Adobe Blatently Ripping Off Customers in the UK
I’ve recently been looking at Adobe’s Dreamweaver CS3 for web development, but they’re so blatantly ripping off customers here in the UK that I’m going to be looking elsewhere.
The price for DreanWeaver CS3 in the UK is around 390 pounds, the price in the US is 399 dollars (about 200 to 210 pounds). So we’re basically being charged twice the price just for living in the UK.
I asked Adobe for details of the reason why I should pay the nearly 200 pound difference and was told the following things (in this order);
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“The license agreement prevents the US version being used outside of North America” - Which basically means that I can’t use the US version because they don’t want me to.
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“The UK version uses International English rather than American English, and there is a higher cost supporting the European product because of multiple languages” - So basically I’m paying for some spelling changes and a whole heap of languages that I’ll never use because I have no way of saying “I don’t want those extras”.
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“There is more free support offered with the UK version” - So let me get this right, you’re offering more help if things go wrong, but, as if I have a smooth and painless installation (as I should with all well written software), then I’m again paying for an extra I won’t use without any way of saying no thanks.
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“The weakness in the dollar in the last couple of weeks makes it look bad”, this one had me almost laughing. If you look over the last decade and take the strongest point for the USD/GBP exchange rate (which was Jan 2002 with 1GBP = 1.41USD), 399 dollars still only comes to around 280 GBP, which still means I would still have save over 100 quid.
In short, if you’re in the UK, don’t go to Adobe looking for fairly priced products