Adobe Australia has officially gone on record with their intent to price gouge Australian looking to buy their new Creative Suite cloud offering, however they have refused to say why they have not lodged their annual financial returns with the Australian Companies and Securities Commission.
In a press release issued today Adobe said that they intend to charge Australian consumers $62.99 a month to get access to the cloud version of the Creative Suite 6 software Vs the $49.99 that consumers are being charged to obtain the same software in the USA.
Adobe who have a monopoly in the supply of creative tools for web and print designers in Australia has refused to explain the pricing difference for what is the same software, served from the same server that users in the USA get access to Creative Suite.
Adobe who is a US based Company is not adverse to price gouging in Australia, their previous packaged Creative Suite 5 was being sold in Australia up untill last month for up to $1,400 more than what a US user was able to buy the same software for in Australia. If a user purchased the US software Adobe Australia denied the user technical support.
On Friday Adobe faced a backlash from users after they said that it wasn’t going to fix critical security bugs in the two-year-old version Creative Suite 5 or the year-old version 5.5.
After design and web forums expressed anger at Adobe’s attitude the Company backed down and on Saturday the Company issued a statement detailing plans to fix the problems.
The issue exploded when on May 8, Adobe issued a security note explaining the vulnerabilities.
They then tried to force users to upgrade to their all new and expensive cloud based software. They said that the only fixes for the bugs was upgrading to the newly released Adobe Creative Suite 6 or being careful with where images were being sourced from.
In an effort to hide their previous bulletins all mentions of the previous guidelines have been editorially purged from both the security bulletin’s page as well as other Adobe product pages.
nCircle Security’s Andrew Storms told Computerworld in the cUSA on Friday that for all the company has been doing to revise their face of security, “this just brings them right back into the dunce cap seat.” One security hole exists in the handling of maliciously constructed TIFF files, conceivably allowing an attacker to take control of the computer after a stack overflow. Details of the other seven flaws are not known.
A spoksperson for Adobe Systems in Australia has refused to say why Adobe needs to price gouge in Australia, they have also refused to explain their lack of financial filings for Adobe Systems with the ACCC.
