My review of the new Creative Suite 5.5 (CS5.5) has just been posted and there’s plenty to talk about in terms of new functionality and what this means in relation to the future of cross-platform design.

However, it’s not so much the extraordinary and mouth-watering creativity of CS5.5 that is likely to strike users as the extraordinary and eye-watering cost.

The Difference Between Price and Value

If you’re downloading software online and subscribing to it online what difference does it make what country you’re doing it from?

Straight up, it’s important to stress that a high price does not necessarily mean poor value. It’s also worth stressing that the full CS5.5 Master Collection is a formidable achievement, offering state-of-the-art creative power stretching from photo-editing and vector illustration through desktop publishing and website creation, to video production and rich internet application development.

Compared to professional 3D applications such as Maya (SRP $3,495), for example, that makes the US cost of $2,599 for the full Master Collection an absolute bargain. The same is true of the $549 upgrade price when you bear in mind that it includes no fewer than 11 updated component applications.

It might be good value but it’s still a seriously intimidating headline figure. Of course most users don’t need the full range of power and Adobe provides the targeted Suite Editions to help keep things more affordable. However while the cheapest Design Standard suite for graphic designers comes in at around half the price of the full Master Collection, $1,399 is still a lot of money. There’s no doubt that the huge upfront cost is putting off new users from joining up to Adobe’s CS-based design platform.

The Difference Between Buying and Renting

Adobe has recognised as much and, with CS5.5, it has introduced a completely new subscription pricing model that effectively lets users rent Adobe’s main CS5.5 suite editions and apps rather than buy them. Prices vary widely but, to give an idea of rates, if you’re willing to commit to an annual subscription (complete with automatic upgrades), the monthly cost for the full Master Collection is $129.

Subscribing won’t be of much interest to current users as there’s no discounted rate if you already own CS5. Moreover, the fact that after two years you’ll have spent more on renting than buying means that, if cash flow isn’t an issue, then the traditional retail route is almost certainly your best option. Especially so if you investigate Adobe’s various upgrade and cross-grade possibilities.

However the subscription pricing will certainly prove attractive to new users who simply can’t afford the upfront cost and also to users of older releases of the software who are generally happy with what they can do, but might occasionally want to try out a new program or the latest functionality.

The Difference between the US and the UK

That’s the good news. Here’s the bad news. I gave the US$ pricing deliberately. At today’s exchange rate, US $2,599 should convert to around £1,575 for the full Master Collection, the $549 upgrade to £333, and the annual monthly subscription rate of $129 to £78. In each case I’d argue that that’s really good value.

Instead the equivalent UK pricing to buy the CS5.5 Master Collection is £2,268, it’s £476 for the upgrade and £116 for the annual monthly cost. And that’s before you add in 20% VAT!

Yes, you can still make a good case for value for the CS5.5 suites in terms of what you can achieve with them, especially with CS5.5’s new ability to deliver rich design and functionality to mobile devices including the potentially lucrative iPhone and iPad markets.

However it’s impossible not to feel exploited and angry when US designers are getting the same products for so much less. The CS5 suites aren’t a rip-off, but the UK pricing certainly is.

I really don’t understand this. The new CS5.5 subscription model shows that Adobe is aware of the importance of affordability. This isn’t done out of the goodness of its heart – Adobe knows that the best way to optimise profits is to maximize its userbase. However for some reason this doesn’t seem to apply in the UK.

The new subscription model brings home the unfairness of Adobe’s international pricing even more directly. The beauty of internet-based delivery is that it provides a truly global audience, as Adobe knows better than anyone. But if you’re downloading software online and subscribing to it online what difference does it make what country you’re doing it from? Why should the UK-based CS5.5 user be charged 50% more (before VAT) for a month’s use of exactly the same software? I really think we can live with US spellings if that’s what it takes to get a fair price.

This isn’t just a question of best business practice. Adobe’s whole cross-platform design vision is built on the principle of a universal and level playing field. The same can’t be said of its pricing policy and it needs to be changed.

Adobe has announced a 5.5 release for its various Creative Suite offerings. As CS5 was only released a year ago, most creatives will be surprised by the news and may well assume that it’s little more than a holding operation at best.

That’s not the case.

Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 is a significant release on a number of fronts with important new 5.5 upgrades for InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash Professional, Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst as well as all the core video production apps. In fact, the only flagship applications left untouched are Adobe’s graphics power houses, Photoshop and Illustrator.

The crucial handheld market

The choice of applications that have been upgraded isn’t accidental. And nor is the focus of each update. With the arrival of the smartphone and the tablet, the very nature of computing is changing and in particular the way that we interact with and consume content. The entire focus of 5.5 is therefore all about enabling designers to deliver rich content to the new handheld audience.

It’s an exciting platform and market, and represents a massive opportunity for the designer. Naturally Adobe has long been aware of its potential – it will dwarf the desktop market – and has been working on how best to deliver rich content to such a wide range of devices and screens.

The vision it came up with is based on a combination of the lightweight cross-platform Flash runtime for rich browser-based delivery and the middleweight cross-platform Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for rich standalone app delivery, based on integrated online/offline handling of Flash, PDF and HTML.

Adobe’s iPad problem

Everything looked like plain sailing (as far as cross-platform development can ever be) until Steve Jobs blew a major hole in Adobe’s universal vision by making it clear that he wasn’t going to support either the Flash player or AIR on the iPhone or iPad. In fact when he first made it clear, deliberately spiking the launch announcement for the previous Creative Suite 5 release, it looked as if he wasn’t even going to support repackaging Flash/AIR apps for native iOS delivery.

There was a strong possibility that Adobe might respond in kind to this openly hostile act, focusing all its efforts on delivering rich Flash and AIR content for Android, BlackBerry and the other members of the Open Screen Project, and writing off iOS as effectively closed to cross-platform development. Apple would literally be left to its own devices.

The Creative Suite 5.5 partial solution

The good news is that the war that Apple declared on Adobe is effectively over. The bad news is that Steve Jobs has dictated the terms

From the Creative Suite 5.5 announcement it’s clear that this isn’t the case. Adobe is still moving forward strongly with its Flash and AIR plans, but it has also built bridges to enable the richest possible delivery to iOS devices within the limitations that Steve Jobs has imposed. In particular this sees the ability to repackage Flash applications into native iOS applications restored, dedicated iPad-compatible publishing from InDesign complete with support for Apple’s in-app subscription service (complete with Apple’s 30% commission) and new HTML5 publishing capabilities within Dreamweaver.

On one level this is clearly welcome, avoiding a catastrophic split between the richest content-creation software and the richest content-consumption hardware. It also means that Adobe’s RIA developers and publishers will finally be able to tap the lucrative App Store market, something they have been crying out for – after all 70% of something is a lot more attractive than 100% of nothing. Perhaps most important of all, it shows that Adobe remains absolutely determined to help its user base do whatever is necessary to deliver the richest possible design across all platforms.

On the other hand, it’s important to realise that targeting HTML5 at Safari and recompiling AIR to native iOS apps and diverting them through the App Store fall well short of full, ideal, universal, open solutions. The only way to enable truly robust, write-once-view-anywhere, device-independent rich design and development across any and all screens, handheld and desktop, online and offline, and freely and directly between content producer and content consumer, would be for Steve Jobs to directly support the Flash and AIR runtimes on iOS devices.

Maybe Adobe has been too flexible in its approach to handheld design. It certainly would have been interesting to see how things would have panned out if the new Creative Suite 5.5 had enabled the InDesign-based publishing industry to produce rich eMagazine content for Android and OSP tablets, but not for the iPad. Could that have been the trigger for Apple’s users to realise that Steve Jobs’ position is designed to safeguard his 30% rather than their best interests?

With the Creative Suite 5.5 it’s clear that this isn’t going to happen and that Adobe and Apple have come to an agreement. On one level, this is excellent news as it means that a compromise has been reached, that there will be links between the two camps and that the all-out war that Apple declared on Adobe is effectively over. The bad news is that Steve Jobs has dictated the terms and that content producer and consumer alike will end up paying heavily for it.

Well the launch of Acrobat 9 might well give us a very strong clue. The Acrobat applications are focussed on the business/office productivity market, but the introduction of new PDF capabilities gives the CS teams something to work with. And with Acrobat 9 that’s an understatement…

The first key is the merging of the Flash player into the free Adobe Reader. This enables traditionally static PDF ePaper documents to become fully interactive multimedia extravaganzas. InDesign already offers some electronic publishing capabilities but now the platform is in place to take this far further – and with the latest QuarkXPress 8 adding comprehensive Flash authoring capabilities the pressure is really on. For more graphics-intensive short-publication work this could also give the multi-page, Flash-oriented Fireworks CS4 a real – and well-deserved – central role.

The merger of Flash/PDF shouldn’t just benefit the page-oriented apps. The big limitation of the Flash platform at the moment is that you need to be online and in the browser to take advantage of it. By outputting Flash projects to PDF rather than SWF, Flash CS4 Professional would open up an important new offline delivery route (effectively a Flash document would be a projector without the hassle of EXE-based delivery).

The potential is even more exciting for the media-focused CS apps. Currently these seem semi-detached from the publishing apps but if Premiere Pro CS4, After Effects CS4, Soundbooth CS4 and Encore CS4 all add PDF output they would become full members of Adobe’s universal Acrobat strategy at a stroke. By wrapping the all-important FLV video format in a PDF wrapper you also get simple offline cross-platform playback.

And the merger of Flash/PDF was only one aspect of the Acrobat 9 launch – perhaps even more important was the launch of Acrobat.com with its free 5GB hosting and services. This isn’t just personal file storage – Acrobat.com creates a Flash version of each PDF for online display and sharing. The potential for integration with CS4 is mouth-watering.

What else? How about multiple page support for Illustrator at last (maybe not if Fireworks takes on this role)? The bundling of Flex? Live Color for InDesign? Photoshop makes your tea?

Of course this is all speculation and the truth might be very different. However I can’t help feeling excited about the prospects for CS4.