That's been my theory as well, that the ultimate victim of Photoshop piracy in the 90s/00s was Paint Shop Pro. Adobe didn't seem to care, professionals still needed their properly licensed copy at Adobe's prices, and students who learn with pirated Photoshop might become actual professionals with paid licenses in the future.
But at $0 vs $0, Paint Shop Pro was a lot less appealing that it would have been at $99 vs $399 or whatever Photoshop used to cost.
Re:I won’t buy ebooks anymore
by stanmancan on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:48PM
(#23314208)
Maybe Adobe clued in to that. Both that:
a) People who can't afford to buy it, and use a pirated copy, might become a professional in the future, and
b) If you can't afford to buy Photoshop, they'd much rather you pirate it than pay a competitor!
Re:I won’t buy ebooks anymore
by dredmorbius on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @04:52AM
(#23320916)
“Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don’t pay for the software. Someday they will, though,” [Bill] Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. “And as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”
Charles Piller, "How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows", *Los Angeles Times8, April 9, 2006
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-apr-09-fi-micro...
Re:I won’t buy ebooks anymore
by ZoomZoomZoom on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @05:06PM
(#23316391)
Absolutely. It's a common and very old belief that GIMP's worst enemy isn't just Photoshop, it's pirated Photoshop. The same was being said about desktop GNU/Linux and Pirated Windows XP.
That's essentially a price discrimination strategy (intentional or not). Adobe could just offer a free version with super restrictive license, and results would be the same without any piracy involved.
To be honest, these days outside of some categories like games (where the prices are relatively uniform) if you just need something to use casually, there's probably one or more open source options. Of course, the open source option may actually be the best one as well but, even if it isn't, it's probably good enough for the odd task now and then.
Re:I won’t buy ebooks anymore
by stanmancan on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:47PM
(#23314192)
That totally makes sense! When I think about pirating, usually movies, tv, music, and books come to mind, but in the case of software, that absolutely makes sense.
I'm not sure how applicable it is for books, because generally prices are more uniform for books than they are for software, but in the case of software I wonder if the ones who lose sales to piracy are the makers of more affordable software?
Imagine a world where piracy was effectively impossible for most people, and you want to do some occasional image editing. You look at Photoshop and it is way out of your budget. But you don't actually need most features of Photoshop. You find that Pixelmator Pro can do everything you want, and at $40 you can afford it and it is a good value. So you buy Pixelmator Pro.
In a world where piracy only takes a little time and effort you pirate Photoshop.
In both scenarios Adobe doesn't get any of your money so we can't say that pirating Photoshop in the second scenario cost Adobe a sale. But it did cost Pixelmator Team a sale.
In general, I suspect that the main effect of piracy is to change our allocation of spending within certain categories or groups of categories, without changing the total we spend in those categories.