Adobe you lost a fan...

I don’t like to complain and certainly not on a blog, but… this time my frustrations reached a boiling point.

Colleagues think I own shares of Adobe as I’ve always been a big defender of their programs and even the Flash player (yeah I know, stop laughing now…). In a company which heavily relies on open-source software and tools it was even a bit of a challenge to get a license for the Creative Cloud. But as I use at least one of the Cloud programs a day and our clients send us files in Photoshop and Illustrator format, it is really a logical choice to pay for it.

And I’m still a fan of the tools. As an ex-video editor I must admint that Premiere + After Effects + Audition + … is the top of video tools you can get at this moment (for that price). Photoshop is THE standard for anything related to graphical design. But if they can make such great tools at Adobe, why is their licensing such a pain in the ***.

I was a very happy user until problems started in November when user data was stolen from Adobe. I got a warning to reset my Cloud password. No problem so far. But then I got a warning my monthly license fee didn’t get paid. So I logged in again and gave in the Visa number of our company card. As this resulted in the strange message “Something went wrong on our side. Please try again” I retried…. and again…

As this wasn’t working and the help section told me to try an other browser and clear my session cookies, I tried that… and again…

After a long chat and phone call with support, it appeared that the error message should have been “Sorry, your card got blocked because of our security problems. Please contact your bank to get a new one…”. Please Adobe, give an error message which is usefull for the user.

But even with a new card payments didn’t succeed yet.

So after more then a month, two support requests on the forum, two chats, two phone calls, a cry for help via Twitter, direct e-mail with someone at Adobe, numerous retries in “manage your account”, … I’m stuck with an unpaid Creative Cloud plan and only 4 days left before my software stops working…

And apparently I’m not the only one on the forum, like this thread with over 2500 views and 60 replies…

Update 13/12/2013

After confirmation of Adobe that there is indeed a problem with their system and that “Our best engineers are looped in to figure out why this is happening & how we will get you back up and running.” it happened today… After many years of using Adobe tools, this is my first day without them…