Putting an older version online for free gives them this virtual real estate online, and that is worth a fair amount of money.#Īdobe is currently claiming that the CS2 downloads with serial numbers that they posted to their website are really just there to help out current CS2 users as they recently turned of the CS2 licensing servers. Before broadband internet when you had to buy most software on disk then Adobe could have the prime real estate on the shelf, but without a free option online, they may be losing market-share to the free alternatives. If Adobe wants to make sure its tools remain the industry standard, they need to make sure that they are the best available, which they do a pretty good job of, and that young people and students are familiar with them. The most important factor in their popularity, however, is their price – and they are very popular pieces of software which open people’s eyes to what is available outside of the Adobe ecosystem which is prohibitively expensive even with a student discount for many people. It’s an interesting model, and one I actually pitched to Emagic when they sold their Logic music studio to Apple, making their Windows version obsolete.įor Adobe’s flagship software, Photoshop, there are numerous decent alternatives that have become popular over the years because they are free such as the open source GIMP and Paint.Net – but they either lack some of the advanced tools that Photoshop offers (Paint.Net) or can be a little tricky to install and use (GIMP). CS2 may be from 2006, but even these older versions compare well with the free and cheap alternatives on the market at the moment, and with many of these tools being the “industry standard”, it is never a bad thing to get comfortable with them.īut why would Adobe give away these tools? From a marketing perspective I have always wondered why more companies don t give away older versions of their software for free in order to steal marketshare from their competitors and hopefully get young people and students to start using their software – people which they then may be able to convert into customers at a later date. Social media lit up on Wednesday with links to the Adobe website where users are able to download all of Adobe Creative Suite CS2 for free.

Adobe creative suite cs2 download