Adobe: Down Two Strikes

April 24, 2012 — by Per Christensson

For many years, I only had good things to say about Adobe. However, the past few years have been different. Ever since the merger with Macromedia in 2005, the quality of Adobe's products has been steadily declining. The company seems to be so focused on meeting release deadlines that the user interface and reliability of their software seem to have fallen by the wayside.

I purchased Adobe's Creative Suite 5 Web Premium in 2010 and it was a huge disappointment. Dreamweaver, in particular, had literally dozens of bugs and was the least polished professional program I had used in recent memory. I upgraded to CS5.5 (the first time Adobe has done a x.5 update), hoping that Adobe had fixed the issues with Dreamweaver. They didn't. Not a single one of the bugs was fixed. Instead, they added "HTML5 features" that should have been part of the initial release, not a $400 upgrade.

The CS5.5 release also bothered me because Adobe stopped providing bug fixes and small updates for the original CS5 products only a year after they were released. In other words, if you didn't upgrade to CS5.5, you were stuck with buggy, outdated programs just one year later. That's not a great way to build or maintain customer loyalty.

Speaking of loyalty, I have been using Adobe products for close to 15 years. While Adobe's applications have been great for most of that time, the past two Creative Suite releases were two big strikes in my book. I really hope Adobe has addressed the quality problems in their software and that they hit a home run with CS6. If not, three strikes in a row means I will be looking for new programs to do my creative work.