About 60% of Photoshop Users are Pirates

An informal survey over on Epicedit.com show that over 60% of photoshop users obtain their software illegally.

My first reaction was "only 60%"? Pirating is very prevalent especially for very popular (and very expensive) software. I guess this is one of the reasons why the software is so expensive to begin with...

According to the BSA over 35% of the software installed on PCs worldwide was obtained illegally, amounting to nearly $40 billion in global losses.

Adobe is aware of these statistics and has not taken any drastic actions to really stop the widespread pirating of their software. They actually make it pretty easy for their software to be distributed illegally. Maybe it's their strategy to let casual users pirate their software with the hope they increase their market share and the number of skilled users who know photoshop. This should translate into higher sales to companies who are more likely not to pirate software and can afford the stiff license fees (currently at $600 per seat).

Whatever they're doing it seems to be working well for photoshop. It is the most widely used photo editing software used today. According to Yahoo! Finance since the introduction of Photoshop in 1990 Adobe has gone from 1,300 employees and $300M in revenue to over 7,000 employees with $3.4B in revenue.

Vassilios
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Vassilios
Co-Founder
OuterVillage.com
http://outervillage.com

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