Dear Adobe: What the hell happened to you?

Filed under: Design, Productivity, Adobe

Dear Adobe: What the hell happened to you?

by David Chartier May 23rd 2007

Adobe has slowly been adding to that chip on many people's shoulders for some time now, and lately they seem to be upping their game. Certainly, comments from their CEO like "our customer is not typically price sensitive" don't help matters, but it seems that even the very software their company is so well known for is beginning to suffer from poor, nay - dreadful - design and management.

Take this rant from Gus Mueller of Flying Meat software on how much trouble it is to simply update Adobe Reader. Gus had to download a disk image containing an installer package which does nothing but download the actual installer application - ironic, especially since you would be hard pressed to find a browser these days that doesn't have its own download manager, sometimes even with bleeding-edge features like pausing and resuming downloads. But the fun doesn't stop there, as Mac developers Rogue Amoeba noted on their own blog last September: for some reason that we're sure would elude even The Oracle herself, Adobe Reader needed to launch an updater upon first run that needed to download updates for itself before checking on any updates for Adobe Reader...

Shouldn't all this software already be at their latest latest versions? Do we really need to download something that downloads something that downloads something just to check if it has to download something? Who manages this software, and what did they do with our dear friend, sensibility?

Please Adobe - this needs to stop.

Tags: adobe, adobe reader, AdobeReader, design, engineering, flying meat, FlyingMeat, gus mueller, GusMueller, rogue amoeba, RogueAmoeba, software, updates

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)

james 42 said 11:13AM on 5-23-2007

You think that's bad, how about how CS3 is disabling firewalls in OS X and not bothering to re-enable them on completion: GracefulFavor

As for Reader, who uses that anymore? Foxit runs a lot faster without all the crashing and annoyance.

And then there's the whole "Adobe is ripping off European customers" thing.

Nice work Adobe, you have turned a once loyal fan into someone seriously considering moving away from your products, entirely. I'm not sure it's realistically possible for me to do that, but I am looking into it.

james 42 said 11:14AM on 5-23-2007

Ah, no links, well here you go:
http://gracefulflavor.net/2007/05/22/adobe-cs3-installer-disables-osx-firewall-and-doesnt-feel-like-re-enabling-it-when-its-done/
http://www.amanwithapencil.com/adobe.html

Gardiner Westbound said 11:18AM on 5-23-2007

I love Adobe Acrobat, but it's becoming a real pain in the ass. As soon as I find an alternate that can scan files to a .pdf document I'm gone.

James said 11:19AM on 5-23-2007

Adobe isn't the only one guilty of mangling their download/install process (though it applies to a lot of their products, not just reader -- try to find an offline installer for Flash Player, I dare you). Hell, look at the Blizzard Starcraft 2 announcement -- they distributed not the video, but a downloader for the video that uses the same peer-to-peer/server hybrid that they use to distribute their WoW updates. Ick. Sun does it for Java, too. It's an epidemic that I see from all sorts of companies now, and I can't even figure out the business logic behind it.

asurroca said 11:26AM on 5-23-2007

Adobe is an absolute mess, and I wouldn't be surprised (read: I hope) if they find themselves in trouble with the Feds soon. Ever notice how now that Adobe bought out their only major competitor, Macromedia, their suite's prices suddenly shot into the stratosphere? Adobe is a monopoly that's ripping off its customers.

Let's not forget that the original PDF program handles the format far worse than the free alternatives. And that GIMP does 90% of what Photoshop does, for free. And that despite forcing Vista users to upgrade to CS3 if they want support, I installed the CS3 trial on my Vista machine, and it runs far less stably and slower than CS2. I could go on and on.

I know it's hard, but we've got to admit this to ourselves: Adobe sucks.

emor8t said 12:15PM on 5-23-2007

Im so not price sensitive to Adobe Product it's not even funny.

How do I manage to stay non-price sensitive? I don't buy.

And there it is Adobe. When I have to choose between a Canon Rebel XT at the end of the month, and Photoshop, what do you think Im picking? Guarantee is isnt a piece of software.

iamhoff said 12:31PM on 5-23-2007

Amen. Adobe annoys the living hell out of me, and the whole AutoUpdater thing makes me want to chuck the laptop out the window.

Dave Chartier said 12:50PM on 5-23-2007

One of my latest beefs that I should have included in the post is their destruction of the UI for the Mac OS X version. All the buttons on panels and widgets are now on the right, as they are in Windows - no longer on the left, as in every other Mac OS X app.

Now this isn't a Windows/Mac beef, it's a usability beef. John Nack from Adobe said they're trying to create a standard experience across platforms - but you can't do that with these very fundamental UI elements. I would honestly be griping just as much if they had switched all the Windows UI widgets on the left side of the window, as they are on Mac OS X, because they would then be destroying the Windows experience just like they've done with CS3 on the Mac.

When in Rome, you do as the Romans do. You put Windows UI widgets on the right, and Mac OS X UI widgets on the left. Period.

Karim said 2:21PM on 5-23-2007

My favorite is how Adobe Reader hangs the whole computer during shutdown because it (MISTAKENLY) thinks you have a PDF open in a browser window and this is reason enough to abort shutting down the computer.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=331506

The *FIRST* solution Adobe suggests is to close all browser windows, then WAIT, quote, "5 to 7 minutes" before shutting down. I supposed Adobe wants you to go have a cigarette or a make a nice cup of tea or something.

I've seen MALWARE that was more well-behaved.

Then of course Microsoft was going to make it easy to save documents as PDFs straight out of Office 2007, then Adobe freaked out and said OH NO NO NO, you can't DO that, we're going to drag you to the DOJ and sue you for ANTITRUST!!!

So Microsoft had to make it an add-in instead of building it into Office 2007:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

Unfortunately the add-in doesn't VIEW PDF files, it just creates them.

In Mac OS X, of course, there's the lovely Preview app, which loads PDF files instantly and has a very nice UI. Unlike the bloated Adobe Reader, which takes a long time to load and looks like it was ported from Solaris.

God forbid Microsoft should come out with a PDF viewer like Apple's, because Adobe would drag them into court and accuse Microsoft of crimes against humanity.

I *really* hope the XPS standard takes off, not because I am convinced it is better than PDF, but just because Adobe has pissed me off one too many times. Acrobat is stuck in the Windows 98 era of AppHangs and crashes and vulnerabilities and someone needs to come along and put it out of its misery.

Mike Werner said 3:35PM on 5-23-2007

I'm sooo disappointed in Adobe, I've stopped using all their products. In fact, I stopped at Photoshop 6. Acrobat is already replaced by Foxit.

Their pricing policies remind me of the 60's, before users had internet and could find out who was paying what and where.

Their support is a disaster, 10x worse than Microsoft. You open a support case, and the just close it without doing enything.

Too bad, it used to be a good company.

Racetrack-Owner said 4:21PM on 5-23-2007

Personally I've always thought Adobe was very overrated. They often do have important and useful products, but the quality, convenience factors, and pricing were always way out of line, and they just seem to be getting worse. But, like Windows, their products are always "good enough" and often just slightly better than what you can get on the cheap (let alone free), so they aren't going anywhere any time soon.

Abscissa said 5:48PM on 5-23-2007

"...seems that even the very software their company is so well known for is beginning to suffer from poor, nay - dreadful - design and management."

Whaddya mean *beginning* to suffer? It's been suffering for a looong time now.

Comment #11 (by Racetrack-Owner) really hit the nail on the head on this. I couldn't have said it better myself.

the forester said 8:03PM on 5-23-2007

It boggles my mind that Adobe Reader itself takes so long to load. Apple Preview can launch and open a PDF in a matter of seconds ... Adobe Reader takes nearly a full minute. Why such excessive bloat -- just to read a PDF?

widget_13 said 8:25PM on 5-23-2007

Part of the reason for the bloat in Adobe Reader is the number of plugin features it has in it. PDF has evolved from a simple print document to a method of handling everything, including videos, ebooks, and whackloads of 'security' features.

Yeah I know, videos in PDF? Crazy.

steve said 8:34PM on 5-23-2007

Try PDFCreator. It's not a viewer, but you can easily make PDF's from any program. It installs as another printer.

Pablo Mac said 8:37PM on 5-23-2007

I could continue tolerating most of my other beefs if they would act on the multitude of Captivate users who need a Mac OS X version. There's really no competitive product on the Mac.

Josh said 8:55PM on 5-23-2007

Adobe's developer tools, like Flex Builder, aren't as bad as the rest of the Creative Suite. We'll see how long that lasts, though. :/

Jim said 9:07PM on 5-23-2007

As an ardent fan of the Corel design suite, I've never had any use for any Adobe product of any kind. Their prices are insane, the user-hostile, non-intuitive software sucks up so much memory it's ridiculous, and Corel does everything they do and more easier, faster, and cheaper. I've been a working web and graphics professional for a decade, and I've done it Adobe-product-free every step of the way. It IS possible, and even preferable to seek out alternatives.

Nerd said 9:21PM on 5-23-2007

They're busy out to lunch, that's what.

Or too busy lurky around MySpace.

Gary said 9:22PM on 5-23-2007

comments from their CEO like "our customer is not typically price sensitive"

What could that mean except that Adobe doesn't expect non-commercial users to pay? Cool. We agree.

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