CS3 licensing - a pleasant surprise

Posted on June 29, 2008
Filed Under Adobe |

To be blunt, for the honest, hardworking developer, Adobe’s CS3 licenses are expensive.

Sure you get an amazing toolkit of applications in any of the CS3 packages you choose (be it Web/Design, Premium or Standard), but the price of entry to the CS3 world is prohibitive to say the least.

Having been developing using the Allaire Macromedia Adobe toolset for over 8 years now I have been lucky enough to not worry about the licensing cost of the tools I have come to rely on like Fireworks, Photoshop and Acrobat etc - the organisations I have worked for have purchased or already owned licenses.

However recently that changed. I desperately needed these applications and didn’t have the luxury of company owned licenses. I felt like I was pulling my hair out getting by without them. So I took the plunge, shelled out my hard earned and bought a license for CS3 Web Premium… and now I’m much more productive I’m happy to say.

I now need my toolset available on my other laptop, and I discovered (very pleasantly) this afternoon that the Adobe CS3 license permits installation on a 2nd PC/laptop for home use. Fan-bloody-tastic! Thank you Adobe!

It’s nice to feel like with all the hard earned sunk into the CS3 license, that I’m actually being thrown a bone by Adobe.

I love Photoshop and Fireworks - they’re amazing tools in their own right - I regard them as “best-of-breed” in their product spaces. Using other image editing tools lately has made me appreciate just how good they are. Acrobat is just starting to come into its own as a genuine development platform and I don’t use Dreamweaver - hate it in fact.

So sure you get a lot of kit with CS3. But am I wrong in thinking Adobe software is expensive?

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Comments

4 Responses to “CS3 licensing - a pleasant surprise”

  1. finty on June 29th, 2008 10:33 pm

    it sure is expensive.

    I’m holding out to buy CS4 myself because the company i work for will not be getting it in the near future. I’m guessing that it will be released around MAX conference time, which happens to be in the quarter when budgets are getting tight. It’s really a choice between going to Max (which I went to last year) or putting the money into getting the software. I think the later is the smarter option for me this year.

  2. raZorTT on June 30th, 2008 9:50 am

    That’s awesome I hadn’t seen that.

    I think Adobe are getting better and are looking to provide people with better value for money. They’re usually pretty good once you have a copy and only have to pay upgrade prices. Still for those looking at an initial purchase, the price can be prohibitive.

  3. Kyle Simpson on July 1st, 2008 12:25 am

    I have been pleasantly surprised by Adobe’s pricing model when it comes to upgrades. For instance, I bought Studio MX 2004 when it was still Macromedia. Then I upgraded to Studio 8, which was awesome. But then, the best part, I got to use Studio 8 as an eligible upgrade for CS3… so I went from having fireworks, dreamweaver, and flash, to having the newest of fireworks, dreamweaver, flash, photoshop, illustrator, AND acrobat…

    uhh… for $400, I not only got my studio 8 products upgrades but I got photoshop, illustrator, and acrobat (which together just themselves would be $1500+)? That was my most pleasant surprise ever with software license costs. I’ll be a forever Adobe customer because of that one!

  4. dave on July 15th, 2008 6:27 am

    actually the really cool part about the new licensing is that you can now split the license across platforms, meaning that before you could have it on two pc’s or 2 macs but not both but now you can have 1 on a mac and 1 on a pc.

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