Adobe Makes Products Harder to Use, More Expensive

An anonymous reader writes "This is a follow-up to an earlier story on slashdot about Adobe releasing their Creative Suite package. It seems that Adobe has decided to go they way of Intuit's TurboTax last year and add activation to their products. Legitimate users are up in arms. For Adobe, they follow the steps of other companies, macromedia, quark (who coincidentally shipped their entire engineering offshore) in the graphics biz. Now since in theory they'll be making more money, I hope at least the price goes down (oops, it did not, looks like the upgrade price even increased)."

Comments

Re:just like....

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a 100% legit Avid editing system, however I downloaded a crack and use it on my system.

The reason?

If you lose the hardware key (dongle), or it gets stolen, Avid helpfully suggests you buy another full copy of their software to replace it.

So I use the crack on my system and have the dongle locked up somewhere safe where nothing is going to happen to it.

Just another example of legitimate users who are inconvenienced by additional copy protection.

I'm sure Adobe is trying to stem the casual copying of their products, as it will do absolutely nothing to stop hardcore hackers from breaking the protection in the course of a few hours and releasing a patch for everyone else.

The problem with activation for legimitate users

[tcd004]

I use quark and various adobe products for DP work and I have to meet deadlines. When it's 8 pm and I have to ship files by 8:45, I can't spend time troubleshooting an installation of a product that just went haywire. I don't have time to spend 2 hours on the phone with customer support figuring out how to RE-activate. (the activiation codes in quark are roughly 40 numbers long. 40 numbers!!!. Try communicating that over the phone line with a guy in india.

My old solution: I have another computer with the same software installed. When one goes down, I drop it like and empty bic lighter and fire up the other one. No problem.

With software activation, I can't set up this failsafe without blowing my department's budget.

softare activation wankers

tcd004

Not Just CS

[KagatoLNX]

I recently felt really good about deploying Acrobat 5.0 with a customer for in-house forms work. Basically, they had 45 people. 2 stations had Acrobat so they could make forms, everyone had the free reader, and the 10 few who needed to save or sign forms had the $50 Acrobat Approval. This worked wonderful, was affordable, and I could feel good about PDF as an "open" format.

So what happened? Acrobat 6.0 came out. Sure enough, they left out Approval. Their customer service tells me to either get Adobe Acrobat Elements (1000 licenses or more only!) or "upgrade" to Acrobat 6.0 (mind you, they have a Standard or Professional version now). So I just went from:

2x$250 + 10x$50 = $1000

to

12x$250 = $3000

That was not cool and makes me look like a dork for recommending Adobe as being somehow "more open" than, say, MS Word. To this day, they won't even say that there will be no Approval version. All I want is for them to say "we don't plan on it" so that I can just tell my customers to abandon it--they won't even do that. They just say "stay tuned to the website for the next exciting release".

This mentality makes me wonder when PDF will become a closed format.

Adobe is plummeting rapidly on my list.