The damning figures & HEXUS.right2reply
Adobe has been far from alone in selling its software at considerably higher prices on this side of the Atlantic than on the other. But where it has stood out is by being among the firms to have charged EU customers the biggest premiums.
Indeed, the price imbalance has been so great between the EU and the USA that European Adobe staff with sales targets to meet must have believed that THEY were being stiffed by head-office, too. Well, how would you feel knowing that so many potential sales are being lost to trans-Atlantic internet buyers and even to personal shoppers who fly over to the USA from Europe and could be using the savings on software to pay for the flights?
But, all that - the Adobe levelling-promise inferred - is going to change. Admittedly, though, no one actually came out and said when. Perhaps it will be the case that the European prices of the new suites and their components programs - all massively inflated today - will be far, far cheaper a week or a month or a quarter down the line. We, however, are not holding our collective breaths here at HEXUS. And, if the tickets do come down in a big way, we'll be thinking sad thoughts about the poor fules that bought the new suites at the "old" inflated prices.
Chapter and verse? How about PS Standard being 35 per cent (£235) more expensive in the UK than in the States. Or Video Bundle being 36 per cent more (that's £430 in feet and inches). Worse still, Premium has a premium of nearly 40 per cent - a mere £372. And all these figures are before VAT gets added!
We also checked out prices on Adobe's French web store and, although there's a degree of swings-and-roundabouts, two of the three new suites are even pricier in France than they are in the UK. Standard is 31 per cent more than in the States and there's a 38 per cent price-hike on Video Bundle. Premium's premium - wait for it, wait for it - is 43 per cent! However, at least two products sell on Adobe's French site for 78 per cent more than they do in the USA, so we Brits should probably bend down and kiss Adobe's feet - a/ For REALLY stiffing the French (the world knows we love it when that happens, doesn't it?) and b/ For only lumbering us with, at worst, a mere 62 per cent loading.
Just look at the right-hand
column to see how comprehensively we Brits are being stiffed by Adobe 
The horrible truth of Adobe's
anti-EU pricing policy is clear when you factor in Euro pricesAs well as tabulating the prices above - which to us are clear evidence that EU buyers of Adobe software are subsidising buyers in the USA - we've also taken the unusual step of making available for download the spreadsheet used to create the tables. Get the spreadsheet here . If you don't have a program that's able to open Excel 2000 files, you can right-click here to grab a PDF version showing all the stats in gory close up.
Our thinking about the spreadsheet is two-fold. First, the good people at Adobe might want to be able to quickly double check the figures - we're bound to have got some of them wrong and finding even one cock-up may give them a bit of light relief.
Rather more important, though, we've made the spreadsheet available so that the rest of world, if it has the urge, can look to widen the net (tighten the noose?) by adding in comparative figures for other nations and other Adobe programs or, better still, for products from other companies.
Why stop at Adobe? After all, this is something much bigger than a single-company issue.
Sound appealing? Then head over to the HEXUS.community and get involved in some concerted action about GAPDY - the Great Atlantic Price Divide.
