Creative Suite 5 and Adobe’s Non-Excising Anti-Piracy Policy
Posted by Marco on May 4, 2010 in
Talk
The Adobe Creative Suite 5 became available this weekend. You can download the entire ‘Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection’ from the Adobe website. And again it took less than one day to hack the entire Suite. I’ve already received several (seperate) reports of succesfull installations. Strange thing is: These were no hackers, just designers. All they did was install Adobe’s demo. After you test out some of the apps you’ll get a request to enter your serial-number. All it takes is one internet-serial and a serverblocking Applescript to fully activate the entire Suite. Both are widely availabe on torrent-sites. (Don’t bother asking, I won’t link to them). For Pete’s sake: The Applescript that these guys used even says that blocking the servers is not required if you’ve previously blocked Creative Suite 4! Being a client with a license I can only say: “Hello! Is everybody at Adobe asleep at the wheel? Did somebody forgot hacking CS4 (with all of Adobe’s flagship-software) was as easy as running an Applescript?”
It was generally understood Adobe made some kind of big mistake when they offered the demo of the entire Creative Suite 4 and it turned out anyone could fully activate it with just a serial from the internet and an Applescript that blocks several servers. That’s something even novice users can figure out. At the time Adobe pulled the demo of CS4 from their website for some time. So Adobe knew it was extremely easy to pirate their software.
By choosing the same M.O. for CS5 Adobe makes it very easy to pirate (again) and we can thus only assume Adobe wants it’s software pirated. I can’t think of any other reason other than perhaps some future update that will cripple the entire Suite, like they did once with InDesign 1 or 2 when you couldn’t open InDesign files that were created in a pirated version. But then again, they never ‘crippeled’ a Creative Suite App after that.
On top of this strange behavior Adobe fired 680 (or 9%) of their employees in 2009, after having already fired 600 (or 8%) employees in 2008. Why? Well, their profits fell of a cliff (-29%). Did they accidentally also fire the entire security-department or something?
If you’re reading this article hoping I can make some sense of it all, I’m sorry I can’t. We have this all you can download and pirate policy combined with massively shrinking profits and a customer-base that really feels the Creative Suite pricing is not just too expensive, but downright insulting. (What would you call it when it’s actually cheaper to fly to New York with your entire staff, spend the night in a hotel and buy a copy of Creative Suite in the US, than it is to buy an English license in London?).
We know what Adobe said when this firestorm erupted during the CS3 launch: “The cost of doing business is so much bigger outside the US”. And we also know other companies like Avid, Corel and Quark do not have such extreme differences.
We’ve seen the launch of CS3 and how it was received by a lot of Adobe’s clients. We’ve seen Adobe learn absolutely nothing when they released CS4 and now we’ve got CS5 with the same high prices. In the meantime Adobe’s profits fell of a cliff year-on-year, Adobe’s had to cut almost a fifth of their employees and even honest clients found an easy and cheaper way to use Adobe products: Skip a version! My company’s bought CS1, skipped CS2, bought CS3, skipped CS4 and yes, we are going to buy CS5. (I wouldn’t want to work using a stolen computer, the same thing goes for stolen software, so we will not be working with a pirated version of CS5). But we have have adopted an ‘every other release’ approach to Adobe Creative Suite and we’re not alone. Had Adobe priced the Creative Suite more like in the US, we probably would have bought every version. I have a feeling 1280 former Adobe employees might feel the same…
(Oh and of course Adobe could always try to develop really cool HTML5 tools that would make jQuery, CSS3, MySQL, PHP and the most famous Content Management Systems easily accessible. Because in case you didn’t know it Adobe: There are millions of Graphic Designers out there that would shell out some real cash in order to get their hands on some powerful and accessible HTML5 tools!)
