In this NYT blurb about the upcoming Adobe CS3 suite, CEO Bruce Chizen states:
Our customer is not typically price sensitive. The cost of the tool isn’t what’s critical — it’s the productivity and what their output can be. They want to pay for value as long as we deliver innovative features that allow them to be more productive and creative.
As John Gruber over at Daring Fireball says, the translation of this is basically “We think we can charge whatever we want.”
Here’s an idea. Charge less for your products and the smaller companies and *especially independent contractors* won’t resort to bootlegging your software.
Photoshop is a standard. If I don’t have a copy of Photoshop, I can’t do my work, and I’m not even a designer, as such, anymore. I’m the guy that takes the Photoshop files and turns them into web pages. But I can’t do that without Photoshop, and Adobe products are easily the most expensive software I have to pay for, well beyond the price of everything else.