Kzenon Überforward

I 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.

But still: Adobe refused to sell me the products! The reason was, that when I clicked “kaufen” (”buy”) on the German site I still landed in the US shop (why, please?) – where my ID was not valid! It cost me 20 minutes to find a menu in which I needed (by hand) to navigate to the “proper” German shop. Why in the world cannot Adobe simply direct me to that shop? And why do I land in the wrong shop? And why *is* that shop so wrong anyway?

But it does not end here.

I wanted a download version of the software. Adobe has the guts to actually demand a *higher* price for the download version. It’s true! The version they send you in a parcel costs *less* that the version without a DVD and a box! This obviously has to do with the fact that the soft version is downloaded from Ireland which has a 21% VAT instead of the German 19%. So I have to pay for Adobe’s decision to settle in a tiny little rainy bankrupt (yet very beautiful, this is about Adobe, not you very nice Irish people) Island. Doubtlessly they did that for tax reasons. Thank you, Adobe, for lowering your tax burden on the money I pay you by making me pay even more.

The download itself is a procedure that was undoubtedly designed by German engineers with a lot of Danish humor. Every time I clicked on “Download” the download manager Adobe uses changed the size of my browser window and one time it said “this manager seems not to be running” or so. I never understood the need for a “download manager” anyway, but *if* you want one on your site, cannot you use a good or at least properly working one?

Needless to say: Paypal did not work as well and I had to pay by Credit Card (probably not Adobe’s fault).

This whole experience felt like one big kick in my butt. With two licenses for Photoshop and Lightroom (one for my assistant and one for me) I may not be Adobe’s biggest customer. But I fell ill-treated. I would very much which for a serious competitor for Photoshop, just to get a bit of competitive spirit back into the way Adobe sells its products. I am seriously not happy.

PS: First trial of the new software. Lightroom has greatly improved but is buggy like hell. I am sure that we will see LR 3.1 in a not too distant future. PS CS5 is, well, different. Yes, some tools work much better, it’s true, and this is why I bought it. But there are “improvements” in the GUI that change most things to the worse. And there is no help that is worth that name.

Here is an example: coming from CS3 the “curves” looked different. I customized a curve and wanted to save it. But the save-button, as known in CS3, was gone. I could not find any other way to save so I tried to click the help button and typed “saving custom curve”. What I got was an article on how to save such curves in CS2 – simply by using the save button. Exactly the button that was gone. Why I got an article on CS2 while using CS5? I do not know. And, actually, I do not want to know, for to understand this one probably need a very twisted mind.

With wild clicking I found the right button eventually. But it took me eons and I learned much more about the help feature than I wanted to know.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2010 at 12:54 am and is filed under Software and Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.