It’s that time of year again. The time when ExpressDigital releases an upgrade version and raises the anger of a few people over the fact that upgrades cost money. I get the point about the cost of the software on the front side and then the ongoing annual cost of support and upgrades, but I also see the other side of the picture as well. Being a Labtricity lab I get to deal with Express often. Probably much more often than they would like, but it does give you perspective.
“Adobe doesn’t charge $495 for a Photoshop upgrade. Why should ExpressDigital?” That’s the question that I am answering here. Why should Express charge this much for an upgrade? The answer begins with the fact that you can’t compare Photoshop to Darkroom. Photoshop appeals to photographers across a very broad spectrum and even at $1,295 full retail it would outsell Darkroom by the same numbers. Darkroom isn’t exactly a niche product, but the potential audience for the application is small compared to Photoshop. Adobe is a multi national company with offices and employees around the globe which further extends it’s appeal to photographers of all skill and income levels. A full copy of Photoshop is $700 and is a true image editing application. Darkroom is a workflow management application that includes some image editing tools.
Your product is priced for the market that you serve. Look at Adobe’s own offering of Photoshop Elements. Yes, it is less feature complete than Photoshop but go buy a copy and look at all that you get for $99. I did. It is amazing to me that they give you what they do for $99 which is what I paid for it on sale at Staples I think it was. Why would Adobe do this? It’s simple really. Photoshop appeals to a very narrow audience. Compared to the numbers of PC’s (People With Cameras) out there Photoshop has a very limited audience being so narrowly focused on professional photographers. Consumers buy digital cameras at the rate of millions (if I weren’t fat and lazy I would break out the PMA report and get the actual numbers to insert here) every year and Photoshop Elements at $99 or $149 makes perfect sense. To maintain and develop Photoshop the money has to be right. Given it’s narrow focus those that need it must be willing to pay the $700 upfront price and the $149 annual upgrade fee if they want the application.
So, Photoshop is a narrowly focused application? It is when you put it in perspective and compare it to a consumer application that appeals to millions and millions and millions more people. So now we look at ExpressDigital and how this all relates. Photoshop and it’s millions of potential customers around the world are what keep the price of Photoshop as low (that’s right, I said low) as it is. If Photoshop had a potential market size as small as Ed’s Photoshop would cost substantially more than it does today. Oddly enough, just as ExpressDigital is now Adobe would be forced to earn their money by appealing to a very small subset of a very large group of people and would charge for their product accordingly. If their product appealed to a large enough portion of that subset then Adobe would be just fine. If it didn’t there would be no Adobe.
Everything in life boils down to value. Does the software give you a great enough return on your investment to justify the expense? This isn’t a hobby and every dime that you spend must be an investment and not just an expense item. Are you investing in greater productivity and enhanced services for your own customers or not? If you don’t find that kind of value in the software put your credit card back in your wallet and get back to shooting. If you do find the kind of value in the application that justifies the expense (as I do and thousands of others) you know what to do.
Oh, and as a side note I can get an upgrade to Photoshop CS 3 for $149. Microsoft wanted me to pay $249 for an upgrade to Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook. At no time do all things make total sense, but this one was very easy to pass on.
Powered by Zoundry
Filed under: ExpressDigital
