Dear Adobe: Why I won’t upgrade to the latest Creative Suite 5

With the recent announcement of Creative Suite 5 by Adobe this past week, and the subsequent complaining that always seems to accompany such an announcement, I thought I would type-up a quick complaint letter that interested people can copy & paste into an email and send off to Adobe. Perhaps if those of you who aren’t happy with the direction Adobe is going in send this letter to them, they’ll completely toss 20+ years of successful software into the bin and start over from scratch!

Dear Adobe,

I’ve been a long-time user of Adobe products, and I feel like you’re not listening to all your users with this latest release of Creative Suite 5. I’ve outlined the reasons that I, your most valuable customer, will not be upgrading my single copy of Creative Suite Premium of CS1 I got off Limewire, because it runs just fine.

First of all, I think it’s pretty damn stupid of you to leave all us non-Intel Mac users out in the cold. I purchased a G4 about 10 years ago and don’t see any reason why I should upgrade my hardware just so I can run your new software. You clearly don’t care about your most important customer.

But that’s enough about hardware that you have no control of… let’s move on to your software.

Your new software is buggy. CS1 runs just fine. I have nearly every piece-of-crap shareware, freeware and OS hack available installed on my Mac G4 with 1GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive, and your software crashes constantly. Your engineers clearly do absolutely no quality control whatsoever. How hard could it be to build a program that does as much as just Photoshop does and make it run on every piece of ancient hardware out there? I have lots of designer friends on MySpace and they tell me that their copy never or rarely crashes, but they’re not very computer savvy. You suck in this area, and obviously don’t care about clean coding. You should have the Googles people write your software.

Even if I could afford to upgrade to an infinitely more powerful Mac Mini to run your Intel-only CS5, and triple the RAM for $100, I cannot justify the $599 price tag for the Design Premium suite upgrade. I realize that every serious and rational designer on the planet charges enough for a single brochure design to nearly pay for the full $1,899 Suite, I choose to low-ball my competition by working day and night on a corporate logo for $100, and only charge roughly $200 for a brochure. How do you expect me to pay for this professional software?

Speaking of the price of CS5 Design Premium Suite, why do you force your most important customers to pay so much for a bunch of apps they don’t use or need? I only use Illustrator and Photoshop, so I don’t need InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Bridge and all that other garbage you throw in to inflate the cost of the suite. Nobody needs that stuff. If you stopped building InDesign and Dreamweaver alone, you could lower the cost of the Design Premium Suite to a more appropriate $299, with a $49 upgrade. And please don’t tell me to only buy upgrades to Photoshop and Illustrator, I like having all the other stuff just in case I need it. But I don’t want it, cause nobody uses it.

What is this icon?
I don't know what it is.

You’re supposed to be a “creative” company, yet you are not smart enough to keep the 10-year old icons from the older versions of the software. How am I supposed to remember what icon is Photoshop in my Dock. I have over 60 icons in my Dock and in the last 10 years you’ve changed the icon three times now, twice where you simply changed the color of the letters PS in the icon. This is very confusing. You need to hire someone like me to design your icons. You obviously don’t even use a Mac or you would not do something like change an icon, even slightly. And speaking of design, I know the splash screen only appears for about 3 seconds on a modern computer, but why must you make it bold and so overly recognizable? Why not use all the filters in Photoshop on a photograph and use that for the splash screens? That way people know all the filters you can use when they see the splash screen.

One more thing about design. What’s up with those boxes? I realize that some designers buy software on the intertubes, but every designer I know buys the boxed version and those new boxes don’t stand out on the 6-foot long software shelf at my local Computers-R-Us store. If you made better boxes, you would sell more copies, and then you could actually afford to print the instruction manuals so I can has better design work.

The Creative Suite 5 boxes SUXORZ! You should have me design them next time!

Now let’s talk about features. You keep adding all these features, making all the apps bloatware. I think you should stop adding all these features, except for a button in the toolbar to [type your request here]. This is most important to your customers, yet you add things like the ability to remove an object from a photo and have it automagically fill in the gaps. I don’t need that, and neither do any of my designer or photographer friends on Digg or Facebook. It’s all these useless features that make the apps run so slow on my G4.

In fact, you really should combine Illustrator and Photoshop to be more like CorelDraw – that way you don’t have to build so many separate features in two different apps because they’ll all be in one. Then you could take the extra time you save by not having to work on Illustrator and add all the features from Freehand that made it so much better than Illustrator. Freehand was much more popular and useful than Illustrator, so I’m not sure why you bought Freehand and killed it anyway. I assure you that if you listened to me and added the feature I want, more people would buy your overpriced software.

If you could just fix all these things in the next few months with a free update, that would be great. But also, you need to add some more features that make it worth upgrading to as well.

Sincerely,

[Insert your name here]

If you’re the type of designer or photographer who doesn’t agree with this letter, please continue to enjoy the anticipation of using all the great new features of CS5 when it’s released next month!