Email from boss: "John, please make updates to the attached datasheet. Need for 10AM meeting." No sweat, Boss! Double-click Adobe InDesign CC icon on desktop. "Your membership has lapsed. Please contact Adobe." Yes, it's been SO much nicer since Adobe started "renting" their products on a monthly basis, rather than just selling them. An hour on the phone with our purchasing dept, our IT dept, a couple of reboots, a couple of false starts, a change of user-name later... it finally opened.
Also, who could ever afford to upgrade any Adobe product for personal use? I got an owned CS2 at home. We have CS5, 6 and CC at work. So many cool new features that CS2 doesn't have, but fuck if I could ever afford a monthly fucking fee for this shit!! Thank Yoda that CorelDraw still simply sells you their product. $250 every couple of years and I'm current again.
Yeah, CS2 is what I have at home as well. I've mostly moved on to Pixelmater for my image-diddling needs these days.
Yeah...I'm needing to buy an edit program and I've been torn between Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier. FCP is a one-time purchase...buuuut I've heard that Apple is getting out of the computer editing business so Final Cut X will be their last program (plus the hardware is much more expensive than PC machines). Adobe makes you buy a subscription. I'll probably end up with Adobe because of the support.
This. The subscription model is a bad idea for anyone who isn't using the software professionally, and even if they are, it's always the people up top who don't realize you can't buy it once, you're just buying it every year. It's a sucker's bet, and Adobe has to be the worst offender. What gets me about Adobe is they're just like Corel. They don't really innovate, they just buy already popular software, slap on the "Adobe" label, and up the price 1000%, with nominal changes. I used to own Cool Edit Pro 2, which cost about $249 (I got a massive discount on it, but that was retail). Well, a few years later, Adobe bought out Cool Edit Pro, and renamed it Adobe Audition. I swear to God, when I demo'ed the software, it looked and worked exactly like Cool Edit Pro 2. They didn't even change the color scheme, but the price was now $300. Now, of course, Adobe Audition is a subscription service, somewhere around $30 a month, or $249 a year. So yeah, fuck Adobe. <rant> I hate the direction software has been moving in for years, though. I use Paintshop Pro, because I have used it since it was Jasc Paint Shop Pro v1.0, and I feel most at ease with it. I currently have PSP X9, because they offered it to me for $14, and holy shit of course I'm buying that. I had PSP X6, and was going to stick with that for another 5 versions, but all I kept getting were reminders, notifications, popups, promos, advertisements every single time I started up or quit the software, that I needed to upgrade to get the full experience. You couldn't disable them, either, they'd come right back. So when they offered X9 for $14, I took it, not only because I do love the software itself but in hopes of at least calming the constant influx of annoyances. So I start up PSP X9, and I get a clear screen with a great program ready to go, right? Hell, no! I get hit with offers to buy their latest video editing software, and when I exit, they show me a promo to get notified when the next PSP version is published. I shit you not. </rant>
Even before they moved to the subscription model, they were already starting with the bullshit that you weren't buying a copy of the software, but rather a license to use their software, which I imagine was a distinction made to keep people from reselling the software or something like that. Kind of like that guy that got in trouble for buying textbooks overseas where they were cheap and reselling them in the US for a small profit to himself but a massive discount to whoever bought them.
the Adobe my company uses (don't know which version, it's not my choice either way it's foisted on us) SUCKS! It keeps locking up several times per day. It will work on one computer but not another, then it switches and Adobe now works on that computer but not yours, some forms it works for some it doesn't, etc.etc. Our IT department has been "working on a fix" for a couple of years now.
I'm the only person in my office whose Adobe won't let me right click - combine files. Very annoying.
that was awesome! Man I feel so old. 1986 prices for cars today would be great though! BTW Victoria Jackson makes my private parts engorged and tingly! amIright?
I don't think that it was Adobe which started that, regardless, it goes back to the early '90s. The same kind of legalese accompanies things like DVDs and music these days, as well as farm tractors.
A friend who's a cable commercial producer bought Lightwave (all the way back at version 6) for himself. He asked if I'd be interested in doing some 3D animation for him on the side. Lightwave's anti-theft device was a physical dongle you inserted between the monitor cable and the PC. So my friend called Newtek and asked if he could buy a second dongle and install the software on a second PC in his office. Nope. They said you had to buy another full copy of Lightwave. Even way back then. Since our laptop died, my wife decided to get a basic one for her own use. So I figured I'd install my purchased copy of MS Office 2010 on it. She was hardly ever going to use Word, but it should be on there. Nope. I got an immediate flag that I'd already installed that copy on two computers. But at least they gave a chance to appeal and somehow prove the other copy (on the dead laptop) was gone. That generated a 35-character key code to input, which then allowed me to input my existing 35 character serial number... Meanwhile I'm happily loading copies of CorelDraw on every PC I've ever owned without a squeek from HQ.
