New Adobe Online Store for Central Europe

I just got word that on May 17, Adobe will open a new online store for 10 Central and Est-European countries, from Croatia to Ukraine.

This is good news, considering that currently it’s impossible to buy Adobe software from an online store if you’re a resident of any of these countries (the address you provide is checked against the credit card so if you live in Romania you can’t buy from the UK store, you get rejected based on IP and so on). Not even buy by phone would work as the operators from Adobe USA and Europe seemed clueless about what to do (“you can ask someone to buy it for you” – jeez, thanks for the advice). To make things worse, local resellers don’t carry some Adobe software like Lightroom, or if they do, they charge outrageous prices ($1330 for a Creative Suite 3 Web Premium upgrade from Studio 8 – this is no joke).

This was a bitter experience for me, especially considering that I always got excellent support from Macromedia in the past 6 years, without feeling like a second-class citizen.

I don’t really understand this policy – don’t sell the software to potential customers or charge insanely (keep in mind that throughout the region the average income is 5 times lower than Western Europe) and then complain that your software is being pirated.

The products will be offered as download only (why are downloads the same price as boxed products?)

No word on the pricing yet. With Adobe policies of selling their software at different rates from country to country, I hope they’ll have a sane pricing scheme, although I’m afraid this won’t be the case. Considering that we’ll have to get a bunch of Web Premium + Web Standard + Production Premium + Flex upgrades, pricing will determine our upgrade strategy.