Adobe Considers Withdrawing from Asian Markets 507
Max Groff writes "This brief ZDNet article (printer-friendly version) describes how Adobe is considering leaving its Asian markets due to the apparently high levels of piracy across the Pacific. This change would not only cut off the marketing of Adobe products to Asian markets, but also halt the development of much of the company's Asian-language software."
So I have to pirate it?? (Score:2, Insightful)
If I want it, I *HAVE* to pirate it!?
Sounds like a great idea adobe.....
English version (Score:2, Insightful)
Hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
The thing is that while their programs set the standard here in the US and many companies now depend on their products, the same is not true in Asia, where Linux is actually being adopted quite rapidly, especially now with Windows XP having copy protection in place (although that hasn't stopped many hacked versions from being produced). This may in fact be a big boon to the Linux industry as more and more users may come to find more full fledged Linux graphics solutions (GIMP is getting there).
Pirates wouldn't buy the software, any way (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, I believe that the equivalent dollar cost in pirated products is highly mis-leading. People who pirate software wouldn't buy the programs if they lost access to it. They would just do without.
Chizen said in the article that it can cost up to $750,000 to produce a Chinese-language version of a product, and extensive piracy makes it difficult for Adobe to recoup those costs.
That said, I can appreciate theirt reasons for leaving. If they spend $750k to produce the Asian version, and don't sell sufficient copies to recoup costs and profit, then they should leave. My understanding is that most companies require a 15% return-on-investment from a product, or they shut it down.
Re:So I have to pirate it?? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, now the pirates have two choices: stop pirating (or at least to the same extent), or lose language support for their copies.
I mean, they can pirate English versions still, but I'm sure they would prefer copies in their own languages. It is their own fault for this happening.
I don't believe that they have actually lost $4 billion, because not everyone buys copies, but even if 1% of those people would have bought copies they would have lost $40 million.
Re:some child porn for you (Score:2, Insightful)
-shpoffo
How stupid are you? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Adobe/Macromedia "Greatest Hits" (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a great example of the wackiness of intellectual property law as it applies to software, in the eyes of most consumers. Because, for just about anything else except software, she'd be right!
For example, yes, it is illegal to make pirated CDs of Britney Spears albums. But it's not illegal to buy one in Malaysia, or to own one in the United States! It's not even illegal to play one in a CD player!
The software manufacturers have pulled an amazing fast one on all of us, by somehow creating a whole new set of rules to apply to their products. You can bet every other intellectual property-owning corporate entity in the world will stop at nothing until they can follow suit.
Re:Prices of products. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you make $600 with said flimsy cardboard box and plastic CD, I think the product has paid for itself.
Justification's from Adobe's view? If the $600 price funds the development of the next version of Photoshop and keeps employees and the company afloat, that's justification.
Can anybody possibly justify taking property that doesn't belong to you?
Re:Go for it (Score:2, Insightful)
For cigarettes, electronics, and cars, but the market for legally licensed software is actually pretty small.
They're not trying to stop piracy (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't hurt them at all to have English language versions pirated in Asia, in fact they probably prefer that to having their competitor's products pirated.
But if it costs $650,000 to produce an Asian languages version of their products (a number I can easily believe, having done localizations of much smaller products), and they don't recoup that cost, there's no point in doing it.
This is news?
This is the fault of the greedy software industry (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not 100% true (Score:3, Insightful)
The question is how to separate all of them enough to target the payers, and get them to pay.
People who do without aren't interesting to this equation or argument. It's the people who make money with the product, and people who need the product, that should be targetted.
In a very fair market way, if there isn't enough pirates who can pay, if they had to, to support the product, the product should go away. If there is enough pirates who can pay, then they can afford to sell, as long as they can convince the pirates to pay.
The question is how lack of an Asian version of the product will affect the market. Will Chinese users, for example, start to use English or Japanese versions? Older versions? Does this mean that Chinese OS X users will be, literally, up the creek?
Re:Uh? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like a business decision to me... (Score:3, Insightful)
Despite the whining from the (lets not mince words here) pro-piracy segment of the slashdot readership, this sounds like a perfectly sound business decision.
Face facts people, corporations are not charities. If they can't get a Return On Investment, they need to invest money elsewhere. Nor will any other business simply step in, because they're not going to get any ROI either. This has already elminated entire markets. The Hong Kong movie business is basically dead because piracy is so culturally acceptable in China.
Re:Pirates wouldn't buy the software, any way (Score:2, Insightful)
and on your other point...Yeah I've finally gotten off of all Microsoft software, except that provided for free or gotten with a purchased machine. I downloaded their MS Office for my OS X machine, and it's just such a bloated feature-itis mess now, that I can't be bothered to even pirate it. Or buy it. I'm making do with a slightly more feature-light program that comes free with every mac (AppleWorks).
Re:This is the fault of the greedy software indust (Score:3, Insightful)
Bottom line, if you think the software costs too much then you don't really need it. Go use something else, be it Gimp or Adobe Image Effects. Dont bitch and moan about the cost of Photoshop and don't condone the piracy of the software.
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
If they have to spend $750,000 to develop a Chinese language version of Photoshop, which only sells a thousand legitimate copies (at $600/each), they've just lost money. They'd be better off putting their $750,000 in a savings account (except maybe a BofA savings account, which would charge them a $300K "We gotta count your money" fee) and selling only a hundred copies of their English language version in China.
What's tougher to determine is if, by not creating a Chinese version, they're hurting themselves in the long-term. Let's say they don't develop a Chinese version of Photoshop. Somebody like JASC could develop a Chinese version of Paint Shop Pro and gain a large following in China. Then, if we assume that at some point in the future, the Chinese market is profitable, Adobe might be in trouble. Everybody in China will be used to using Paint Shop Pro, and might not bother swapping over to Photoshop.
It's a question of determining when it'll be profitable to spend money developing Chinese language versions of software, and deciding just how much the Chinese care about getting a native language version of their software.
Re:So I have to pirate it?? (Score:2, Insightful)
Good... (Score:4, Insightful)
We care about companies breaching GPL-licenses, and we should care about these people breaching the commercial software world's licences.
Asia will never get a software industry of their own if they continue this way, and will be doomed to producing cut-throat priced commodity hardware for the rest of the world.
I hope Adobe makes it real hard to use their programs on computers where the clock is set to Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur or Beijing time, or the internet connection reveals they are connected to
If they can't pay for commercial saftware, they'll just have to settle for GPL'ed alternatives!!!
Piracy is sometimes just free advertising. (Score:4, Insightful)
I have known Chinese (in China) who own little more than 2 white shirts, a pair of pants, and a bicycle.
However, they may use a computer at work to do personal jobs. They may run software on a computer at work that costs, in the U.S., more than their entire net worth.
This is not lost profit for companies like Adobe. It is free advertising and free trademark promotion.
No amount of law-making or law enforcement will make these people pay hundreds of U.S. dollars for Adobe Photoshop. However, advertise that you need someone who knows how to use Photoshop, and hundreds will apply. Is this a bad thing?
People in the U.S. get little accurate news of other countries. They often unconsciously make the assumption that other people are as rich as they are.
U.S. Senator Biden, who is an intelligent and educated man, and who is the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, doesn't even pronounce the words correctly, yet he talks of changing (my article, see the Biden interview) [hevanet.com] the Saudi government and controlling the development of the government of Afghanistan. If Senator Biden is like this, make a guess about the knowledge of other countries of the average Adobe executive.
Adobe executives should not consider that every pirated copy is a personal attack on Adobe profitability. There are many social situations that require more social sophistication than that.
I pirate software (Score:2, Insightful)
I myself pirate some software titles. Yet even I can see that this article is not about Adobe trying to stop piracy. Adobe's products are aimed towards businesses and professionals, not home users. I personally dont think they expect a home user to pay the $600 for the software. In fact they probably dont mind piracy by the home user because it would extends their user base. However I do think they expect someone who makes money from the software to pay it. The artists are the people who Adobe makes photoshop for. If you are an artist who has the cash it is probably in your best interest to pay for the software. Adobes continued existance would be a good thing for them.
On the discontinuation of asian localization:
Adobe is losing money when they localize the software. If they continued to localize while losing money it would go against all business logic. does 2+2=5? Also Asians can localize the software themselves. If some korean was using OS X and an adobe app used
Alternative Adobe business models? (Score:3, Insightful)
how does Adobe afford the production costs
Release the non-trade-secret parts of the application as free software. That'll help a bit. Splitting the most proprietary parts into modules priced at $49.95 a piece might help further.
and the support costs
"No support except to registered users." That's one of the proposed models for making money off open source.
and the bandwidth costs
If they can get their install down to 10 megabytes (perhaps by not including all that d*rn clip-art), bandwidth becomes relatively cheap.
if they don't make any money on top of the distribution costs?
For downloadable software, bandwidth costs == distribution costs.
Parent article is insane (Score:5, Insightful)
I have written web based programs that generate PDF without using any Adobe code. (When you need to be in control of the exact layout and 75dpi is not good enough, it is a great choice.)
TeX is happy to make PDF files. My Mac is happy to write anything I wish out as a PDF file instead of printing. In linux I have a little program to convert postscript to pdf. No Adobe software required on those systems.
I do tend to use Acrobat Reader for reading them, but I also use xpdf (launches much faster under linux) and, under OS X, Preview to read them.
I don't even understand that part about scanned documents and
It is possible that there is another format that provides precise display at high resolution in an easily navigable, on demand downloadable format, but I haven't heard of it. Long live PDF.
China is not a very impressive market (Score:5, Insightful)
Out of 3 billion people, 900 million of them are rural peasants who don't have a pot to pee in. These are people that are so poor that they go for months without even seeing currency, let alone using it.
100 million of them are rural farm workers who may sometimes receive a "paycheck", but who are not employed for long periods of time. These people make a fraction of what a McDonalds grill cook makes in the US.
Of the remaining 2 billion, you have a tiny elite of maybe 120-80 million people who make money in a range that is remotely similar to the west. Of all the people who receive somewhere in a living wage range, maybe 500 million of them, save 40% of their income and use 60% to live. They do this because their economy is fragile and they are subject to losing their incomes rather easily. Compare that to Americans where 4% of people's income (on average) is saved.
The Chinese do not have descretionary income to spend on software. This is what Adobe is really coming to grips with. If it were made to be incapable of stealing the software, they would just go without!
Companies that make money in China are like Coke-a-Cola, Pepsi, Marlboro. These are companies that make 80-90% of their money outside the US anyway. The rest of the companies (like Adobe) tread water for years and never turn the corner. This is the reality of the Chinese market: they are an export economy with a weak domestic economy. A place where slavery was "abolished" in 1929. A place where children participate in forced labor programs to pay for their educations. Where you recieve the death penalty for selling a fossil you dug up in your own backyard to a non-Chinese buyer.
(I have no idea why we have a normalized trade relationship with this country and yet Cuba is still under an embargo)
Since when does China == Asia?????? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Adobe/Macromedia "Greatest Hits" (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems to me that most slashdotheads don't care about intellectual property beyond making sure that they can get what they want without cost.
Re:The Gimp, Natch (Score:3, Insightful)
Mind now, I don't fundamentally care how many users gFoo has. Userbase is important to Free software in a couple of indirect ways: some of those users will submit bug reports or patches, or help in other ways with development; also, many users of Free software make it difficult for proprietary vendors to lock users into their products through closed formats, much less force new users to their product by making such formats into de facto standards.
Should Adobe go through with this withdrawal, I forsee (or at least hope for) benefits to Free software in that some former unlicensed users will go on to help make real Free substitutes for Adobe products -- e.g. Gimp has potential, but it ain't Photoshop yet -- or help i18nize various packages to their native locale.
Re:Go for it (Score:1, Insightful)