Great Software Bargains Still in Gear Online after Cyber Monday

With overall retail online sales reaching unprecedented levels on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, major software vendors like Adobe, Nuance and McAfee are continuing to offer product discounts into the rest of Cyber Week.

For the first time ever, online sales reached $1 billion this year on Black Friday and $1.5 billion on Cyber Monday, estimated ComScore, a market research firm which named Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target and Apple as the top five online retailers for Black Friday.

Indeed, all of those companies have offered online software bargains over the past few days, with all but Amazon -- which has no brick-and-mortar presence -- bringing price breaks into retail stores, too.

Developers with Mac and iOS apps temporarily slashed pricing in Apple's online store, and you still might be able to find some deals in the iTunes shop. As of Tuesday, the Pixelmator photo editing software app for Macs was still listed at $14.99, just about 50 percent less than its pre-Black Friday pricetag of $29.99.

Bargains from Big Name Vendors

Some of the sweetest deals, however, still linger on Web sites operated directly by big Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac software makers -- although in some cases, you'll need to act really fast!

Through November 28, for instance, Adobe is offering 40 percent off on the full version of its Elements photo and video edting packages, 20 percent off on Photoshop Lightroom 4, and 15 percent off on Acrobat XI Pro and Acrobat XI Standard.

As of Tuesday, Nuance continued to list special pricing on Dragon Naturally Speaking (DNS) 12 for Windows PCs ($74.99 for the Home Edition and $149.99 for the Premium Edition) and Dragon Dictate for Macs ($149.99).

Meanwhile, Parallels has kept selling Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac for $59.99, $20.00 less than its usual price of $79.99.

Cool Deals on Subscriptions, Too

Also according to Comscore data, digital content and subscriptions emerged as the fastest growing retail category onine for Black Friday, with sales up 29 percent over last year.

Some subscription bargains are still available online, too. For example, cloud-based storage and file sharing service YouSendIt is now emailing out advertisements for a $50.00 price cut on unlimited storage to $99.95 per year on subscriptions. The catch is that these subscriptions must be purchased by November 30.

Through November 27 only, McAfee is offering respective discounts on annual subscriptions of $15.00 on McAfee AntiVirus Plus 2013 and $27.00 on McAfee Total Protection 2013.

Online sites are a natural for software deals, of course, because they tend to cater to a tech-savvy crowd. For that matter, vendors can never run out of downloadable software. Yet lots of price breaks are also available for boxed software.

If you're interested in a specific software package, but you didn't make it to the local mall this past weekend, you might want to hop on over to your favorite vendor's Web site soon to see if you can strike a good deal.