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Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

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Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#111

Post by fotbr »

lusr wrote: post #109
jaems33 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a bit. Looking at GIMP's roadmap: - Improvements in the text handling - Automatic layer boundary management - Filter layers and "Layer effects" - Non-destructive editing - Auto-anchoring of floating selection - or better, get rid of floating selections! - Script recording and playback - "Smart objects" Even for me as a mere moderate power-user (I design websites/apps and do photo adjustments), there's four thin…

That's quite a list. I wonder why it takes so long for these features to be supported. Perhaps what's necessary is a new paradigm of development: a core application with composable modules developed by a community on the basis of need. Evolution of standards will be tricky to manage but it seems likely to be inevitable.

It takes so long because the GIMP developers have a long-standing tradition of telling people with requests to go jump off a cliff if the feature being requested isn't directly useful to the developers. They have a fairly typical failing in assuming that because the source is available, anyone asking for features has the ability and the time to implement those features themselves, when often that is not the case.

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#112

Post by cpeterso »

droithomme wrote: post #15

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…

Adobe offshores their "mature" but profitable products to Adobe's Bangalore offices they can milk the cash cow with minimal maintenance costs. Examples include Director, Cold Fusion, the Flash authoring tool, and (I think) Flex Builder and Fireworks.

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#113

Post by ConstantineXVI »

cpeterso wrote: post #112
droithomme wrote: post #15

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…

Adobe offshores their "mature" but profitable products to Adobe's Bangalore offices they can milk the cash cow with minimal maintenance costs. Examples include Director, Cold Fusion, the Flash authoring tool, and (I think) Flex Builder and Fireworks.

Just noticing, all of those happen to be former Macromedia products.

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#114

Post by jaylevitt »

pasbesoin wrote: post #100
jcromartie wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you that every person he talked to during the order process was in an offshore call center somewhere. The order processing is probably outsourced to a third party too. I see no other explanation for something that should be: if (validatePayment()) { emailCustomer(generatedSerial); }

I went through the process of helping someone attempt to get license codes for the 32 bit, CS 4-ish versions of some programs that are included, for compatibility with older systems, with the CS 5.5 Suite -- it says so right on the tin that they are included, and the installation programs for them are right there on the DVD's. The process was atrocious. Each phone call essentially started from scratch. One time, I ac…

Even if you were able to talk directly to the manager, you'd have been stuck. (I talked to a woman who claimed to be "manager of customer care and sales in North America", and she didn't even know how to work their systems.)

There seems to be no support management team in any normal sense, and no upper-management concern about the lack of support management.

Here's 59 ways they failed to deliver me a working product:

http://consumerist.com/2008/03/adobe-needs-eight-employees-t...

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#115

Post by pasbesoin »

jaylevitt wrote: post #114
pasbesoin wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went through the process of helping someone attempt to get license codes for the 32 bit, CS 4-ish versions of some programs that are included, for compatibility with older systems, with the CS 5.5 Suite -- it says so right on the tin that they are included, and the installation programs for them are right there on the DVD's. The process was atrocious. Each phone call essentially started from scratch. One time, I ac…

Even if you were able to talk directly to the manager, you'd have been stuck. (I talked to a woman who claimed to be "manager of customer care and sales in North America", and she didn't even know how to work their systems.) There seems to be no support management team in any normal sense, and no upper-management concern about the lack of support management. Here's 59 ways they failed to deliver me a working product:…

To clarify, I never did speak to a "manager". That quite apparently simply is not allowed.

I did, finally and purely by chance, end up speaking with a front line support representative who not only came to understand what I was describing but who also demonstrated some initiative.

When they, after my lengthy -- starting "from the top", once again -- explanation, inevitably "went to their manager", they were given an incorrect response. I explained this, and how I had encountered it before, and what was actually needed. And this person actually went to the manager a second time and "pushed back" enough to get the manager to look again. Lo and behold, they found the right product in the licensing system (a special combo installer created for the CS 5.5 32-bit support) and finally supplied me with a working key for that installer.

Unfortunately, my intuition is that that front line representative was probably not long for that job.

P.S. Upon reflection, I now recall that I may have spoken to such a manager, once. Just long enough to get the brush off.

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#116

Post by tom9729 »

fotbr wrote: post #111
lusr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite a list. I wonder why it takes so long for these features to be supported. Perhaps what's necessary is a new paradigm of development: a core application with composable modules developed by a community on the basis of need. Evolution of standards will be tricky to manage but it seems likely to be inevitable.

It takes so long because the GIMP developers have a long-standing tradition of telling people with requests to go jump off a cliff if the feature being requested isn't directly useful to the developers. They have a fairly typical failing in assuming that because the source is available, anyone asking for features has the ability and the time to implement those features themselves, when often that is not the case.

If they're not being paid to work on it, why would you expect them to prioritize things they're not interested in working on or not going to use?

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#117

Post by Legion »

esbwhat wrote: post #84
AJ007 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reminds me of Microsoft's "cloud" offerings. The last version of Office I bought, I bought online, its undownloadable. There is no CD key in the account. A few years ago I used Office Live. Its shut down and (may be) named 365 or you are supposed to use Office 365. I don't know. I once used "Microsoft Online" which was just a hosted Exchange server. The goal was to use the web based email, along with Outlook on…

This is why I only buy software on CD, even if the option costs extra.

For me, this is why I am extremely reluctant to ever rely on proprietary software for important things.

Sometimes, of course, it is unavoidable. The more narrow the problem, the more likely that the software available that solves the problem is somebody's proprietary vertical app. But, at the very least, that gut-level mistrust of relying on non-free software ensures that if I do press the "Buy" button, it is because I've exhausted all other options.

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#118

Post by egorfine »

I tried to buy CS6 subscription five times, each approach took me 10-15 tries. Not the representative on the phone nor the web chat could help me: "we cannot process your order".

The same card was successfully used to buy Lightroom4.

Noone at adobe could tell me why my payment doesn't go thru.

Screw 'em, I have pirated the photoshop CS6. :(

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#119

Post by recusancy »

learc83 wrote: post #46

I'm about 90% sure that Adobe makes their software very easy to pirate in order to keep their monopoly. For CS4 and CS5 there were no cracks to install, just map the sites it uses to call home to localhost and enter a fake serial number. You could even run the updates. They could have very easily disabled this in an update, but they never did. Businesses will still pay for it, and there isn't much room for competitio…

Pixelmator is a reasonably priced alternative that has been making some headway.

Re: Buying Adobe Photoshop CS6

#120

Post by nosse »

The article is just a rant. I came to comments to see something thought provoking. Like deep analysis on the corrupting factor of monopoly or the problems of large corporations.

I'm disappointed.

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