How Adobe (nearly) prevented me from buying Adobe Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3
Sunday, June 13th, 2010I just bought a new Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom 3 online on the Adobe site. Heaven prevents that I ever have to do this again. I had one of the worst possible customer experiences possible. I felt so much like 1996. Running a monopoly for too long has obviously dampened Adobe’s need to deliver, well, at least decent service to its paying customers. If there was any alternative to the Adobe products (at least to Photoshop – and do not say GIMP!) I would surely be using it now.
First of all it is surprisingly hard to convince Abobe to sell me anything at all. I used, as I always do, the US site. Well, US, the Internet is supposed to be international I thought. Through a desert which stylistically needs an update anyway I navigated to the products I wanted and put them in the shopping basket. For the checkout Adobe wanted me to log in with my Adobe ID. I did that. And was refused. The reason? My ID is valid only for the German store.
This is bad since for some silly reason the prices in the German and the US store are different, even for identical products. I want, obviously, an US/English Photoshop since virtually all books and tutorials are English as well. I could buy that for a good price on the US site or for an overcharged price on the German one. I was willing to swallow even that and typed the adress of the German site in my Browsers’s adress bar. (more…)