Remember Quark?
“When a competitor finally arrived, it had many shortfalls, but no one cared and we all switched anyway.”
Since my post last week urging more reasonable student licensing for Adobe Creative Cloud, word went out to IT administrators of Creative Cloud lab installations:
…we wanted to notify you that the grace-period access to Adobe Creative Cloud desktop Apps will expire on July 6th. After that date, students’ entitlement level will return to the level prior to the March 19th release date… let your students know they will be losing access, as well as opportunities to continue using Adobe’s free offerings at home… Adobe is introducing new options to make student licensing more accessible for our education customers.
Cryptic, but it’s something. As I’ve thought about The Software Question for the last week, it occurred to me that I failed to mention one important option that Adobe could introduce to really make things good for students.
To recap, my last post asked Adobe to change their approach to Creative Cloud software for students in one of three ways: 1.) offer free, fully functional software to students; 2.) offer free versions with limit at the upper end of functionality; or 3.) extend their full functional trial period.
The obvious fourth possibility, which could be paired gracefully with a retooled #3 above is: allow students to subscribe at the student rate on a month-to-month basis. The thing about Adobe’s Creative Cloud programs is that it’s actually a really good deal if you use more than one of the programs (and it’s nearly impossible to use fewer than three). Professionals pay about $50/month ($600/year). This gets you everything—every app, on two computers, plus a bunch of other stuff that isn’t that useful.
Students get a reduced rate of $20/month ($240/year), but only for the first year, then it goes up to $30/month ($360/year). And here’s the kicker: you only get the student price if you commit to buying the whole year. Imagine a curious first year student stumbles on my class, they’re interested despite what they’ve read about me, and they register. They can use whatever software they like, but they quickly discover after using the labs that they’d prefer to use Adobe tools because, well, they’re pretty good. They only need the software for a few months, maybe sixty bucks worth, but to use the software at home they’d have to commit to $240, just to see if it’s right for them.
This is before we start talking about my students who work full time, my students who commute, my students with families, all the people for whom the computer lab hours just don’t work. They have a computer that can run the software, but this cost is one more remora suckerfish more than they can bear. They use other tools for graphics that may be free or open source—some of them are ok, but those are often more finicky. Maybe those students don’t get as good results. Maybe they get great results, but it’s a slog and they decide not to take more advanced classes.
But Simon, that price is about the cost of the intro Chemistry textbook at your university.
Exactly. That’s the problem. Expensive textbooks cost what they do because no one uses them after the class is done. Then you get to keep or resell the book for not much money because there’s a new edition. The market might have been able to bear the cost for renting a year’s worth of software to use during three or four months of class. I’m guessing that students of means go ahead and pay for it, and the students without go to the labs. Bulk lab licensing alone probably makes up a significant income, which continues to justify keeping the year contract requirement in place. What happens when the labs are closed or extremely undesirable (for a year? forever?)? Do publishers then raise the price to make up for the loss? Do they expect more students to buy a year’s worth of software for the work of one class?
I’m seeing more and more professors talking in the Oh-My-God-How-Do-We-Do-This-With-The-COVID Facebook Groups about fundamentally sacrificing assignments and processes just to avoid Adobe software. I hope Adobe realizes this and adjusts accordingly. It’s much harder to gain a customer than to lose one, and it’s even harder to regain on who you’ve lost. Remember how eager everyone in design fields was to jump ship from Quark XPress? When there was finally a decent competitor the Quark user base (especially in education) moved over as fast as they could? Oh God, that was over twenty years ago. Trust me, everybody was sick of Quark, their pricing and their general attitude toward customers was “what else are you gonna use?” Everyone talked about Adobe InDesign as “the Quark Killer,” and when it arrived it had a lot of version 1.0 problems but no one cared and we all switched anyway.
We’re about to that moment with Adobe now. They have a great chance to earn some good will and loyalty, or risk sacrificing a generation of new users. Let’s see what they come up with, I hope they’re listening.