Hacker News Reader

Comment by vz8 | Hacker News Reader

Following up: 50 minutes in chat and 5 rounds of back and forth like a used car dealership before they would agree to cancel.

Adobe: "Have 3 months free!"

Me: "We are no longer using these licenses."

Adobe: "But you are on the hook for a year. We have reset all of your licenses to have the same annual renewal date, regardless of when you purchased them."

Me: "We are no longer using these licenses. Free months are just a tactic in hopes that we miss the cancellation window and are forced to pay for another year."

Adobe: "We highly recommend that you accept our generous 3 months free offer."

Me: "That sounds a little ominous. Please cancel the licenses, effective immediately."

This is paraphrased, but follows the essential conversation. Adobe, you disappoint me.

View on HN

Yet later, all the complaining when one uses pirated versions of their products. A company that behaves in these ways flatly deserves no consideration when choosing to simply use pirated editions of their software. Many people are way too forgiving of what should be considered blatantly shitty behavior by vendors yet heap blame on those who don't pay "fairly" for using the same company's products.

I don't think you should fight bad behaviour with a different kind of bad behaviour.

This just increases the overall badness in the world.

Unfortunately I do not know the solution; their product is simply good, and the alternatives are all lacking in some ways.

I agree with the general reasoning of what you say but in this case (and some others we could name) I'm tempted to call it a form of protest even. Basically letting them know that: "Your product is good enough that I respect it, but i think i'm justified in working around the way you've set up payment for it through so many dishonest dark patterns that some of them might arguably even be illegal themselves. So fix yourselves a bit first before acting like the only victims".

Tell them they're engaging in racketeering and you're going to file a complaint with your state AG.

I wonder if this would work for SiriusXM and/or AT&T with their ever-creeping upward prices and reduced offerings - SiriusXM takes over non-sports channels for sports throughout the year, and at&t threatened to perma-ban my SIM cards if we tethered, even though i bought the SIM cards with the understanding that all three would be allowed to tether at-will. See, they removed "overages" but eliminated tethering during the full swing of pandemic, so that's the "new normal". I'll lay 50 for 1 that sometime this year they'll bring back overages, but not tethering.

What's worse is the poor employee forced to do this day in and day out.

They're getting commission when they succeed.

Or in the case Wells Fargo, they're threatened with being fired if they don't meet sales quotas using unethical and illegal means. Then they're fired anyway when they are caught.

Doesn't mean they like it

Some do. They are the ones who make careers in sales. They enjoy the challenge of getting people to buy stuff that they really don't want.

Sure, but such cognitive dissonance usually gets resolved in the long run, and the easiest way is to somehow convince yourself you're doing the right thing after all.

That sounds like every excuse-making Facebook and Google employee on HN.

isn't that awful? sigh.

This sounds like me trying to uninstall Adobe Creative Cloud only to be stopped by an 'error' each time.

I haven't used creative cloud in a while and wanted to uninstall it: you need to log into the service and go through all updates in order to uninstall it.

Their new business model feels so invasive.

I actually booted up an old laptop the other day, there was creative cloud sitting very smugly knowing it's probably not leaving any time soon...

I will never use an Adobe product ever again. I know many that feel the same way.

In Adobe's defense, I had the opposite experience. We weren't using a product, and noticed that we'd been billed for 5 months for it.

They offered 3 months free. I asked if they could apply it retroactively since they could see we hadn't used it, and no longer needed it. Bit of a crazy request, but they did it!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com