Adobe joys, or, the overcomplicated silliness of software ownership

Tue 8 Jan 2008 - Filed under: Not a Journal., | Posted by: Gavin

Sometime in the last year or so we received an influx of cash (the sound of books selling well, cha-ching!) and we upgraded our Adobe software so now we have (the thus far hugely-underused) Design Suite—InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, Photoshop. So it was installed on two laptops and everything in the land of book design was thought to be both hunky and dory. (We are so far behind on web design that upgrading the Dreamweaver seemed like a huge learning-curve time sink.)

Recently a new iMac (with a screen big enough to, er, be very big and shiny) was winched down to us from a passing airship. Onto this new toy was cloned a laptop (which mostly worked fine except for making the stupid and complicated “permissions” even more stupid and complicated). Everything went smoothly enough for the nonce until we, foolishly, try and open InDesign on the iMac.

Does not work. A screen opens and says something along the lines of “You must reactivate this product.”

Not the only thing that needs reactivating around here. It’s winter and we’re hibernating. So, after a week or so of dilly-dallying, a call is placed to the activation line.

—Sorry, we are told, you have to de-activate one of the previous installs.

—But wait, we reply. We still only have 2 people using the software, it’s just that it’s in 3 places now. Look, it’s right there (well, almost) on the shiny big screen for the office and over there on the tiny travelling screens for, well, travel.

—Nope, replies the calm and polite woman no doubt used to this flawless and yet useless argument. What you have is a license limiting the number of machines on which you can install the software you (perhaps now you are thinking you over)paid for. 

—Dur! Grr!

—I’m sorry. You aren’t speaking to a machine you know. You’re calling the help line in India where all Apple and Adobe help has been outsourced. I barely understand what you’re saying. Is that English or just the sound of your teeth grinding?

Teeth ground down to stubs we admit defeat and instead of writing about the joys of our neighbors art files we wanted to look at or some other such wunnerful thing we post defensively and defeatedly (and perhaps repetitively, at least about that defeated bit) about the lack of flexibility in software ownership. Where’s Cory when you need him? Dur. Grr.

Ok, off to deactivate a laptop. Now, to do that do we cut the red wire or the blue wire?