Adobe is unprofessional
I always thought that Adobe was a professional company, and that they made professional products. Then I had direct experience with Adobe and their products. I’m sorry to report that Adobe really sucks. Here’s why:
- Adobe’s installer failed miserably.
When I popped the CS3 DVD in my system at work and fired up the installer, it gave me a small window with a floating piece of paper. The floating piece of paper sailed across the little window, from a folder on the left to a folder on the right, then it repeated. While this floating paper animation was flying, a progress bar below was creeping. Once the progress bar was full, the little window disappeared. And that was the end of the installer. The installer never did launch. I waited a long time for the installer to launch, and I ran it many times, but the installer never did come up.
I called Adobe tech support on this issue. I spoke to a very sharp, very nice, very patient guy named Robert. We ran through so many things, so many procedures, to fix this. And we were just guessing as to what the problem was. We tried turning off all startup programs, we tried putting the entire contents of the DVD onto the hard disk, we checked the system logs. we edited specific XML files, and we rebooted the system many times during all this. Finally, we stumbled upon the solution: he had me download a utility from Adobe. This utility was designed to repair Adobe installation problems. It did all kinds of things, like back up the registry, clean out temp directories, check files… and so on. The utility fixed the problem.
Getting all this “Adobe installer” stuff worked out and handled took the better part of one business day. That’s a lot of lost time just to handle a really crappy installer. In all my years playing with computers, I have never had the frustration of working with such a low quality installation program. By the way, we also had to turn on the Flexnet service. I’m just guessing that this was yet another failure of the installer.
- Adobe’s phone system failed for part of a day.
I was working with our vendor on a different problem; the serial number we got didn’t work. Our vendor tried to call Adobe to get some help but Adobe’s phone system was down. It was resolved the next day. More time lost.
Now, having said all that, I must report on the rest of Adobe’s products. Overall, Adobe’s products work very well. I have been using Dreamweaver for a few weeks now, and it has not crashed on me. I have been using Flash Video Encoder and it has only failed me on two movies thus far (requiring us to buy additional software to make up for Adobe’s failure).
So, overall, Adobe’s products have been working and working well. The fiasco with their installer really amazed me, and wasted a lot of time.
