Tuesday, November 27, 2007

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!!!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a feature called "PDFMaker", there are instructions about how to remove it from your computer overall or specific instructions on how to remove it from specific applications..... http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2005/11/disabling_1butt.html

I personally love this feature. PDF is the defacto for multiplatform distribution. Many people havent give microsoft the money for office applications (any why should they have to?), dont realize there are free viewers for office file types (for some operating systems anyway) or dont want to touch MS Office bloatware. Almost everyone (except maybe our grandmothers) has used a PDF at some point, it just works on any system anywhere on any system. Not to mention the much more meticulous visual control pdf gives designers. Dont get me wrong, as much as I love PDF i believe more in choice... and if you want to remove those "features" then it should be easy for you to find the answer how. Happy Holidays.

Unknown said...

thanks for the info... very helpful. Good comments to. I am not against the feature as much as where it shows up (without me requesting it) in my apps. "Save as PDF" is a great option to have. But when theses features show up as the only 2 buttons on a row in my tool bar, that's when it gets frustrating.