about Joe Karaganis , is the report “Media Piracy in the Economies of Developing Countries”, prepared and recently released (in electronic and printed form) by the international non-profit organization Council for Social Sciences Research (SSRC). The document, I think, is very interesting. For non-commercial use, you can download it for free, but registration is required at e-junkie.com. Those who are too lazy to do this can, thanks to peaceprayer , download from rghost or mediafire (PDF, 6.5 MB)
2. I know that in Russia (unlike in many CIS countries) there are studios and freelancers who basically use Adobe licensed software. I want to ask them: what is your upgrade policy? Revenues for these upgrades enough? Have you experienced the problems described in the topic? Is Adobe really that bad with compatibility?
In the long run, the main asset is the installation base, people who use our products. And you expect that over time they will turn to software licensing.
In middle-income and low-income countries (and, for that matter, in the low-income segment of developed countries) this installation base is created by piracy.
This logic seems clear enough if you look at a company like Microsoft . The company benefits from massive network effects arising from an almost monopolistic position in the market of operating systems and office software. A vast and precious software ecosystem is built around Windows, and Office is the de facto standard. This situation has a huge impact on consumer and business decisions when acquiring software. No wonder Microsoft owns 90% of the operating system market (despite the revival of Apple).
But Microsoft is not unique in this; These factors play a role for companies without monopolistic positions, but trying to enter new markets. As LogMeIn executive director Michael Simon noted (echoing the words of Bill Gates of previous years), “If people steal something anyway, we damn want them to steal ours” ( New York Times , 2010). Of course, the value of LogMeIn is not 222 billion, but 300 million, but the point here is not only in scale. Rather, LogMeIn wants to become the standard; and, acting in this way, becomes it in countries where it cannot invest enough in marketing and distribution (and does not reduce prices).
Of course, the software sector is very diverse; and we just scratched its surface, studying what such dynamics would lead to. One of the curious cases is Adobe , which occupies an uncompromising position in the fight against piracy.
')
My general assumption was that Adobe is just a variation on the same topic. Although the Adobe Creative Suite tools as a platform do not function like Windows, they undoubtedly benefit from network effects, crowding out competitors. They also undoubtedly require serious training in order to use them properly. Thus, piracy helps maintain Adobe’s tools as a standard, and at the same time brings a significant portion of the training costs associated with them into the informal sector — at home, at school, or into a small business environment.
Since Adobe gets $ 1300 to $ 2,600 for Creative Suite, it can expect a high level of piracy in this context, up to 100% in developing countries, where the price-earnings ratio reaches absurd values. And this strategy seems to have some meaning for Adobe. She earned $ 3.8 billion in 2010, a 29% increase from 2009.
I thought, that's probably the whole story. But then I connected to the release of the MPEE report . Like many publishing projects, the release of MPEE was a small collaboration, including the assistance of freelancers with layout, maps and reading. After the text was verified in the publishing program (in our case, InDesign), all the other stages were most easily done in InDesign.
Here we got a bitter lesson. Adobe has released 3 versions of InDesign for 4 years. All of them broke compatibility with the previous versions. When the designer responsible for the layout (he has CS3) handed over the document to our map illustrator (CS4), and the document was saved, the first one could not read it. In our office at the University of pcs. Columbia, we acquired CS5 (not at an outrageous price, but for $ 300 under an academic license), but the original layout used Macakov fonts that were displayed differently on the PC. In the end, everyone had to upgrade to the trial version of CS5, then the counter began to tick, and we had a month left to finish everything.
If you go crazy with these problems, ask for help on the Adobe website, you will receive advice like this :
I don't think what to expect from a freelancer to keep 3-5 versions of InDesign is too much. It’s also a good idea to keep Illustrator CS3 at least for compatibility. I think it is in the order of things.
Or a “community support specialist” who offers:
If you want to work with people who have CS3, you also need to use CS3. Do they have CS4? Similarly.
And here is one of the loyal customers who clearly expressed the dilemma:
21 months have passed since I purchased my software; during this time, Adobe has twice expected me to upgrade; and I have not yet beat off the initial cost on my books. For small firms, such frequent upgrades are impossible - for an office of one person, they are prohibitively expensive.
So, as I understand it, if everything is done correctly, I have to buy an upgrade and keep both versions on my machine, and for each client to keep track of which version I work with him. What if I need to hire a worker? I will have to buy another version of CS3 in addition to CS5, otherwise we will not be able to work on the same files. I find it disappointing.
Let me remind you, this incompatibility affects not some kind of exotic functionality, but just the layout of text in columns and callouts. These are things that have been the basic functionality of publishing programs since the early 1990s. Transfer this dilemma to Brazil or Russia, where revenues make up a small part of the US level, and get a simple result: the mass piracy of Adobe products. In fact, after going through the whole process in the last month of a four-year project, before the deadline, you begin to understand all the sympathy for such a perspective. This, as I noted earlier, is not a defect in the Adobe business model; this is the business model itself.
The fact that Adobe will not support inter-version compatibility for such basic functionality seems to be very anti-consumer; but obviously he is very good at business.
PS One more thing, since I'm complaining here: the old version of InDesign will never say why it doesn’t open a newer file. Instead, it will ask you to update 10,500 plugins. What you can not do!
[Next come quotes from comments from the discussion on Slashdot. I did not translate them all, because there will be enough of the same :).]
In particular, they cited a similar example with another vendor, Intuit, which produces financial software (Quickbooks, Quicken, Peachtree, and others). Also noticed the difference in Adobe prices in different countries. For example, the CS5 Master Collection in the USA costs $ 2,599. And in Norway, which Adobe refers to the "rich" countries, already costs $ 5436, twice as expensive. And in Sweden, so generally $ 6,100. Conclusion - Adobe pays damages for piracy in poor countries at the expense of rich clients.
[The following is a quote from Adobe’s official position on piracy.]
By the way, in Europe, Adobe itself seems to pursue mostly intermediary businessmen who sell pirated copies. As long as the concept of “commerce” is not interpreted so broadly that responsibility arises for such marginal sources of income, such as Google Adwords (or even worse, the wording from the NET Act “acquisition of something that has value”), it suits me.
On the other hand, the Business Software Alliance (in which Adobe is a leading member) spends a lot of time harassing small businesses for license violations, and also seeks to criminalize the “violation of the end user in the organization” by entrepreneurs (which in the US is already a crime according to ). I find this figure in the dance around piracy causing objection, and with the above dynamics, bordering on extortion.
If Adobe really wants to enforce its licenses, let it provide this through strong server authentication, and forget about all the benefits of the mass pirate market.
If she values ​​the benefits of piracy more than the additional income from licenses that she receives by enforcing them, then she should not allow the BSA to pursue entrepreneurs by filing lawsuits or seeking an agreement (with payments). But definitely, the resources of a society should not be wasted to allow it to have both.
From translator
1. The work, which the author writes about Joe Karaganis , is the report “Media Piracy in the Economies of Developing Countries”, prepared and recently released (in electronic and printed form) by the international non-profit organization Council for Social Sciences Research (SSRC). The document, I think, is very interesting. For non-commercial use, you can download it for free, but registration is required at e-junkie.com. Those who are too lazy to do this can, thanks to peaceprayer , download from rghost or mediafire (PDF, 6.5 MB)
2. I know that in Russia (unlike in many CIS countries) there are studios and freelancers who basically use Adobe licensed software. I want to ask them: what is your upgrade policy? Revenues for these upgrades enough? Have you experienced the problems described in the topic? Is Adobe really that bad with compatibility?
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/117009/
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