This reminds me of Microsoft's "cloud" offerings.

The last version of Office I bought, I bought online, its undownloadable. There is no CD key in the account. A few years ago I used Office Live. Its shut down and (may be) named 365 or you are supposed to use Office 365. I don't know.

I once used "Microsoft Online" which was just a hosted Exchange server. The goal was to use the web based email, along with Outlook on my desktop, and synced to my phone. They told me to call support to get Outlook to work with the hosted exchange account on my Windows machine. No thanks.

Nothing with Microsoft's "cloud" services make sense. There are a bunch of different names that continually change. Multiple accounts access multiple services. And in the end, most of it barely works.

Its surprising and disturbing to hear the same thing happening at Adobe.

The bones of these bloated bureaucracies are creaking very loudly. The managers of these companies are begging for customer assisted suicide. That's good for small start ups who have no trouble staying on message.

Adobe has started to remind me of Microsoft in other ways in the last few years. Lots of applications that you have no idea what they are for, stuff that doesn't work or gives you some awful experience that sidetracks you from the simple task of what you were trying to originally do. Lots of interrupting dialog boxes and a lack of consistency. Oh and reinventing everything with every iteration.

So for example, a very MS experience in an Adobe app might be wanting to view the online help. Loads Help application. Oh, Help needs updating waits. Help is an Air app. Oh, now Air wants to update waits. Right, all done. Oh, no local help files, and can't seem to see the ones that are local for other apps. Whoa 700mb of help files to be downloaded, I think I'll just view the online version. Taking ages... Now nothing is showing. Gets's some content. Why was I here again? It's honestly easier to just open a browser and google it.

I bought the student edition of Microsoft Office 2007 back when that was the current version and the entire process was simply:

1) Pay

2) Receive email

3) Use download link to get installer (1 .exe package)

4) Use serial included in the email during install

There are some parts of MS that work, some that don't. It's a roll of the dice every time.

Like my BizSpark ran out a few months ago and I only just realised. But I've not heard a peep from them about it. As I was clicking around the MSDN site the whole thing seem to be in two minds about whether I was an existing customer or not.

Or when my credit card was cancelled and they locked my XBox account from adding a new credit card and after two weeks they still couldn't figure out how to unlock it so I effectively lost that account because I couldn't buy gold membership for it. Good thing I care little for achievements.

Add to that the fact that all their sites are built on the very broken ASP.Net membership that means you should never attempt to change your username or your email address as you're likely to lose control of your account.

This is why I only buy software on CD, even if the option costs extra.

For me, this is why I am extremely reluctant to ever rely on proprietary software for important things.

Sometimes, of course, it is unavoidable. The more narrow the problem, the more likely that the software available that solves the problem is somebody's proprietary vertical app. But, at the very least, that gut-level mistrust of relying on non-free software ensures that if I do press the "Buy" button, it is because I've exhausted all other options.

The ironic thing is that until recently photoshop's was cheaper to buy on disk than it was to download. Madness. At least they seem to have fixed that little bug, though the difference is still only £7.

We're in a digital age. You shouldn't have to do this.

You shouldn't /have/ to. But I still do, at least for the important tools.

I've also stopped buying music digitally. I have a Zune pass, but the music I really care about, I buy on CD and rip.

I've utterly stopped buying audio books from Audible. While you /can/ burn CDs and so on, I've basically had it with that nonsense. The last audio book I bought, I had to "turn pirate" in order to listen to (the CD write borked, and I didn't have any apparent recourse other than to rip the audio stream directly).

I agree completely. The last two pieces of software I bought were both for a computer that doesn't even have a CD drive. But it still makes me feel better to have the files, in a way that more or less guarantees there's no prerequisite of having a functioning internet connection (implying their server will also need to work in order for the software to)

Having your software come in a box doesn't always mean anything. Take a look at Diablo III. Even though the particular software that you use may work if you have the disk, there's a good chance that the next version won't even have a physical option.

Unfortunately true. TBH The only two things I've needed/bought in the last couple years were an adobe suite (wanted to get one while I was still a student) and parallels, both for my macbook. I run linux on all of my other PCs and use free (as in proprietary but at no cost) or open source software pretty much exclusively so I'll be alright.

Buying software has just left a bad taste in my mouth most of the time in the last couple of years. Good thing I'm not a gamer I suppose.

Hah, I was in a very similar situation to you last week, wanting to start a Photoshop subscription.

My first issue was that there were two descriptions of what happens when you cancel an annual subscription early. I thought about calling up to ask which one actually applied, but I couldn't stand the thought of fighting through a phone-menu/customer-service/hold dance to actually get an answer, and more importantly, I don't have any trust that the answer I would have received would have been correct anyway!

> Right, so I just assumed I'd login and change my country to Australia. Wrong!

The admin interface "worked" for me, but the problem is, you can't change your registered country anyway. I went round and round in circles, and would actually end up at the South African store regularly, for some reason. Not to mention that if you visit the business store, the Photoshop subscription plan isn't even present.

I was too lazy to bother calling them up to change it, so I just registered another account (I didn't have any previous purchases). Then I ran into the next problem: I had no idea how to actually download the program! The Adobe store redirected me to... a blank page. And in the 5 emails they sent me regarding the subscription there were no links to download the program. Somehow I discovered the Adobe Creative Cloud Client, which finally let me put in my login and download/install the software.

God help someone like my (artistically inclined) mother if she ever wanted to do the same. It really is amazing how a process can be so broken. It's broken enough that I'd consider going and searching for a pirate version purely to avoid having to deal with Adobe. And that saddens me, that a company with such a tight grip on a market can treat it's customers and users with such contempt.

Perhaps this kind of stories is what makes the App Store very successful.

But it's not without its idiotic blunders. Topping the list is Apple's insistence that your user ID be an E-mail address. That's not just a bad idea, but it has resulted in untold numbers of people with numerous Apple IDs and content bought with all of them.

I actually think this is a good idea. An email address is unique and easy to remember for the user.

The stupid stuff is the following:

This was not always required. I think there was a transition period were it was not enforced but only advised on the register page. And also somewhat ambigous like "Enter here your Apple ID username eg. BruceWayne@mac.com" I know two people who entered their (company) name in such a way, but without really having a dotmac address! And then dotmac was changed to Mobile Me and even though me.com was retained for iCloud I couldn't use an "old" Mobile Me email-adress, which was sad because it was a nice address with the initials of my name, but had to make a new me.com iCloud account/address. Really Confusing.

Which you can merge to the same account [edit: actually, no, you can just use in tandem].

But, really, how would that be different if the user ID was a random name? People could still have "numerous Apple IDs and content bought with all of them".

As far as I'm aware you can't merge Apple IDs and it has been said a few times that it isn't likely to happen, I might be wrong however.

If it does exist, do you happen to know the URL as I've been looking to do this for a while.

>As far as I'm aware you can't merge Apple IDs and it has been said a few times that it isn't likely to happen, I might be wrong however.

Checking again, that feature does not exist. I was certain I has seen info about doing so, but the official Apple docs say "nope".

You can't use them in tandem anymore if you want to enable automatic download. Then iOS locks you to one account for 90 days.

They're just as bad with the downloaded copies.

I bought Photoshop Elements online for the Mac a couple of years ago, and it took two days for them to email me my serial number.