Feel bad for those guys, layoffs before the holidays always suck. Adobe is about the only large company out there that I’ve come to appreciate. They make good products, but more importantly have good people willing to communicate with it’s users. I hope this doesn’t disrupt that too much.
One of the reasons cited was the weak CS4 sales. Ironically I was contemplating upgrading to CS4 master suite only a few hours before hearing about this. Now, I think I’ll wait a bit. I imagine there’s a chance of a price drop if sales are so dire. I wonder if many people are thinking that way? If so, it’s maybe another case of bad news causing more bad news.
Good luck guys.
I wouldn’t expect many big discounts to be honest and hopefully not too many people hold out for deep discounts…maybe that’s why the sales are weak?
On an unrelated note, I wanted to know if you were coming to Flex Camp Boston next week? I looked for a way to email you outside the comments but didn’t see one.
Sadly I’m not surprised CS4 sales aren’t what they expected. CS3 is only what? A year maybe a year and a half old? Shelling out 3k for CS4 or even the 1k-2k upgrade price, is a bit steep, for all but non enterprise users.
Definitely a sucky time to be laying off, sad that they couldn’t wait 22 days at least.
I suspect it was a lot of getting rid of positions that did similar jobs etc. They had quite an army, hopefully this helps stream line everything.
I agree with John here. The releases were too close together in my opinion. For me the upgrade was well worth it, there’s a lot of new, useful functionality and having the integration between all the tools has helped workflow productivity. 64 bit Photoshop has been a huge blessing.But again, the pricepoint of CS 4 is such that people don’t want to jump on the bandwagon until they need to.
While there were some significant improvements to apps in CS4, it apparently wasn’t compelling enough to stimulate upgrades and sales. I can do fine with CS3 and usually wait for better penetration numbers of the flash player before upgrading. The economy (worldwide) sucks and people all over find areas to cut and upgrades are usually at the top of the cut list.
Additionally, unless there are trade tariffs I’m not aware of, the price of Adobe products overseas is obscene. Another factor of declining sales.
Supply and demand usually dictates price (look at gasoline) but Adobe has been pretty closed about considering that…at least for now.
I hope the laid-off employees got a decent severance package to compensate for the timing of the layoffs. I’ve been there a couple of times and wish all of them well. Merry(?) Christmas!
I believe users have come to expect more in both product upgrades, and free version updates. Also IMO Flash CS4 feels more like CS3.5 than a 4. IDE lag, lack of features that can be found in open source software, and such are still around. I’d like to see Adobe strip the Flash IDE into a visual-asset plugin that can be imported into eclipse, that’s pretty much all it’s become to me.
I bless for these slow times. Upgrades? what upgrades? I have been using Adobe’s products since mid 90′s and always thought that the last “upgrade” was just what I needed.
I think people are not that stupid anymore. it’s not really upgrading anything it’s just sucking your hard-earned money into buying things you DO NOT NEED! what was wrong with PS7 ? why the hell all the Mac CS3 bugs where not fixed? I got a reply from customer support that Adobe did not have time to fix all the bugs because of lunch schedule… So I say to Adobe, sorry, due to my time schedule, you won’t get my money this round. maybe CS 11.
Micha