Thursday, November 29, 2007

Ordering Adobe Photoshop for Download - Process Hasn't Changed Since 1998

My wife recently left her job and decided to give some full time parenting and some part time contracting a whirl.  She's does art for the web, and uses Photoshop as her primary tool.  Well, our version of Photoshop was pretty old, version 6 which was released some time in 2001.

She recently got some work that required her to upgrade to CS3, so we needed to upgrade.  She went to the Adobe site to see what the upgrade options were, and there weren't any!  None at all.  There is not an upgrade option for any version of Adobe Photoshop earlier than version 7.  Pretty wild, considering you're shelling out $650 for a new version, as opposed to $160 for an upgrade.  Boo Adobe.  You've got a lot of loyal folks out there, and with this greedy policy, you're setting yourself up to fail.

So, I came to grips with that fact we were going to have to part with a good portion of my MacBook Pro fund, and buy the full version.  My wife orders it from the Adobe site for download, hoping she could download the nearly 800 MB package and install it, and start billing some hours to replenish my hardware fetish account.  Would you think that after giving Adobe $600 bucks that they'd give you the software right away?  I would.  But they don't.  You have to wait till they send you the email.  What's that all about?

So 4 hours go by, and she gets an email saying it's ready for download.  She goes to the site, and no download.  Kinda not ready.  The links were there for the download, but when you click them, there's no download.

So I called the support hotline, and got some guy in India named Lance.  Well Lance in India says they need 5 hours for processing of the order to make sure the software is available.  Available?  WTF?  Um, let me check to see if your copy of Photoshop is available, our engineers are feverishly copying the source and compiling a copy for you to enjoy...  Seriously?

On top of that, Lance said that since she ordered so close to the end of the day (2PM PST), that they would not be able to fulfill the order until the next morning.

This is crazy.  Why is this so difficult?  Why do you have to check inventory for a piece of software?  You don't have enough people to do a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V?  Lame Adobe. 

Watch out, there's bits out there that are getting close to what you do, and they're doing it for free.