What makes Adobe thinks it can sell Acrobat XI to New Zealanders for A$200 a pop or $281 for the pro version?
The software can make, edit and view PDFs. That’s useful, but so can many other applications. Some of them do it better, most of them do it cheaper.
Microsoft Office 2013 has built-in PDF tools that can so all these things. The market is awash with dozens of free, shareware and low-cost tools.
Acrobat XI has a touch screen interface for annotations, but I can help thinking there are better things to spend money on. Or am I missing something important here?
Presumably that’s just the upgrade cost, unless they’ve greatly reduced the initial purchase price. I’m still using Acrobat Professional 8, which still makes perfectly good high-end publishing PDFs.
There are good alternatives now. One is Foxit. I’ve been using Foxit Reader for a long time instead of Adobe Reader or the reader built into my Pro 8 version. It opens up far more quickly and does a better job of displaying opposing pages in a document layout – like it understands that odd pages should be on the right hand side. I don’t know why that;’s so hard for Adobe to figure out.
At some stage I may investigate Foxit for producing PDFs as well.
Yes, that’s the upgrade price. Interestingly those are the only visible prices displayed on Adobe’s web site.. It’s not until you try to buy that you discover it costs $636 for the full product.
I guess that’s because Adobe assumes there aren’t many new customers out there, just upgraders.
I used Foxit Reader for a while. Recently I noticed there’s a good PDF reader built-in to Windows 8 that does most of what I want. Most, but not all.
It’s a native Windows 8 app, which means it takes up the entire screen, I’ve got a huge monitor on my PC and like to open documents on the right and a writing tool on the left. Having two panes is the biggest productivity gain I’ve found in years.
At the moment I open PDFs in Word 2013 – which is a little slow and the rendering can be clumsy, even inelegant. On the other hand, it works seamlessly.
I do the two windows in Win 7 all the time. That’s the Windows key plus right or left arrow keys thing.
I suspect adobe continue to charge premium prices for acrobat in order to entice you into taking a “suite” option. If you require acrobat and just one other major adobe program, such as photoshop, it is cheaper or nearly as cheap to buy the entire suite. Thus few people will ever stump up for the price of acrobat alone. Clever marketing
That’s a good point. Companies often price things in ways that guide you to obvious decisions. Manipulate might be a better word there.