Category: Applications

Dear Adobe,

Your activation process is making my life miserable. I am trying to follow the rules and regulations of the EULA (which sucks too but that has more to do with the poor state of legal affairs). But here’s the issue. Although I predominately use my CS3 license on my desktop machine, I occasionally have to use my laptop. Your activation scheme makes it nigh impossible to accomplish this without some degree of frustration. Might I suggest you find a better way of handling this? Some possible solutions:

1. You trust your customers. I’d say a good 80% of us try to do the right thing and a serial number would be enough to stop most casual pirating. Make your products easy, friendly, and a good cost-to-value ratio and watch your sales soar. Your customers will love you. Or were you trying for the “it is better to be feared then loved?” Because at the moment its more of a “better to be loathed.” And I certainly am not feeling the love.

2. Make it easier to transfer the license between two computers (not 3, not a network – just two)…without having to deactivate or activate all over the place. This would reduce the number of staff you have to have answering calls about activation. Your developers are pretty smart. I’m sure they could figure this out by the next release.

3. For $150-$200 more sell a 2 CPU license (it would work best with two different serial numbers so the two could licenses could operate independently). I think this would do amazingly well. It would certainly make small design boutiques happy!

4. And this is where I think Adobe could really make a change for the better: figuratively “fire” the marketing and business managers and let the engineers lead the company…you need practical visionaries, not false prophets who search for the uttermost farthing. I may not be a fortune 500 company, but I am your customer and I am concerned about your current course which appears to be more focused on profits then on customer needs – the European pricing is really quite outrageous! Consider this a friendly warning from someone who has been with you since the Photoshop 4 days.

I look forward to a productive exchange of ideas. Maybe we can create a better, more user-friendly way of handling this activation thing?

So I got my CS3 Design Premium update. This updates Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Acrobat Professional to … whatever version CS3 puts them at now. Its all fine and dandy and it updates pretty much everything I have from either Adobe or Macromedia. Almost. I therefore added Fireworks CS3 update to my order in the (mistaken) belief that I could update my Fireworks that I got with my Macromedia MX 2004 Suite. Hah! Nope. It won’t take my serial number for my MX 2004 Suite. So I call Adobe to see whats up. The Adobe rep tells me I need the serial for the stand-alone Fireworks and that the MX 2004 Suite serial won’t work for the upgrade. In fact, if I want an updated Fireworks I’m either going to have to purchase the Web CS3 Suite (as opposed to the CS3 Design Premium upgrade I did purchase), buy a standalone full version (non-update) Fireworks, or get the whole kit and kaboodle with the Adobe CS3 Master Collection. I’m a bit flabbergasted. I’ve generally been treated quite well by Adobe but this whole situation just rubs me the wrong way. It certainly makes “a la carte” ordering systems more appealing, where the more items you order, the greater the discount and you can purchase exactly what you need as opposed to what the marketing and business team think you need. Adobe has basically told me, “You can’t get here from there”. I should have checked the upgrade notes a bit more before ordering but still… So count this as a warning to all you potential upgraders and hopefully a wake-up call to Adobe to my suboptimal customer experience. Who knew that you can’t upgrade to Fireworks CS3 from a MX 2004 Suite license?