[big K]

O.K. the price was including VAT (actually the list was not made by myself) but without VAT it is 749 € that is still almost 200%
there are a lot of resellers here (you get the software slightly cheaper - but they also have to pay the way too high prices)

In the end, if the price is really that unreasonable, why would you buy it? Why isn't there a European company offering an equivalent product at half the price? Questions like this need to be answered before a person can really claim they're being 'ripped off', imho. Unlike those other kinds of businesses - governments - which force us to buy their product with a big gun, we are always free to tell a private company to 'stick it where the sun don't shine', simply by choosing a different product...

this sounds good. but if you think about it, there is no way it works like that.
first of all i used to be more a macromedia client than a adobe one. (flash, flex, dreamweaver etc)
macromedia was bought by adobe (not my decision). of course they adopted their nice pricing policies for the new products.... there are not many alternatives for web stuff, especially flash.
now adobe is pretty much in a monopoly position concerning some of their products. it is not easy for a company in europe, as you claim, to start a new product line with much production costs, just to be swept away because adobe then just makes more aggressive pricing.
that would be fine for me - but which company is going to make this risk ?

and i have never seen any US costumer that had to pay that much more for any european product - especially not software.
so please don´t come with this over the top theoretically stuff.
they do rip off their clients, because they can do it !
and the only thing i can do is at least saying my opinion.
otherwise the guys from adobe say, hey, nobady complained !

i for sure will not go with them, this time, but it is really hard for a small buisiness to change the production line with quite a few products !

michael