Here’s a loyal customer who expressed the dilemma pretty clearly: If you want to work with people in CS3 you’ll need to use CS3. Or the ‘Community Support Specialist’ who offers: I think it just comes with the territory. Also probably a good idea to keep Illustrator CS3 at minimum for the compatibility. I don’t see keeping 3-5 versions of InDesign as being too much to expect of a freelancer. When you visit the Adobe site for help after going crazy with these issues, you get advice like this: Ultimately, everyone had to upgrade to the trial version of CS5, and then the clock was ticking and we had 1 month to finish. We bought CS5 in our Columbia U office (via a not-ridiculously-priced academic license at $300), but the original layout had used Mac fonts, which the PC rendered differently. So when our layout designer (CS3) handed the doc off to our map illustrator (CS4), the document saved up and was no longer readable by the former. All of them break compatibility with the previous versions. Adobe has released 3 versions of InDesign in 4 years. Once the text is laid out in publishing software (for us, InDesign), all of these stages are most easily done in InDesign. Like a lot of publishing projects, the production of MPEE was a small scale collaboration involving free lance help for book layout, maps, and proofing. Then I got involved in the production of the MPEE report. I thought this was probably the whole story. Such a strategy seems to make good business sense for Adobe. ![]() Because Adobe charges $1300-2600 for its Creative Suite tools, it can anticipate a lot of piracy in these contexts–and close to universal piracy in developing countries where price/income ratios become absurd. So piracy helps maintain Adobe’s tools as standards, and at the same time shifts a lot of the training costs associated with its tools into the informal sector–at home, in school, or in small businesses. And they do clearly require a lot of training to use properly. Although Adobe’s Creative Suite tools don’t function as platforms in the same way as Windows, they do clearly benefit from network effects that crowd out competitors. My general assumption was that Adobe was just a variation on the theme. One case that I’ve been curious about is Adobe, which has a very high profile in antipiracy and enforcement efforts. Of course, the software sector is very diverse and we’ve only scratched the surface in exploring how these dynamics play out across it. Rather, LogMeIn wants to become a standard, and do so in countries where it can’t efficiently invest in marketing and distribution (and won’t lower prices). LogMeIn is a $300 million company, not a $222 billion company, so scale is not the only factor here. As CEO Michael Simon of LogMeIn observed (echoing comments made over the years by Bill Gates), “If people are going to steal something, we sure as hell want them to steal our stuff ” ( NYT 2010). But Microsoft is not unique: these factors also come into play for companies without monopoly positions but trying to enter new markets. It’s not for nothing that Microsoft owns roughly 90% of the operating system market (in spite of Apple’s resurgence). Such a position provides enormous leverage in consumer and business decisions to buy software. There is vast and valuable software ecology built around Microsoft Windows, and Office is a de facto standard. This logic is pretty clear when looking at a company like Microsoft, which benefits from the massive network effects of being a near-monopoly in the operating system and office software markets. In middle and low income countries (or, for that matter, lower-income segments of high income countries), piracy creates that installed base. ![]() What you hope to do over time is convert them to licensing the software (Mondok 2007). In the long run the fundamental asset is the installed base of people who are using our products. ![]() We’ve argued at some length that piracy is part of the software business model in developing countries because, as Microsoft exec Jeff Raikes put it,
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