Ok, you sent this to my email, on an account where you have my full name, and you couldn’t even take the trouble to create a variable data field and be polite?
The rest of the letter is as follows:
At Adobe, we always strive to deliver more value to our customers, including much requested new features and capabilities, critical bug fixes and security updates. For these reasons we recommend all customers use the latest release of our Creative Cloud applications.
We have recently discontinued certain older versions of Creative Cloud applications and as a result, under the terms of our agreement, you are no longer licensed to use them. Based on your preference settings, we are not able to see if you are using any of the discontinued versions.
Please be aware that should you use the discontinued version(s), you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.
Please upgrade to the latest version(s) using the instructions below. By upgrading, you will continue to receive all the value that Creative Cloud has to offer.
Thereafter follows a list of things they’ve discontinued.
Um… why wouldn’t they know what I have? It’s isn’t like they don’t have a little spy dashboard that is aware of items you have installed and when they need to be upgraded. It would be a simple matter to push a notice to that. I bet they can tell the 3rd parties who to go after for infringement claims though.
Or maybe they want to aggravate me more than their software already does.
I can’t retire fast enough to get away from these people.
I haven’t received that particular letter, but I wouldn’t be surprised to get one since I routinely disregard their never-ending and mostly pointless CC updates.
Adobe has turned into one of the worst, most customer-unfriendly companies I’ve ever encountered. Quark used to have a bad reputation, but Adobe has outdone their arrogance and bullying many times over.
I’ve said it before, but in my opinion the company should be prosecuted and broken up for gross violations of antitrust laws.
For all intents and purposes, they’ve become a monopoly that controls our industry all the way from the fonts we use to the final RIP and everything in between.
At anytime the want, they can put us out of business or force us to bend to their whims. It’s a company that does not deserve to exist in its present monopolistic form.
Where would we be without Adobe? How would we cope if they disappeared forever? We would continue to use the software they sold us and maybe give a little shrug.
Dig around in your install box / cds / whatever and you may find a pre-cloud version of the Adobe suite that you actually paid for. If you find it I can recommend that you install this version and forget all the ransomware you rent from Adobe.
You may have to make .idml versions of your newer InDesign files but the other software will open newer versions with a little complaining.
It will take a little adjustment in your expectations and you may even find that you miss some of the newer features (I doubt it) but you will be forever free of this Adobeangst.
I held out using CS6 for as long as I could (maybe until eight or nine months ago). Eventually, with Mac OS updates, certain things stopped working as they should and I was getting files from people that I could no longer open. There are a few interesting features in the CC software that aren’t in CS6, but honestly, I don’t need them. There are probably an equal number of things in CC that I like less than in previous versions.
I’m attempting to wean myself from CC and migrate to the Affinity suite, but the transition isn’t all that easy when it runs counter to the norm that most everyone else accepts.
That’s why I stopped updating Mac OS. The only thing forcing me to update now is browser incompatibility. The worse that gets, the more I’m driven to use Windows and Android. At least there’s more backward compatibility on those platforms.
Perfectly fine for a designer on their own not interacting with other designers.
Not so fine for production where we have to keep up with the designers who like to be on the bleeding edge of software updates. I draw the line at beta upgrades though. You use those and I can’t open the file, you get a phone call.
It used to be Adobe appreciated their “print partners” more and supplied pre-release versions of their next updates. They no longer have that offering, or that program, and couldn’t care less that printers have to wait for them to push an update in order to get it integrated into the work flow. It often is not a simple process. Starting with driver and rip updates and going downhill from there.
I highly recommend waiting a solid 4 weeks after a new full-number update is released before downloading it. Give the printers a chance to catch up and give the bleeding edgers a chance to find out what won’t work for you.
I find I’m agreeing with everyone here. I dislike how Adobe touts new “features” to sell the products without the new features being usable in a press setting. They may look good onscreen, but they will cost (someone) more to produce.
This means that art utilizing any new features (see my rant on pattern swatches and custom lines) get to me in a state of disrepair. That means I have to spend my time (at a massively inflated price btw) to do the things that Adobe promised a designer would work. So we send the file back and say “fix so and so” and resend (because it will cost them 3x as much if we do the fixes than if their designer does it).
But people HATE getting art back, especially when the artist that hired is saying “No it’s good art.”
The divide here is that this causes confusion with Sales staff who are talking to the customer who is talking to their artist who is talking to Adobe who will directly refute what I’m saying is wrong with the file. So sometimes we actually lose clients because Adobe is lying about the abilities they have.
All that said, I need to be up to date with every single CC update (as soon as bugs are worked out) because, as Print Driver says, good artists want to be on the cutting edge of software utility. So I need to be there too. Adobe makes that more difficult.
SIDENOTE: The board-game Monopoly, the best selling board-game of all time, was never meant to be an actual game. It was to be a tool to show people (who at the time were not as educated as we are today) that a “pure” monopolistic society hurts most people.
I just received a notice too. For the 2017 versions of Bridge and Photoshop.
InDesign has been sluggish and crashing daily since I updated it from version 2017 to 2019 a few weeks ago, and that has damaged some files that I’ve had to retrieve through Time Machine. I’ve been reluctant to update the other programs, and now Adobe is threatening me with a lawsuit if I don’t.
I didn’t even notice the Bridge. OMG, I’m illegal!
It really doesn’t help they call it CC7 when they really mean 2017. Naming conventions matter.
Dumping it now. (shows how often I use it any more.)
You may have misunderstood that. There may be potential for 3rd party legal action. Using or deploying the now-unauthorized versions could expose you to that.
“Please be aware that if you continue to use or deploy the older, unauthorized versions of Creative Cloud, you will not have third-party claim coverage pursuant to your contract with Adobe. Should you continue to use or deploy these unauthorized versions, you may be at risk of potential claims of infringement by third parties.”
I long ago decided Adobe had become an arrogant and conniving company, but I’ve never known them to be irrational. If anything, their methodical way of figuring out how best to extract a regular cash flow from their customers’ bank accounts demonstrates a certain evil genius.
So with that in mind, what possible rational reason would Adobe have for threatening those customers who might have a previous version of some CC app on their computer in addition to the newest ones. I mean, what possible difference does it make to them.
Their major updates never seem to automatically remove the old ones. Instead, I’ve periodically had to uninstall them myself once I’m satisfied I no longer need them. So is Adobe saying that we’re somehow hurting their interests by failing to manually run their uninstaller apps?
Is this company finally slipping from simple arrogance and narcissism into psychopathy?
Do you have any links to more information on that? If that’s the case, there still might be a logical reason for what they’re doing with a little more substance than psychopathy. Seems to me, though, if anyone gets sued by a third party for something regarding Adobe’s software, those people could then sue Adobe for leasing them software containing something that one might be sued over.
I haven’t bothered to read the latest licensing agreements, but I read on an Adobe Premiere-related blog that Adobe now only makes the two latest versions of their software available for download and only the latest version of Acrobat. Apparently, they regarding the possession of anything else as a violation of their licensing agreement. I don’t know if this pertains to CS6, which I’m not about to delete since I paid cold, hard cash for the license to use it indefinitely.
This is the only thing I find about the whole mess:
a snippet:
While Adobe has not said who the dispute is with, the company is presently being sued by Dolby. Through a legal complaint filed in March 2019 with the US District Court and the Northern District of California, Dolby is seeking a jury trial over issues of “copyright infringement and breach of contract” against Adobe.
I just switched to CC last year, held on to CS6 as long as I could. I vividly remember adobe selling CS6 along side CC saying CS6 will ‘always work’ but just won’t get any new features and CC will. Apparently that’s not the case, because from my understanding the installer doesn’t work on the latest Mac OS and adobe isn’t fixing it.
imo CC is bloatware that runs slower than the CS versions.
Also, really wish adobe would fix their bugs and compatibly issues that have been plaguing their software for YEARS instead of trying to come up with BS features meant for amateurs.
A few off the top of my head:
• Apple Airplay breaks photoshop UI elements
• Certain Modifier keys don’t work in photoshop when using dual screens and with application frames turned off.
• all of Adobe’s open/save dialog windows are not compatible with dropbox selective sync.
I own CS4 and will never go any higher.
Just read this as a matter of fact in a “What companies screwed their customers” Reddit. Don’t let them try & charge you the cancellation fee if you want to cancel. The will eventually waive it.
Adobe pales in comparison to SiriusXM radio as far as renewal/subscription tactics go. The whole part about calling to cancel… yeah. I am at war with Sirius at the moment up to and including writing a complaint to the state AG about their billing practices. But I see more and more of their model out there. The latest is a newspaper I subscribed to changed their practice to “call to cancel.” Unless you live in a state where an online service has to have an online cancel, good luck with that.
Adobe is quickly approaching that point.
Like I said, I cannot retire fast enough to get away from these people.