“Cowen’s Walter Pritchard [today] cut his rating on [Adobe, ADBE] stock to Neutral from Outperform,” Eric Savitz reports for Barron’s.
“Pritchard is concerned about the company’s transition from the current version of its flagship software package – Creative Suite 3 – to the coming update, Creative Suite 4. He says that with the May quarter, ‘the company will reach a peak in financial momentum.’ But Pritchard contends that ‘many of the drivers of growth in CS3 are not in place and in some cases work against CS4 given the significant upgrade activity and price uplift that came with CS3,'” Savitz reports.
“He notes that in the case of CS3, there was 24 months between versions, rather than the usual 18. The current version, he adds, benefited from additional demand associated with Apple’s adoption of Intel processors for the Mac,” Savitz reports.
Full article here.
I just upgraded to CS3 Design Premium a few month ago. Now Adobe will want another $500.00 or so of my money. I think I’ll skip CS4 and wait for CS5.
I still use PS 7.0…
Steve, when are you going to put us out of our misery and buy Adobe?
I’m waiting for CS 5, or even 6. I can’t imagine there’s much more than tighter integration in such a quick release. I can live without it.
Now that CS3 went universal, I’m done upgrading Adobe apps until they either lower the price or significantly upgrade features/interface.
Even the upgrade prices are just too much to justify what you’re getting. Their pricing reminds me of Microsoft. No thanks.
re: Apple and Adobe.
For my needs, I’m hoping that Steve has been “secretly developing” their own full on Photoshop and Illustrator.
I’ll upgrade when they learn the Cocoa API.
Adobe, is only doing a half upgrade for Mac OS X, they are waiting till CS5 to move the CS product line to 64 Bit on Mac OS, so I expect that this Upgrade will be skipped by a significant number of there customers.
“bite the bullet” Adobe and rewrite your damm code.
No shít deepdish!
Nah, Apple should just continue to leverage open source and put their own front end on GIMP. They’d likely have to give it away due to the GPL but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Then what would Adobe do?
We bought the full CS3 (Yikes) and it’s very good. It’s stable and I almost never see a progress bar.
But.
If you use Exposé to navigate multiple windows anything but Standard Screen Mode renders random grey boxes – STILL. As I don’t believe Adobe gives a rats rear (and would rather we go back to Winblows to make it easier on them) I can expect this to go unfixed for the foreseeable future.
All I can say is that Adobe had better make CS4 mighty compelling and drop the insane price. All it would take is Pixelmator or another hungry upstart to get our attention…
I’m done with the ‘screw you’ customer service attitude from Adobe.
Step 1:
Buy Adobe.
Step 2:
Give immediate priority to OSX integration and systematically cancel (or at the very least hobble) the Windbloze version of each program.
Step 3:
There is no step 3.
Dear Apple,
Please buy Adobe or develop your own Acrobat 9.
Thank you,
DJ.
@ Happy with Adobe Because I Don’t Have a Choice
I think you’ll be pleased.
I hope none of you have lost as much work as I have in the last few days. Photoshop doesn’t play well with OS X 10.5.3 and Servers. I’ve had several huge composites (2GB) that refused after saving to my server– the files are not recognized as Photoshop files (or anything else for that matter). Apparently the files are being corrupted in the save process, but there is no warning that anything is wrong; the file with a preview can be seen on the server. I discovered today a Knowledge Base notice about the issue today on Adobe’s support page; says Adobe is working with Apple to solve the problem.
What I want to know is this: Why, after filling out software registrations and contact information for 20 fricken years, could not Adobe sent out a mass email to its CS3 customers alerting them to this disastrous problem? I calculated 20 hours of lost production because of this. This is just piss-poor customer service, and a betrayal of the professionals that rely on their tools.
Lastly, I know that Apple’s update caused or at least triggered the problem, but Apple doesn’t know which of its users use CS3. Adobe does. They should have put out an immediate email blast and press release warning users of the problem. To the best of my knowledge they did not.
@bwally,
You still run PS 7.0? I have 7.0.1 and have not been able to run it since upgrading to Leopard. I get an “unexpected and unrecoverable problem has occurred”, and then the program exits. What’s your secret?
I just poked around in Preview after viewing this Oct 2007 AppleInsider article and tried a number of those tools for the first time. Extremely clunky as it was, I’m sure Apple could come up with a competitive product if it chose to devote significant resources into graphic apps development.
At the moment Adobe still reigns supreme, but with Pixelmator, DrawIt and others against Adobe’s bloatsuite and horrible pricing, the latter will face an Aladdin/Allume/Smith Micro Software [Stuffit] destiny.
Apple purposefully keeps some of its programs clunky.
Why? So we •buy• the programs we need (Ps, Office, etc…) to keep the developers happy and the Mac relevant.
More Macs again!… Adobe has to worry about it’s Apple services and make few 180° adjustments…!
@Deliberate,
Fairly good enough analysis! +1
@ Spark
From kb403815:
“Saving directly to a network drive is not supported by Adobe.”
And never has been. That’s why Version Cue exists (though I have never heard of anyone using it..) I don’t like it any more than you do, but I think I quit saving directly to servers about 13 years ago because or problems like this.
Sorry we didn’t get that email out to you telling you not to do what we’ve always told you not to do.
@ step up apple
Step 3:
????
Step 4:
score epic loot
ok so i used to be a WoW tragic
Adobe had better start listening because we always see so many saying they have had enough of being gouged by your pricing and upgrade strategy.
And being compared to Microsoft is no compliment.
Happy with Apple Because I Don’t Have A Choice:
I’m done with the ‘screw you’ customer service attitude from Adobe.
ChrissyOne:
Sorry we didn’t get that email out to you telling you not to do what we’ve always told you not to do.
Ah. I get it.
Adobe is the new Microsoft. They make their product like they want and expect the industry to bend over backwards. Apple should buy it, focus all it’s resources on a Cocoa based suite, then discontinue the Windows version. Actually, even better, continue the Windows version but charge double for it over the Mac version.
@Chrissy
True, Adobe does not “support” working on/saving to a network. Meaning they will not help you troubleshoot a problem if you are on working from a network.
However, if they truly did not want you to use a network, they should disable saving to network volumes in the save dialog.
Adobe also says not to work on InDesign files live on a network, then they turnaround and sell us InCopy which REQUIRES a network to be full -functioning – all while using the exact same InDesign files they tell us not to open across the network. They can’t have it both ways – sales people telling you it is OK (or required), and support engineers saying not to do it.
@C1
“From kb403815”
Chrissy, the date on that kb article is June 4, 2008. It’s title is,
“Error occurs and you cannot open files that are saved to a server (Photoshop CS3 on Mac OS X v. 10.5.3)”
This is not some long standing issue that the “poor newbie” fell into. I’ve used PhotoShop since day one of its existence. And I’ve saved to networked servers almost as long. NEVER in 20 years has this new problem occurred.
In kb403815, Adobe states, “This is a known issue that Adobe is working on with Apple.”
They admit it’s an issue, they know about it and they are working with Apple… presumably to correct the situation because it is ABNORMAL. Now, it’s nice that they posted the kb article, but seriously, if they can send me an email when they’ve got an upgrade they want me to buy, couldn’t they just as easily have sent an email stating Photoshop’s Saving function (the SAVING function for christ sakes) had seriously been compromised?
ChrissyOne… you’re just dead wrong on this one; at least in your “tough luck, can’t be bothered” attitude. Google around like I did and you’ll find a lot of people that have been going crazy this past week over corrupted PS files with error messages that they’ve never seen. I blame Apple too, but like I said, Apple doesn’t know I own PS and Adobe does.
When did I ever say ‘tough luck, can’t be bothered’? This is my job, Spark. This is what I do all day. I get to find out that Apple put out an update that broke some of our functionality, then I get to figure out why.
Do you think the first thing I do is run to the customer database and scream off a letter to millions of people telling them that an unsupported action might cause them big problems? Well then would you like to tell me where that ends? There are all KINDS of crazy things you can do with you computer that might case you to loose your work. Do you want an emergency email for them all?
I care very much about my customers. If you have ever been escalated to me you’d know that. But if I panicked and freaked out every time Apple or HP or Red Hat or Microsoft broke some system that we depend on… well, I’d never get any kb docs written or any bugs filed. That’s the only way I can help you.
Saving to the network is a LONG STANDING ISSUE. I was escalated when I called Adobe about it in 1996 to a tech that I now work with. We had to work around the issue both at Getty Images and at Wizards of the Coast, because there were too many unpredictable factors in saving even a 50mb file to the server, much less a 2GB file.
I’m sorry about the time you lost. And that’s the truth – I have been there many times. But telling me that I don’t give a shit about my customers are fighting words, my friend.
-c
<a >But what do I know…</a>
Chris Cox — 10:43 PM on June 03, 2008
Apple’s file IO APIs are the ones with the bugs introduced in 10.5.3, that Apple is now working to repair.
And John [Nack]’s post already explains why you can’t qualify network configurations in any reasonable way.
Photoshop is designed to work with the network — it just cannot anticipate every possible bad network, driver, OS API or server out there. File IO to local disks is usually better tested than network IO, and involves fewer factors that could go wrong. Thus, local IO is generally safer.
Fixed Link to John’s blog
Hey, here’s something from 2005…
http://photoshop911.typepad.com/help/2005/05/photoshop_file_.html
Photoshop File on Network Drive
… refuses to open
matt from New York, US, using CS, Photoshop 7 with OSX, Win2k…
“You’ve violated the cardinal rule of Photoshop: NEVER save to a network server or drive. Because of the variances in drive speeds, formatting and gateways. you’re asking for trouble. Always save on the local drive FIRST. Then copy the whole file to the network drive.”
Then there’s this…
http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.3bc43768
Photoshop 7 wont save to a 2 terabyte network drive
“Well known issue.”
“just as an fyi george, adobe doesn’t support saving to a network share outside of version cue (not sure if that was around in 7 or released w/cs). problems don’t ususally happen, but if (when?) they do, you could lose your work.”
“Because Photoshop has not a clue how robust any particular network is or might be, it cannot guarantee that saving a file to a remote drive will not produce errors. The OS has this error checking built in. It effectively double-checks that the destination file matches the source file precisely before deleting it.”
Should I build a big neon sign?
Damn.
Sometimes my thread-killing powers amaze even me.