Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

I wonder if they have a payment fraud problem that necessitates manual review of every order. Not that it would excuse the process or the support.

> They didn't lose anything by letting the user use Photoshop for two days.

But they did. If they don't catch the fraud before capturing the funds, then they'll find out about it when the real card holder charges back the unauthorized payment. Now they:

1) Lose the $10-25 chargeback fee.

2) Risk their ability to accept Visa and MasterCard cards at all if their chargeback rate exceeds 1% for multiple months.

The harm of payment fraud is not the lost product or service. Payment fraud is a direct threat to the very existence of an eCommerce business; the ability to accept payments from customers. If your merchant account is terminated for too many chargebacks, your company and all its principles are added to the MATCH/TMF (Terminated Merchant File) lists which all banks/issuers must consult before opening an account. They're essentially banned from accepting credit cards for life, for that business or any future venture.

Considering Adobe's software has historically been among the most pirated, I wouldn't be surprised if they have a significant number of people trying to buy it with stolen card numbers. Brand new phished CC#s can sell for just $1-2, the software's worth $500-1000... I imagine if they didn't have some serious mitigation effort in place they'd already be out of business.

Many years ago the number one page layout program was Quark Xpress. The company decided to save money by firing all their employees who developed the program and were familiar with the code base and save money by outsourcing all development to a code team overseas who was not familiar with page layout software or the Mac platform Quark ran on. This outsourcing team would appear on development boards asking extremely simple questions about coding. An OS X compatible version of the program was delayed for so many years that they lost almost all their customer base to Adobe.

Adobe in the last 5 years has now let go many of the core developers of their critical products and outsourced their key products to development teams overseas who were not familiar with the product or the fields of graphic design and illustration.

What we see now is the predictable result of getting rid of the people who are familiar with the code base, under the theory that developers are interchangeable so one should get the least expensive one.

What is the correct way to do this? The original designers that have the product vision and have created the architecture that supports the market winning product should have been mentoring the next generation of developers at the company on site. This is a practice of apprenticeship which takes a few years. This is what is needed to transfer the knowledge and philosophy of design for which the company is known.

Feel free to bump the text size up. The site's layout will adjust accordingly :)

And, for the record, the background is white, and #333333 meets the criteria of both the W3C and the WCAG (http://www.snook.ca/technical/colour_contrast/colour.html?fg...)

Thanks for reading!

Photoshop CS6 is a huge improvement over CS5. A lot of small changes that I think as a whole are long overdue. I'm one of the most anti-Adobe guys out there (as my Facebook feed is 50% jokes, and 50% screenshots of stupid things Photoshop does) but I have to give kudos to them.