Eric Stevens
A few weeks ago I had an interesting discussion with a guy whose background was in marketing and who had recently retired from an advertising firm.

He pointed out that Adobe have two classes of customers for their graphics products. There are the ordinary mortals like most of us who use Paintshop etc because we want to. Call these group 1. And then there are the people who earn their money in the field and for whom, for various reasons, there is no real alternative. Call them group 2. He said that for practical purposes this second group are locked in.

He then made the point that although if Adobe raised their prices they caused a number of group 1 to drop out, virtually all of group 2 had to stay in. Basically Adobe were happy as long as the gains from group 2 exceeded the losses from group 1.

Neither of us knew whether or not Adobe had effectively raised their prices but my friend suspects that the prices will be effectively higher once the introductory discount period is over.

Outsiders can't easily tell without knowledge of update and renewal figures but my friends feeling was that Adobe would end up making more money per licensee out of their cloud software.

He also said he suspected that Adobe prices would tend to squeeze out the amateur photographer (particularly in those parts of the world where Adobe prices are higher than the US). As has already been suggested here, he thought that this would leave room for others to fill the void being left behind by Adobe.

Yesterday, when I closed Corel's PhotoPaint Pro I found myself staring at a pop-up telling me that as an existing user I could buy Corel Draw's Home and Student Suite for $69.99 as opposed to the normal price of $99.99 (These may be NZ$ in which case US prices may be even cheaper). Never having heard of Corel Draw's Home and Student Suite I went looking and found:

http://www.corel.com/static/product_content/cdgs/hs2014/CDHS2014_Comparison_Matrix_EN.pdf

the student's suite is a stripped-down version of the full Graphic Suite but from reviews it would seem that so much has been removed that for experienced users it is only somewhat better than a toy. Pity.

Nevertheless, Corel seems to be under pricing Adobe and trying to move into the group 1 segment of the market. It is particularly interesting that they are aiming at students: catch and train them young and you have got them for life. :-)

I also notice that Corel is developing a range of products for Apple. Nothing much yet but watch that space.