I love Adobe, I Hate Adobe
I sent the following letter to Adobe Customer Service last week. I wanted to share it...
I am a designer and have been a loyal Adobe & Macromedia customer for over 15 years. I have bought multiple versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, Director and Flash for myself and my staff over these years at multiple companies. After Apple, Adobe is the company serving the needs of the design community... especially following the merger of Adobe and Macromedia.
Two things about Adobe are really pissing me off and ironically, it seems to have the most to do with Adobe Acrobat... the one program I don't pay for. Over the last 2 or 3 years, Acrobat buttons have been showing up in Word, Outlook, Excel and Powerpoint. I don't want them there but they won't respond to requests to remove them. Worse, they often show up on their own line in the toolbar so I lose a whole line on my monitor for buttons that I don't even use and can't remove. I remove them once and then they show up the next time I launch the app. I never asked for them in the first place! I've also had a "Send as Acrobat" button replace my "Send" button in Outlook. This happened at two different companies I've work at and challenged both tech support departments in removing them. How could Adobe think that sending an email as an Acrobat document could be more important than just sending a plain old email? I would love to know the thinking behind this move.
The other major problem is that Acrobat, Photoshop and Illustrator were constantly checking and downloading updates. I got notices everytime I tried to quit and go home for the night that they were checking for updates. In Acrobat I got notices for the same language updates over and over. Luckily, this problem seems to have subsided. But were they really updating the software that often?
Adobe, please stop pushing your buttons and updates where they are not wanted. You are THE design software company. When designers need something from you, we'll pay you for it!!!
