I like Adobe, I dont love them like I did Macromedia, but I like the company and think it produces some fine software. But then Im a developer not a normal user. Normal users dont have as positive a view of Adobe.
Why? – we’ll there is an email with a bunch of graphs doing the rounds at the moment with comical graphs and pie charts from graphjam.com
One of them is this one:
To us developers this may look a little odd. But what the lay user means by Adobe is the Acrobat reader. The average users doesnt know what Acrobat is, it’s just a big Adobe logo that takes ages to start up when you want to view a simple pdf and is constantly asking to update.
Personally I dont like Acrobat(adobe reader). Not because it doesnt do a good job of what it is supposed to do – it does a perfectly fine job of rendering pdf’s. But I hate how often it nags me about updates and how big the downloads are for the updates. And most importantly because I cant tell it to bugger off. There is no way to tell it not to update or nag me. I dont like being nagged for something I only occasionally use. I’m guessing a lot of other people feel this way and it is doing the Adobe brand some significant damage.
Dont think its an issue – take a look at dearadobe.com – this is the number 1 gripe people have against the company! It is also the number 2, and number 3 gripes. It bothers people more than the very high prices for photoshop etc.
I really want Adobe to remain successful; but if you manage to annoy everybody with a piece of free software, then you clearly need to have a close look at your business.
Great point.. Quite a few bad implementation decisions by the Adobe PDF team. Lucky for them there really isn’t a competing platform for portable documents.
While were bitching about PDF I was extremely disappointed with the way that PDF’s render on the Kindle. Pretty much unuseable..
I find the same thing really annoying about Firefox, with a new update every couple of weeks. But with both Adobe Reader and Firefox as well as Flash I realize these updates are mainly about security issues. Hackers are finding new exploits in browsers, plugins all the time and companies have to react to these exploits as quickly as possible and release patches. For Adobe Reader, updates used to come out on a quarterly basis unless it was a really big issue, but even with that Adobe is under pressure from security companies to increase the number of updates.
The title of your post “Why no-one likes Adobe” isn’t exactly reflecting a scientific analysis, but I agree that the number of updates are annoying. The good news is that they are actively updating their products. The bad news is that some of the updates seem to be fixes of items missed during the QC phase of product development. I perceive that Adobe is a company that’s trying to do a lot and if there are bumps in the road it is reflective of their motivation to compete in a very fast moving industry. Could they do better? Of course they can, and hopefully they will.
Every software has bugs and some software come with capabilities to allow the user for an in-app upgrade (i dont get annoyed when i launch firefox / filezilla and they ask me to update). Adobe updater does have an option to not bother you with updates. check it out.
Hey Jeff, yeah not really a scientific study, but the fact that this issue is the top issue on dearadobe.com suggests that it probably is the one thing that Adobe does that bugs people the most. I also completely understand that software needs updates. But I think the PDF Reader manages to do updates in a user unfriendly way. Really updates should be small and only when needed.
Also, appologies if Ive offened anyone at Adobe – didnt mean to – just trying to highlight an issue that I think would ‘bring adobe more love’ if they improved it.
Arun, you are quite right.. I just found an option to turn off the updater by accessing the preferences window in the Adobe Reader. The funny thing is that every time Ive wanted to turn off updating its been during the update process and Ive never been able to find a way to do that from the actual updater.
I do second the thought of not keeping the title offensive. It’s completely every individual’s perception/opinion
There are many groups of people anti-google, anti-microsoft, anti-yahoo, anti-apple etc. who cares ? why de-fame?
Hey Arun,
I didnt mean to offend or defame (I dont really think the title really counts as deformation – just opinion). But Im always willing to bow to peer pressure. So Ive changed the title from ‘Why no-one likes Adobe’ to ‘If Adobe changed this everyone would love them more’ – I hope you approve
What I hate is that update download manager that is installed without asking