What was so galling was the disparity between UK and US pricing. Comparing the UK and US prices for the full Master Collection – £1969 (£2264 inc VAT) and US$2499 – I pointed out that ”even with sterling at a two-year low against the dollar, at the time of writing that should equate to a price of around £1350. That’s a saving of over £600 before VAT – over 30% – enough to pay for a transatlantic trip.” Our esteemed editor,Tim Danton, had been so incensed by the pricing difference for Acrobat 9 Pro Extended that he started a rip-off pricing campaign. 

Well things have certainly changed since then and suddenly Adobe’s current UK pricing is looking something of a bargain…

Not that Adobe has lowered its UK pricing I hasten to add.

However. with a further 25% slide in the pound-dollar exchange rate since September’s CS4 launch to today’s figure of around £0.7 to the $, today’s equivalent UK pricing for the US price would be nearer to £1750 exc VAT. If the suites had launched today, the disparity might not have merited a mention and certainly wouldn’t have warranted a campaign.

On one level then, the plunging exchange rate has proved a vindication of Adobe’s position – and clearly there are a whole host of other similar financial variables that the company has to take into account when determining UK prices.

However I can’t help noticing that, even with a once-in-a-lifetime collapse of the financial markets and the value of sterling having fallen off a cliff to a 20-year low that was completely unimaginable back in September, our American friends are still currently around 10% better off!  

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.