Why doesn’t Adobe release Adobe Bridge for free?

I want to use Adobe Bridge to manage the images on my PC. If you aren’t aware of what Adobe Bridge is, it’s a media manager for all of your Photoshop, Illustrator and other graphics files (among other things – read more here). But the thing is that Adobe Bridge isn’t free and you can’t even buy it separately. It’s weird – here’s this great utility (that’s all it really is after all) that, if more people used it, more people would likely want to use more Adobe products. But Adobe won’t let you have it unless you buy the Creative Suite or Photoshop standalone. I don’t get it.

The reason I like Bridge is that I have a lot of .EPS format graphics files and, by default on Windows XP, Vista and 2008, there is no .EPS thumbnail preview. So I can’t view thumbnails which is a bit of a bummer. However, if I load up Bridge, I can browse them with ease. So again – here’s a great little utility that you can’t have unless you buy the big package. It doesn’t make sense… EPS files are less ubiquitous than PDF files yet Acrobat Reader is free – why not Bridge?

I’d love it if someone could share the reasons in the comments. I’m a huge Adobe Bridge fan – it took me awhile but I love it and can’t live without it today.

Workaround

Actually you can get Abode Bridge for free if you download a trial version of DreamWeaver CS3 (and maybe CS4 – haven’t tried that yet). If you download the trial copy, then you get a fully-functional version of Adobe Bridge that doesn’t time-out when your Dreamweaver install completes. At least this is one way to get Adobe Bridge for free!