Overpriced Acrobat upgrade
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Editor's Note:
This is one of three submissions by McIlroy on the release of Acrobat 8.0. Links to the others can be found in this article's More Info section.
In trying to pin down the street price of the upgrade from Acrobat 7 Professional to Acrobat 8 Professional, a Google search, not surprisingly, led to Amazon.com, where the price was listed as US$142.99, a 10 percent savings from Adobe's list price of US$159. On Amazon.ca, the price is $169.99 in Canadian funds, with no discount available.
To complicate matters, there are in fact seven different versions of Adobe Acrobat: Standard, Professional, 3D, Acrobat Elements, Acrobat Connect and Acrobat Connect Professional and the still-free Acrobat Reader. There are also a couple of Adobe server products that can come into play in large installations, and, by the way, Creative Suite 2 is now called Creative Suite 2.3 when Acrobat 8 is included, and with (the old Macromedia) Dreamweaver substituting for the never-very-popular Adobe GoLive.
Acrobat Professional is the standard for the graphic arts. The full Professional version, for the 17 interested Canadians (and 170 Americans) who have yet to purchase Acrobat, goes for CDN$469.99 (no discount available), or for US$449.00 (reduced by 11 percent to $399.99 on Amazon.com). According to today's Bank of Canada nominal exchange rate, the U.S. product would cost CDN$450.87, plus shipping (but minus sales tax), while the Canadian product, though eligible for free shipping, would set you back CDN$535.79 with GST & PST included. Sadly, when I tried to order the U.S. version at $399, to see what the shipping might be, Amazon.com refused my order, telling me that I would have to order from Amazon.ca instead. A racket if there ever was one.
I am reinforced in my notion that it is the upgrade that matters more than the full version, as I find on Amazon.com that purchasers of the full version cannot lay claim to the diverse interests of the upgraders. According to the Amazon.com site, customers who bought the upgrade also bought: The Da Vinci Code DVD and 24 Season 5 DVD along with a couple of other software products.
So it would seem that a certain predilection for mysticism might predispose you towards upgrading your copy of Adobe Acrobat Professional, or perhaps a sense of adventure, with some lurking suspicion of international conspiracies. I imagine that few will purchase it based on inherent value.
Next: Adobe's Top 10 reasons (page 2 of 3)
