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.

Two money-saving opportunities have come to my attention today for software that I have recently reviewed and recommended. As they just might save you £1,500, I thought I should pass them on…

The first is a very significant saving of 50% on Maxon Cinema 4D from Maxon itself. Cinema 4D has long been the PC Pro recommended choice for accessible high-end 3D and, as my Cinema 4D 11 review shows, the program continues to push back the boundaries in terms of ease of use and 3D power.

In fact, Cinema 4D’s unique BodyPaint 3D painting and new ProjectionMan matte painting capabilities are each well worth the core version’s discounted price of £324.50 (exc VAT). And, if you’re very serious about your 3D, then here’s your chance to buy Cinema 4D 11 complete with all add-on modules (see Cinema 4D 11 Studio Bundle review) for “just” £1,424.50 (exc VAT).

A couple of caveats: you need to have proof of purchase of a qualifying third-party 3D app and I’m afraid that, as the offer finishes at the end of the month, you only have a couple of days left to take advantage.

The other special offer price is an over 40% saving on Nitro PDF Professional bringing it down to the princely sum of $49.95.

It’s not clear from the Avanquest site how long this “limited time offer” lasts nor if it’s for the latest version 6 (I’m assuming it is as they emphasise speed, but on the other hand the current RRP is actually $99). In a way though that’s not the point. The real comparison here is less against previous versions or the current RRP, than against Nitro PDF Professional’s real target: Adobe Acrobat Standard.

As I say in my Nitro PDF Professional review : “Nitro PDF Professional doesn’t offer leading-edge, let alone bleeding-edge support for PDF, but … for its target audience Nitro PDF Professional offers the most important selling point of all: value. With a price of $99, Nitro PDF Professional is designed to offer 90% of Acrobat Standard’s functionality at a third of its $299 price.”

When the comparison is made between Nitro PDF Professional’s discounted price of $50 and a dollar conversion of Adobe’s rip-off UK pricing of £275 that means that you can actually buy around nine copies of Nitro PDF Professional for every copy of Acrobat Standard. And that’s excluding VAT.

Well worth investigating.

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!  

I was curious to see how well this veteran CPU had aged (and it’s not like I had anything else to do this week), so I dropped it into our testing rig and kicked off the benchmarking process. A few hours later, the results were in: the Pentium Extreme Edition 955 had scored 1.19. That’s far from disgraceful, but today, you can get a CPU that achieves that sort of score for as little as £90. To put that into context, I’ve tweaked our CPU graph (click for full-sized version) to show how the 955 would fit into the mainstream market if it were launched today.

If you take any sort of interest in computing – and let’s face it, you’re reading the PC Pro blog – you’ll have seen similar scenarios play out many times before. I remember my father paying £100 (around £350 in today’s money) for our first family computer, a Sinclair ZX-80. A year later, the ZX81 appeared, costing half as much and bringing numerous technological advances, including floating point arithmetic and a screen that didn’t go blank every time you pressed newline.

A more recent example: three months ago, I reviewed the Samsung 1TB Spinpoint F hard disk. I liked the drive, but felt that at £185 it was too expensive. Today that drive is selling for £96. Now it looks like a bargain – but of course in another few months we’ll be looking back at the days when we used to pay £100 for a terabyte drive and laughing at how naïve we were.*

So when I realised that some sucker had probably actually shelled out £600+ for the deeply average processor sitting before me, my first instinct was to feel bad for him.**

But although the constant downward procession of prices can seem profoundly depressing when it catches you out, in reality it’s a wonderful thing. Because it means the horizons of what you can do at a given price point are constantly expanding. Of course, it’s a gradual process: maybe next month a £699 PC will raise the performance ante by a few percent, or a Blu-ray burner will come along that’s £5 cheaper than the last one. But over time these small cumulative increments open up whole new avenues of creativity and productivity. Case in point: ten years ago, real-time non-linear video editing was a high-end specialist application. Today, my girlfriend does it on her laptop.

Of course, all this isn’t much help when you’re actually buying, say, a CPU or a graphics card. Unless you go for a real pocket-money model to start with, you just have to accept that, a few months down the line, you’ll be able to get the same part, or a comparable one, for less.

But the thing to remember is that, whatever may happen in the future, at the moment you put down your cash you’ll be getting more for that money than at any previous point in history. Where once £650 would only buy you a Pentium Extreme Edition, it’ll now get you a Core 2 Extreme. And what my father once paid for a ZX-80, adjusted for inflation, will buy you not only a fully-featured 15.4in laptop, but also a copy of Vista to run on it, giving you a range of useful features that even the ZX81 never equalled.

Put it like that and a few hundred quid here or there suddenly doesn’t seem like a screw-over. In fact, it looks like a very small price to pay.