Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6
patdryburgh.com
patdryburgh.com
Adobe in the last 5 years has now let go many of the core developers of their critical products and outsourced their key products to development teams overseas who were not familiar with the product or the fields of graphic design and illustration.
What we see now is the predictable result of getting rid of the people who are familiar with the code base, under the theory that developers are interchangeable so one should get the least expensive one.
What is the correct way to do this? The original designers that have the product vision and have created the architecture that supports the market winning product should have been mentoring the next generation of developers at the company on site. This is a practice of apprenticeship which takes a few years. This is what is needed to transfer the knowledge and philosophy of design for which the company is known.
I was there...they herded everyone down to an all-hands meeting, and announced that they had made an unsolicited offer to buy Adobe. The room went nuts, but I remember a few of the more senior developers grumbling that it was insane (which it was. Adobe had a poison pill, and even if it hadn't, the stock leapt as soon as the news of the offer hit the wire. Quark never had a chance.)
Three years later, of course, Fred Ebrahimi fired most of the development staff, and the rest is history.
For anyone else wondering what a "poison pill" is, in this context:
I don't know if that's true, but even if I take your word that it is, this really has nothing to do with the OP's problem, which is order fulfillment and not the actual Creative Suite software.
And as a user of quite a bit of Adobe's CS software (I have a full CS6 Creative Cloud license for a year due to attending Adobe Max last year and had CS5.0 prior to that), I don't see too many signs of what occurred with Quark when it comes to the quality of new releases. The Creative Suite software is all pretty good year over year and generally improves more than regresses, and this is true up to and including CS6, IMO. Granted, one could argue each new release doesn't offer a ton more than the past release (especially considering the premium upgrade pricing), but that's true of virtually any mature commercial software product.
if (validatePayment()) {
emailCustomer(generatedSerial);
}The process was atrocious. Each phone call essentially started from scratch. One time, I actually got a U.S. representative, and while they were more coherent, ultimately they were no more help, insisting I go back into the other support "flow", which dumped my right back into an Indian (I'm assuming) support center.
It took a fucking month. By which point, the person's original deadline and need had passed.
At the end, I was explaining to the support staff what they needed to do. I finally got someone with a bit of initiative, and after they went to their manager once and received the wrong information, I convinced them to make a second attempt, again with my clarification.
These "managers" have access to a system that generates keys. All the manager had to do was look up and generate the right kind of key. Which they finally found, after my strong insistence and detailed description.
This was one of many support center "managers" consulted by staff during multiple calls, none of whom had a fucking clue about their own product.
If they had, and had demonstrated any motivation, let alone initiative, this month of purgatory would have been reduced to one 10 minute support call.
You can see why they "need" to shift support overseas. It must be the only way they can afford endless hours of utterly useless support staff time.
Fuck Adobe. I'm generally reserved on HN. But these bozos really deserve the outrage.
P.S. I've nothing against overseas (for me) staff. The staff were consistently polite and patient on the phone. They were just utterly untrained and unempowered to solve the problem. (The "managers", OTOH, were in front of the fucking key generation system. They merely had to actually identify the right product and generate a key for it.)
There seems to be no support management team in any normal sense, and no upper-management concern about the lack of support management.
Here's 59 ways they failed to deliver me a working product:
http://consumerist.com/2008/03/adobe-needs-eight-employees-t...
I did, finally and purely by chance, end up speaking with a front line support representative who not only came to understand what I was describing but who also demonstrated some initiative.
When they, after my lengthy -- starting "from the top", once again -- explanation, inevitably "went to their manager", they were given an incorrect response. I explained this, and how I had encountered it before, and what was actually needed. And this person actually went to the manager a second time and "pushed back" enough to get the manager to look again. Lo and behold, they found the right product in the licensing system (a special combo installer created for the CS 5.5 32-bit support) and finally supplied me with a working key for that installer.
Unfortunately, my intuition is that that front line representative was probably not long for that job.
P.S. Upon reflection, I now recall that I may have spoken to such a manager, once. Just long enough to get the brush off.
The one thing that really held back InDesign at first was the hideous amounts of RAM it required just to say hello.
Sorry, but that's the way it works. Especially if you are mentoring someone overseas.
It's not (just) a matter of spite. Particularly if you're a bit older, and you're staying in or locked into that sort of corporate environment: You are much more employable when you are already employed. (You need a job to get a job.)
This is all, of course, from a U.S. perspective. YMMV.
P.S. I am all for mentoring and have been the mentor more than once. But these days and in these types of organizations, it is often not fostered or rewarded. And it is not up to you to make up the difference with your own sacrifice.
I don't think I'm at odds with what the parent says (who is, I think, describing a different organizational attitude, as opposed to working differently within the one that actually exists). But, as someone who was brought up to "pay his dues" -- I'm not sure whether people even learn or believe that attitude, anymore -- I'm saying, "pay your dues" is no longer a general rule and is often used as a lever of exploitation.
No great surprise, my saying that. But it bears repeating.
... and then being fired? Great piece of advice!
As for Adobe's shitty software, it doesn't help that Adobe have acquired most of their titles via acquisitions, check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisition...
Some of the software (such as flash) are handed down many times, ensuring the loss of those who knew the code best, which were often the company owners who cashed out after the initial sale.
Adobe's software titles and portfolio are so massive now that it's no surprise that they're laden with bugs, overly focused on new features and notorious for their CPU requirements, memory footprint and ancient code.
The best Adobe software titles have always been their home grown, more recent titles, such as Lightbox and InDesign. It's clear they know the code here and how to revise it.
Adobe's risk is that, like Quark, their main business is in relatively few titles. They could be competed effectively by anyone who is willing to take on the big 3 design requirements. (Raster Editing/Vector Editing/DTP for PDF/postscript output.)
The reason gimp fails to make a sizeable dent in photoshop is because it has next to no support for CMYK images(or spots), which are essential to print.
I'm not sure why there's a need for apprenticeship today, when there are so many ways to record and exchange information. There just needs to be a culture giving value to documents and documenting practices. This doesn't reduce the need to hire good people, but is likely to increase their work efficiency, regardless of how much development is outsourced.
I own CS3 and was entitled to the one year discount. However my account at adobe where my copy of CS3 is registered was created many years go and appears to be incompatible with their current systems. My account information says I'm from the USA, which is incorrect, I'm from Australia. So when I try to buy Creative Cloud at the Australian Adobe store it redirects me to the American store and when i try to buy it at the American store it say I'm not allowed (because my ip is from Australia).
Right, so I just assumed I'd login and change my country to Australia. Wrong! Their admin panel breaks when I login. JS errors, tried many browsers to no avail. I assume this is because I am missing half the information it assumes I should have.
OK, I'll just call Adobe and they can change my details manually. Wrong! I spent 1hr and 20mins on the phone while they transfered me about. Eventually someone tells me that someone else will fix my account shortly and then I will be able to buy Creative Cloud. Well it's been 3 weeks now and my account still isn't fixed and I can't bring myself to give money to such an incompetent company.
The last version of Office I bought, I bought online, its undownloadable. There is no CD key in the account. A few years ago I used Office Live. Its shut down and (may be) named 365 or you are supposed to use Office 365. I don't know.
I once used "Microsoft Online" which was just a hosted Exchange server. The goal was to use the web based email, along with Outlook on my desktop, and synced to my phone. They told me to call support to get Outlook to work with the hosted exchange account on my Windows machine. No thanks.
Nothing with Microsoft's "cloud" services make sense. There are a bunch of different names that continually change. Multiple accounts access multiple services. And in the end, most of it barely works.
Its surprising and disturbing to hear the same thing happening at Adobe.
The bones of these bloated bureaucracies are creaking very loudly. The managers of these companies are begging for customer assisted suicide. That's good for small start ups who have no trouble staying on message.
1) Pay
2) Receive email
3) Use download link to get installer (1 .exe package)
4) Use serial included in the email during install
Like my BizSpark ran out a few months ago and I only just realised. But I've not heard a peep from them about it. As I was clicking around the MSDN site the whole thing seem to be in two minds about whether I was an existing customer or not.
Or when my credit card was cancelled and they locked my XBox account from adding a new credit card and after two weeks they still couldn't figure out how to unlock it so I effectively lost that account because I couldn't buy gold membership for it. Good thing I care little for achievements.
Add to that the fact that all their sites are built on the very broken ASP.Net membership that means you should never attempt to change your username or your email address as you're likely to lose control of your account.
So for example, a very MS experience in an Adobe app might be wanting to view the online help. Loads Help application. Oh, Help needs updating waits. Help is an Air app. Oh, now Air wants to update waits. Right, all done. Oh, no local help files, and can't seem to see the ones that are local for other apps. Whoa 700mb of help files to be downloaded, I think I'll just view the online version. Taking ages... Now nothing is showing. Gets's some content. Why was I here again? It's honestly easier to just open a browser and google it.
Buying software has just left a bad taste in my mouth most of the time in the last couple of years. Good thing I'm not a gamer I suppose.
I've also stopped buying music digitally. I have a Zune pass, but the music I really care about, I buy on CD and rip.
I've utterly stopped buying audio books from Audible. While you /can/ burn CDs and so on, I've basically had it with that nonsense. The last audio book I bought, I had to "turn pirate" in order to listen to (the CD write borked, and I didn't have any apparent recourse other than to rip the audio stream directly).
Sometimes, of course, it is unavoidable. The more narrow the problem, the more likely that the software available that solves the problem is somebody's proprietary vertical app. But, at the very least, that gut-level mistrust of relying on non-free software ensures that if I do press the "Buy" button, it is because I've exhausted all other options.
But, really, how would that be different if the user ID was a random name? People could still have "numerous Apple IDs and content bought with all of them".
If it does exist, do you happen to know the URL as I've been looking to do this for a while.
Checking again, that feature does not exist. I was certain I has seen info about doing so, but the official Apple docs say "nope".
The stupid stuff is the following:
This was not always required. I think there was a transition period were it was not enforced but only advised on the register page. And also somewhat ambigous like "Enter here your Apple ID username eg. BruceWayne@mac.com" I know two people who entered their (company) name in such a way, but without really having a dotmac address! And then dotmac was changed to Mobile Me and even though me.com was retained for iCloud I couldn't use an "old" Mobile Me email-adress, which was sad because it was a nice address with the initials of my name, but had to make a new me.com iCloud account/address. Really Confusing.
My first issue was that there were two descriptions of what happens when you cancel an annual subscription early. I thought about calling up to ask which one actually applied, but I couldn't stand the thought of fighting through a phone-menu/customer-service/hold dance to actually get an answer, and more importantly, I don't have any trust that the answer I would have received would have been correct anyway!
> Right, so I just assumed I'd login and change my country to Australia. Wrong!
The admin interface "worked" for me, but the problem is, you can't change your registered country anyway. I went round and round in circles, and would actually end up at the South African store regularly, for some reason. Not to mention that if you visit the business store, the Photoshop subscription plan isn't even present.
I was too lazy to bother calling them up to change it, so I just registered another account (I didn't have any previous purchases). Then I ran into the next problem: I had no idea how to actually download the program! The Adobe store redirected me to... a blank page. And in the 5 emails they sent me regarding the subscription there were no links to download the program. Somehow I discovered the Adobe Creative Cloud Client, which finally let me put in my login and download/install the software.
God help someone like my (artistically inclined) mother if she ever wanted to do the same. It really is amazing how a process can be so broken. It's broken enough that I'd consider going and searching for a pirate version purely to avoid having to deal with Adobe. And that saddens me, that a company with such a tight grip on a market can treat it's customers and users with such contempt.
I bought Photoshop Elements online for the Mac a couple of years ago, and it took two days for them to email me my serial number.
Businesses will still pay for it, and there isn't much room for competition in the individual/very small business/student market because it's hard to compete with free.
No one's really clamoring for a reasonably priced alternative b/c it's basically free.
Forget the next SoLoMo craze - who wants to disrupt Adobe? They need it.
"Adobe is Lazy" - Steve Jobs (http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/01/googles-dont-be-evil-...)
I agree. As a photographer, I use Lightroom and Photoshop for most of my post-processing needs. Lightroom, when it hit, barely felt like an Adobe application (it's great), but Photoshop has always been a nightmare of crashes. CS5 on OS X is especially bad.
As an experiment, I tried to use (only) Lightroom and Pixelmator[1], which is the closest "indie" alternative to Photoshop I could find/had experience with. Note that GIMP was out as 2.8 wasn't released by then, and older versions were horribly clunky. Pixelmator gets a lot of things right; it's fast, has a clean UI and supports a raft of layer blending types. But it lacks a lot of useful keyboard shortcuts-and I don't mean "Photoshop shortcuts", I mean shortcuts, period.
This in itself slowed me down considerably; I have a small set of Actions in PS that I use for some final tweaks on most images. Having to re-create those layers manually, for each image, isn't that fun.
I would definitely say that for most users, Pixelmator (or Acorn, etc.) can definitely replace Photoshop. But it's difficult to move away from PS when there's such a large ecosystem attached to it (as unfortunate as that realisation may be).
I purchased an education license online, going through the convoluted student status verification process (which was incredibly unintuitive at times, e.g. I had to open a support ticket to request verification). After I put in the payment details, I was told that the purchase was successful, and that I should be expecting the license key in my e-mail shortly. Few weeks pass with no e-mail, and no indication that anything had gone wrong, so I called them up. Turns out they had never received the payment, and the representative on the phone actually made me go through my bank transactions to verify that the transfer didn't take place, rather than confirming it on their end. Finally, I just gave up and used a pirate version until the version 4 beta became available. I hope the process goes smoother when version 4 becomes available for purchase.
- Improvements in the text handling
- Automatic layer boundary management
- Filter layers and "Layer effects"
- Non-destructive editing
- Auto-anchoring of floating selection - or better, get rid of floating selections!
- Script recording and playback
- "Smart objects"
Even for me as a mere moderate power-user (I design websites/apps and do photo adjustments), there's four things on that list that are absolutely essential. And I'm willing to pay the extra dollars for it given how it enhances the final product.
Of course, if you don't care whether or not anyone uses your software, telling people with questions and requests to jump off a cliff is entirely reasonable.
Once I had a photo in the Gimp, the most obvious thing missing was non destructive smart objects and filters/adjustment layers. These are a pretty big deal for me, which is a shame, because I would like to see the Gimp progress - it still has a long way to go.
Or: Why are UK prices nearly double US prices? It's cheaper to fly the team up to New York and buy the software there. https://getsatisfaction.com/adobe/topics/why_are_uk_prices_n...
If Support location mattered, you would have hawaii being charged differently from the other 49 states for every bit of software. As it is I have at least 2 hours of cross over with US business hours. If I bought the US software and had to call in during US hours, THAT would be understandable. No local free call number... that is understandable. But NOT just not selling it.
In the modern environment, if your entire transaction is via the website and the support rep is in india, why does it matter if I am buying from the US or Australia through your US store?
Surely the only cost is currency exchange, which I have to cover anyway on my Credit Card.
This is just Adobe trying to rake more cash in. They are betting that companies are not going to switch from Adobe products to something else because a licence is twice as expensive. So far, it seems to have worked.
Now in my old age I feel like I'm being held hostage to ever damn upgrade with few killer features that blow me out of the water. In fact just seeing a headline about an Adobe upgrade makes my blood boil because I know my credit card will be involved. And I've got no choice because you can't really afford to be behind one release if your work with other people.
So if any of you are looking for "that disruptive opportunity" just come up with a CS killer that doesn't feature an extortion business model. I'm frankly shocked that Apple hasn't done this yet, my guess is that it has something to do with patents or perhaps even blackmail material (because I can't think of a good reason why they haven't done it).
My guess is that Apple has basically decided the pro market for anything is not worth their while. Apple makes virtually all their money from mass consumer products like the iPod and iPhone. The spectacular growth in those segments has been paired with a steady decline in Apple's interest in servers, desktops, pro video, pro photography, etc. Good for shareholders no doubt, but I think it's sort of a shame.
(Also, paying $30 per month vs $1900+ up front seems to be a hell of a deal.)
The first step after getting a Creative Cloud subscription is to install the "Adobe Application Manager." With that installed, it's one click to install whatever Adobe app you want. There's no bothering with serial numbers.
Are you buying new or upgrading? Checking their website the upgrade is only $525. As they only come out with a new version about once every 2 years that. $525 to upgrade vs $720 for a 2 year subscription.
Even if you were purchasing new it's still cheaper to pay outright.
6 years at $30 a month for the first year + $50 for the next 5 is $3360
1900 + 2 upgrades at 525 is $2950
Even if I decide to keep the subscription after the project is over, paying just $400 more over 6 years for the benefit of amortizing my business expenses, not having to worry about being out of date, and not having to predict ahead of time which tools I will need in the future (e.g. if I had purchased the Web Suite a year ago, I wouldn't get After Effects) is totally worth it (to me).
I chose the download option just because I thought it would've been really simple: I assumed I would pay, then their shopping cart system would immediately give me a license key and a download URL. This assumption was based on the fact that I was going to spend $800 on a piece of software and it seemed like a reasonable expectation that there'd be a quick turnaround.
Noope. Someone apparently had to manually review the order, so that a license key and download link would make it to my email at some indeterminate period of time in the future. And of course, I bought it on the Saturday of a 3-day holiday weekend, so it wasn't until that Tuesday afternoon that a human punched the magical "fulfill order" button.
Of course, if you are only adding extra licenses onto a key you already have, no big deal.
In any case, it's inexcusable. But that's what you get with a monopoly.
But they did. If they don't catch the fraud before capturing the funds, then they'll find out about it when the real card holder charges back the unauthorized payment. Now they:
1) Lose the $10-25 chargeback fee.
2) Risk their ability to accept Visa and MasterCard cards at all if their chargeback rate exceeds 1% for multiple months.
The harm of payment fraud is not the lost product or service. Payment fraud is a direct threat to the very existence of an eCommerce business; the ability to accept payments from customers. If your merchant account is terminated for too many chargebacks, your company and all its principles are added to the MATCH/TMF (Terminated Merchant File) lists which all banks/issuers must consult before opening an account. They're essentially banned from accepting credit cards for life, for that business or any future venture.
Considering Adobe's software has historically been among the most pirated, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a significant number of people trying to buy it with stolen card numbers. Brand new phished CC#s can sell for just $1-2, the software's worth $500-1000... I imagine if they didn't have some serious mitigation effort in place they'd already be out of business.
Also keep in mind that this is a pretty expensive software package, so I would think they should have a team that works on this.
While I agree that most private users and to some point professionals can also accomplish the same results in Gimp as in Photoshop stuff like Bridge, the Creative Cloud and all those tools around the core applications makes the suites so valuable for designers that just do not want to roll their own sync / management / foo solution with even more software.
it's definitely my experience that a lot of more of my professional/creative friends rely on photoshop than gimp.
with this latest push to 2.8, i'd say the gimp folks still have a bit of kick in them and it's hard to argue with their licensing strategy. since the latter is what the original article was addressing, offering up the gimp as a good alternative seemed prudent. and, possibly, if facing a situation where i couldn't get photoshop licenesed over the weekend, it seems gimp would do in a pinch.
I'll have to ask him about it.
I spent a couple of hours on their help forum - which is manned (and womanned) by frustrated users and some adobe employees (probably contractors) who don't seem to understand the questions.
I finally succeeded in finding a pdf document containing all the terms and conditions in N (where N is large) languages. No index, toc, or hyperlinks. English language (actually attorney-eeze) was way down in the doc.
Ordering isn't the only thing Adobe has screwed up. Their CS6 documentation has no index nor table of contents. I've wasted hours simply trying to find answers to simple 'how do I . . .' questions.
This is a real startup opportunity - if you can negotiate the IP nightmare.
Adobe make it really difficult to want to buy their products.
http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/tcx5s/i_unknowing...
Not quite legal -- but possibly close enough.
Even after 5 working days we never got access and have to resort to using the Adobe reseller's account to actually try out the software.
Not saying Adobe support is great though. I had a nightmare experience some years back: my CS3 had license issues after installing trial CS4, and the good folks in India insisted I was ineligible to use my CS3! It was the single worst customer support experience for me EVER. A subsequent follow-up call resolved it easily though, so it's only a few bad apples IMO.
From what I've read that didn't actually happen. EA spun it that way to make it look like they were the victims, and it appears to have worked.
Here's a forbes blog article about it http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/04/05/ea-in-full-d...
Basically the only proof that EA has is some anti-gay hate mail they received that has nothing to do with the poll. There are no indications that the people voting in the consumerist poll were some kind of anti-gay mob.
Yes #333333 and 0.875em thin text looks cool on a grey background, but it is hard to read even with these young eyes.
And, for the record, the background is white, and #333333 meets the criteria of both the W3C and the WCAG (http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html?fg...)
Thanks for reading!
All of that said, I do intend to redesign the site with a larger font size. But, in the meantime, a little CMD (or CRTL) + + will go a long way ;)
It's absurd that Adobe can't even do this for a digital product.
I'm disappointed.
Emailed serials? Surely that is not a good plan. Email isn't exactly secure.
The same card was successfully used to buy Lightroom4.
Noone at adobe could tell me why my payment doesn't go thru.
Screw 'em, I have pirated the photoshop CS6. :(
We really have trivialized words like "nightmare" to death in the first world.
Promising a client concepts, then immediately asking for an extended time, only to learn that you may have to ask again can be considered a nightmare, depending on the client.
Bought latest Lightroom a month ago directly from their site, and it took 3 days for them to acknowledge the purchase and give me the license key.
Very odd.
I allowed it, but wasn't happy about the invasion of privacy.