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?
Mostly musings on design
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2 responses to “You can’t get there from here…”
Funny — I have always been treated poorly by Adobe, with the exception of the time they tried to convince me that Adobe was a good place to work (that time they fed me pizza and won me a backpack that I take on day hikes). I knew that we were all doomed when acrobat reader advanced past version 4. By that point, the writing was on the wall. The rest is just the culmination of the loss of customer centricity that piece-of-crap acrobat foretold.
Yes…Acrobat has slowly devolved into crapware since version 4. What is amazingly stupid is that I was just recently installing updates for CS3 and there was an update for the updater! I mean what the crap? Isn’t the updater application a glorified web client that downloads updates and runs installer scripts? What could you possibly update in it if you wrote the code decently the first time? It just boggles my mind. But in general I’ve been treated pretty well by Adobe. So I’m still cutting them a little bit of slack but I don’t know how long that will last.