The last post was about buying from Adobe — the process. This one’s about the weird product purchase options they give you.

From a web-guy point of view, there’s really only a few things you must have, and they start with Photoshop. Then you can add maybe Dreamweaver, Flash (if your site demands Flash) or Illustrator (if you have design talent). Adobe offers all of these singly, or in bundles. Of course, buying in singles is prohibitive, but here’s where it gets weird for me. The “Web Premium” bundle offers all those, plus another 7 products, of varying value, for $1,699. Off course, you can counter that the price is also a significant discount for all of those apps.

But what if I never wanted them? It becomes an arm-twist, where I spend a lot more than I feel comfortable about, so I can get a lot of stuff I may never use, but I’m forced to do that because the base pricing for the few products I want are extraordinary high as well. It’s like Cable company pricing — the only way to get the channel of value is to buy all the other junk channels. And we all know how much in love most of us are with our current cable company relationship.

It’s almost like their financials dictate that they sell a specific number of product x, regardless of if the customer ever wants them.The customer is forced to deal with the problems that Adobe’s internal product-line competition has created.

Adobe — I’m pretty sure you could avoid these continuous sales on bundle upgrades if you’d just price them to be what people want. Or, try a “Build Your Own” where I tell you I’m willing to spend $900, and you let me choose what goes in the bundle. It could be really cool if I could change my budget amount, and you’d let me add more items to the bundle — for a $900 purchase I can chose any 4 of 8 products, for $1100, I get 5 of 10, etc. I have a sneaky suspicion you’d get two things at once:
1. More sales overall — price points are big inflection points, and right now, I bet a lot of people are unhappily making the purchase they “must choose.” Twist their arms less, they’ll buy more, betcha betcha.
2. Customer insight in to the products they do and don’t like, which will lead you to smarter product development strategies.

Right now, everyone is forced to get all these things, some of which they neither want or ever intend to use.