Comments on: Upsells vs. Upgrades. What to Buy.

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:50:59 +0000

Even better. Could be a price change from the time of the original post.

Thanks for the update!

By: Rob Sommers

Rob Sommers — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 18:39:46 +0000

Hey, Bob, it looks like the upsell savings is $400, not $200. $1,399 vs $1,799 on Adobe’s site.

By: Matt Nelson

Matt Nelson — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 03:25:13 +0000

I got the über suite at my university bookstore, and I never use most of the stuff in it. Next time, I’ll get single apps instead of everything.

By: wa veghel

wa veghel — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 10:03:40 +0000

>If you had an earlier version of InDesign (CS or 2.0) installed in addition to the suite the installer would have seen that and recognized it as the eligible product.

How smart is this updater I wonder…
I now have the CS3 suite installed as suite minus InDesign, I had InDesign installed as a stan-alone with a different serial. I cab only hope that the CS4 version will let me update only InDesign, and who knows later on maybe the suite…

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 12:47:45 +0000

It really depends on your situation. When the original suite was released you could buy it at upgrade pricing from Photoshop. If you already had Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat then you’re right…it cost more for the suite than all the products individually.

But going forward, the upgrade pricing on the suites is, at least from what I can see, less expensive than upgrading the individual apps. The CS3.3 Design Premium upgrade from CS2 is $599 and includes upgrades to InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Acrobat, Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks.

Upgrading those individually would cost about twice that much and if you don’t own one or two, that really inflates the price.

So you have a choice, which I think we can all agree is a good thing

By: Lou Kash

Lou Kash — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:32:48 +0000

Bob, thanks for the explanation. The status of this upgrade/upsale/upwhatever is actually clear to me. I just don’t get Adobe’s accounting: how can a bundle of four products be more expensive than the four products individually?! Are there people who are so bad with numbers so that they will buy such a pricey suite upsale anyway…? Paying a $400 premium only for the comfort (?) of having a single serial number? Or is it only a regional issue? It’s baffling.

In fact, at first I only upgraded ID2 to IDCS3. Upon reading that PS7 won’t be compatible with Leopard and/or Intel (don’t remember what the issue was) I decided to upgrade the rest as well since I will likely have to replace my “tigered” PowerBook some time next year. And since I hardly use the other apps beyond the features of PS7/AI10, in the future I will likely upgrade only ID – if at all. At least until the next Mac OS X incompatibility, that is…

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:36:09 +0000

If you had an earlier version of InDesign (CS or 2.0) installed in addition to the suite the installer would have seen that and recognized it as the eligible product.

By: wa veghel

wa veghel — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:15:05 +0000

Well I had a CS2 suite. I only bought an InDesign upgrade last year. I had no problem installing and activating this stand-alone InDesign upgrade.
I did however got a license for the CS3 suite later from my instutue. This required an uninstall of the upgraded InDesign CS3 before it would install InDesign again as part of the suite (wich makes sense).
It makes no sense that you can not upgrade a single program as you say. My expierence out of first hand is that it is NO problem to do so…

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 19:26:20 +0000

Lou,

The reason for your issue is that you didn’t have a suite, you had a collection. That was just a box set of a bunch of individual applications.

You could use any one of the for an upsell but not the entire collection.

When Adobe introduced the suite EVERYONE was faced with the decision of what to do and back then only Photoshop was eligible.

For you it may well pay to continue to upgrade individual products.

By: Bob Levine

Bob Levine — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:30:26 +0000

Mr. Hair splitter, er, I mean David,

You’re correct, and I really should have emphasized that you can’t split the suite for the purpose of having two workstations for two different people.