Adobe's Strange Software Giveaway: Goof, Or Clever Marketing? 385
dryriver writes "Yesterday, Adobe put up a mysterious webpage from which its now seven-year-old CS2 line of products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Premiere and others) could be freely downloaded by anyone. The page even included valid serial numbers that will unlock the CS2 apps for anyone who wants to. This strange 'giveaways' page at Adobe.com quickly went viral on the internet after a few tech bloggers reported on it. An Adobe spokesman said initially that the CS2 downloads are for existing owners of Adobe CS2 software only, who may not be able to activate their software anymore, due to the CS2 activation servers having been shut down by Adobe. But the internet at large took this webpage as meaning 'Free Adobe CS2 Software for Everyone,' which was probably not what Adobe had in mind. It seems that at this point, hundreds of thousands of people have downloaded their 'free' CS2 products and installed them, and started using them. So Adobe is in a bit of a PR pinch now because of this — Do you tell all the thousands of people who have downloaded CS2 products in the last 48 hours that 'you cannot use these products without paying us'? Or do you accept that hundreds of thousands of people now have free access to seven year old Adobe CS2 products, and try to encourage some of them to 'upgrade to the new CS6 products'?"
If they are smart... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If they are smart... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't actually find a problem with that; if someone gives me a piece of free-gratis software and it has a simply click-through nag screen then that seems reasonable to me.
Surely that would be the only point to such a promotion for a corporation, give people chance to become accustomed to Adobe products and encourage them to upgrade to a paid install.
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The binaries are already out there. I've already downloaded mine. It doesn't contact an activation server. How would it prompt me?
Re:If they are smart... (Score:5, Informative)
Activation servers only come into play with CS4 and above.
Re:If they are smart... (Score:4, Informative)
Wondering if the win version would work on a mac running windows on VMWare?
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Definitely would. And it would also work on any version of OSX you can manage to install Rosetta on. CS2 is old, so it runs fast on new hardware, even through the translation layer. I'm still hoping to see someone get Rosetta working on Lion or Mountain Lion.
Re:If they are smart... (Score:5, Insightful)
And before you say it, CS2 has hit EOL. I have no reason not to disable update checking.
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See my pre-emptive self-reply:
And before you say it, CS2 has hit EOL. I have no reason not to disable update checking.
Re:If they are smart... (Score:5, Interesting)
They'll try to turn it into a marketing strategy, with constant reminders to update to a newer version every time you open your "free" version.
I suspect that their problem is that CS2 is more than adequate for most people who haven't already upgraded to CS5 or 6(in particular, it should curb-stomp any version of "Photoshop Elements" which Adobe doesn't exactly give away...
Adobe does add some interesting features with each new revision(their software engineering people are exactly as good as you'd expect, given the sordid histories of things like Flash and Acrobat Reader; but they have some genuinely interesting machine vision/image processing people); but a lot of the core tools don't change too much, both because there isn't too much to change and because the Pro users get touchy.
It probably won't hit existing CS5/6 customers hard; but allowing free CS2 into the wild will murder 'Elements' and make upselling harder.
How will this affect the industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been following the events closely and was trying to figure out how this will affect the industry. What has gone down is clearly a goof, not a marketing plan. Some say that it will help sales of CS5/6; others say it will hurt them. My best estimate is that the net effect on CS5/6 sales will be close to zero. However, as parent stated, if Adobe doesn't walk back their "permission" to use CS2, they have effectively killed off Elements. PS has the much higher price tag, but I'm sure that Adobe makes much more money off of Elements due to volume.
Elements: dead
Paint.net: dead
GIMP: dead on Windows
any other photo-editing software already struggling to survive: dead
Aside from PS, the other big release was Acrobat 8 Pro. This is really bad for Adobe, too, as there are no free, _usable_ tools for creating PDFs. Acrobat 8 Pro has everything most people would need to create PDFs, so this particular goof will definitely hurts sales of the modern version.
Adobe is between a rock and a hard spot: kill major sources of revenue or take on a PR nightmare. If I were them, I think I'd take on the PR nightmare instead of losing Elements and Acrobat. Let's see how this plays out.
Re:How will this affect the industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's a bit lightweight, and weirdly noncompliant with certain UI conventions of Windows; but I've always been impressed by how fast Paint.net is. Not quite as fast as paint; but far faster than Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, or GIMP. If you just need to pop an image open and do a quick fix, that really matters.
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I also suggest/install paint.net for people who need to do some image editing. It's a great tool that does everything most people need, has a TINY file size compared to the mammoth of PS, is 100% free, and is easy for people to understand because they think it is just an upgraded version of Paint.
I just wish
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I could have warez'd photoshop whenever I wanted before this...it just wasn't worth it.
Not worth it, because of the difficulty of doing it, or not worth doing something illegal and unethical?
The value prop changes a bit, if Adobe is making it available.
Re:How will this affect the industry? (Score:5, Interesting)
Paint.net and GIMP dead? HUH?
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This was my response. GIMP works great for me and has an update every time I check. Why is he calling it dead?
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The most recent GIMP release lacks important high-end photography features that even ancient CS2 has: native high bit depths, layer groups, and proper blending modes. Full GEGL support will bring these features to GIMP 2.10, but GIMP developers have a habit of rarely communicating their release schedules to the public, and also a habit of missing release dates. I'd be very surprised if 2.10 is released this year.
Re:How will this affect the industry? (Score:5, Informative)
> The most recent GIMP release lacks important high-end photography features that even ancient CS2 has:
I concur 100%! I have a .PSD file I created back in ~2006 and sadly GIMP 2.8 _still_ can't open it properly. Every year it gets a little closer though!
GIMP 2.8 is still incomplete / broken WRT:
* nested layer groups is partially broken - doesn't show Layer Effects as sub-groups .PSD file that uses them
* no native Layer Styles (FX Blend Modes) - they still don't properly work when loading a
see: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WSfd1234e1c4b69f30ea53e41001031ab64-789ba.html [adobe.com]
* no native option to set the default hotkeys to Photoshop
* stupid English name
Note: While GIMP has a layer blend modes that PS lacks, namely: Subtraction, Grain Merge, Grain Extract, Value) that is not the same as the Layer Styles.
Basically this page lists all the ways that GIMP functionality is lacking compared to PS.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/04/03/8-handy-tweaks-to-make-gimp-replace-photoshop/ [smashingmagazine.com]
The fact that you GIMP doesn't work out-of-the-box the same way PS does and you need half a dozen plugins to get the equivalent functionality already built into PS CS2 tells me that GIMP is still immature.
Hoping one day GIMP will become a viable PS replacement.
References:
Blending Modes supported in PS and GIMP
* http://emptyeasel.com/2008/10/31/explaining-blending-modes-in-photoshop-and-gimp-multiply-divide-overlay-screen/ [emptyeasel.com]
Re:How will this affect the industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, for fuck's sake. How many times will this need to be explained to the slow of thinking? The problem with GIMP is that it lacks features that are absolutely vital to professional graphic designers and professional photographers. It's not about the the GUI. It's not about keyboard commands. It's not about the host OS. It's about the basic goddamned feature set and how it works under the hood .
I'm an open source fanboy. I grew up on Linux. I run Slackware as my main desktop OS and compile my own packages, for preference. But when it comes to my photography, GIMP is not an acceptable substitute for Photoshop. Until GIMP has those vital and basic features, I'm going to stick with Windows and my education-licensed copy of Photoshop.
Re:How will this affect the industry? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with GIMP is that it lacks features that are absolutely vital to professional graphic designers and professional photographers.
Which is why many professional photographers use Adobe Lightroom. It's better than Photoshop for most photo post-processing activities, including the stuff you do to 90% of your photos as a matter of course.
I have GIMP and Paint.NET and I've used Photoshop and there's only a couple of things that I can't do in Lightroom that I'd want to do. Contrast masking was one, but Lightroom v4.x removed the need for that (with its excellent highlight/shadow sliders) and the other is HDR - which you can acquire far cheaper software than Photoshop to do for you, or use the layers and transparency masks within any of the three products to achieve manually.
I almost never need HDR though, and even when I do I rarely have a tripod available so it's just not worth paying money for.
A lot of professional photographers do have and use Photoshop, but a wedding photographer just wont have the time to go through 2000 images in Photoshop. It's not designed for that sort of workload.
Photoshop basically adds some very nice tools to do photo patching (which is a more manual and less seamless task in Lightroom) and proper image manipulation - rather than merely post-processing.
A professional will benefit from the ability to do things like take out power lines, remove acne, maybe even recompose a shot, but cropping, correcting lens aberration, adjusting the colour balance, saturation and brightness, changing the effective exposure (and the contrast curve), applying colour filters as part of converting to black and white.. these are things I do in Lightroom.
Re:How will this affect the industry? (Score:4, Informative)
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Adobe Audition is what Cool Edit became.
Cool Edit 2.0 is still very usable software 12 years later, and so is the classic cool edit 96
Re: If they are smart... (Score:5, Insightful)
their key servers are down.. do you think they even have stable code for that one?
Did you suspect that Adobe had stable code for one of their products even when they released it?
The latter. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:The latter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The latter. (Score:5, Interesting)
"And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Seemed like a good move considering they're having to deal with market erosion from things like Paint.NET and GIMP.
Re:The latter. (Score:5, Insightful)
the only good thing about GIMP is that it's free. Otherwise it's torturous to use. No way is it a real competition to photoshop (which is slightly less torturous) Yes, I know I could go in and help fix it but my first step would be to delete all the code.
Brett
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indeed.
even for semi-serious non-professional uses i find GIMP to have a horrible UI. it's sort of like Blender.
honestly i'd rather work out an ImageMagick script to do what i want than do it in gimp. at least then it's reusable and command-line.
i do prop PaintShop Pro and Pixelmator for being solid products an order of magnitude or so cheaper than Photoshop.
altho pixelmator has swallowed a bit too much of the Apple cool-aid around stamping out "Save As", imo.
Re:The latter. (Score:4, Informative)
It's "horrible" only because you're not used to it. That's all, IMHO.
Re:The latter. (Score:5, Funny)
Got to love ImageMagick, there's nothing funnier than confusing a "creative" with their MacbookAir by batch editing a folder full of images via SSH on a mobile phone, they just can't grasp what's going on.
Re:The latter. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, take that people with a different skill set!
When did you last use Blender? (Score:4, Insightful)
Blender has had its UI completely redesigned. I think it's one of the best designed in any kind of 3D software now.
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Paint.net, sure, but GIMP, really?
Re:The latter. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I'd say they have high piracy because after you purchase your first upgrade you realize Adobe's ripping you off ... and you don't want to keep giving them money for new version which basically amount to bug fixes.
- I remember Photoshop CS ... mostly how buggy it was ... ... ... smart objects but not much else compared to CS ...
- Then getting excited about upgrading to CS2
- After upgrading to CS2 realizing it did not offer anything new really
- Mucho money spent over multiple version with only minor increment
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Says you. Adobe Lightroom is easily worth every penny.
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You have $400 left at the end of the month? Spread some of that wealth around...
I wish as of recent. Some of us simply do not make $70k a year who can buy such things. I have seen posters on slashdot where they laugh at those offering just 60k a year and wonder how are they going to survive?!
Apparently, they got in during 1999 and not in 2009 where most computer science graduates make $12/hr out of school and feel lucky to ahve a job and still live at home. The disconnect is huge right now between these groups. Traditionally it was the college vs non college educated adults ... but thi
upgrading a mature product (Score:2, Insightful)
Adobe has run out of compelling new features to add their main line of products. Sure, there are new bells and whistles in every new release of Photoshop and Illustrator, but the CS2 versions (and even a couple versions back from that) will let you achieve the same results as the CS6 results, just maybe with a little more work. It's not their fault, really; it's the quandary of having a mature set of products. So pretty the main reason anyone upgrades these apps anymore is because they no longer work (or
Re:The latter. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The latter. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd say the target for Adobe isn't the regular user, and never was. The target is comprised of companies which are involved in graphical design, artists and the like. It's pretty easy to cross-check an artist's name (publicly displayed) with whether they have bought an Adobe license and then engage them to see how can they go legal in case they are using Adobe products.
My gut feeling is that Adobe messed up. It wasn't intentional.
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Re:The latter. (Score:5, Insightful)
"It's pretty easy to cross-check an artist's name (publicly displayed) with whether they have bought an Adobe license and then engage them to see how can they go legal in case they are using Adobe products."
You're assuming that licenses are registered using the same name the artist uses professionally. A freelancer might use the name of the LLC that they formed for tax/liability purposes. The non-creative tech guy for a large firm might put his own name in. For that matter, you're assuming that artists consistently have their name legibly attached to all of their published work; if it's freelance work-for-hire (a huge portion of Adobe's user base), that's actually pretty unlikely.
Re:The latter. (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if I had the money to burn I wouldn't install it because of the terrible system-invading DRM. Another case of the Pirate Bay version being better quality than the official release.
Re:The latter. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The latter. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd prefer the DRM over the trojan(s).
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When it comes to the Creative Suite (especially Photoshop and Illustrator), Adobe has been really good about actually giving you value for your money. Sure they break compatibility, but that's because they give you new features that you actually use all the time. The bad thing about these features is that techniques that retouchers used to charge $100/hour for and work on a photo for 14 hours now takes someone who has zero experience 20 minutes to accomplish, so it's ruining the industry... but at the same
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Under what principle can you lose your copyright by not defending/enforcing it?
I think you might be thinking of trademarks. Trademarks and copyright are very very different.
Goof. (Score:5, Informative)
It's 'free' for people with currently active subscriptions to the product, not every Tom, Dale, and Hates the Gimp, alas.
Re:Goof. (Score:5, Informative)
From the EULA:
"2. Software License. If you obtained the Software from Adobe or one of its authorized licensees and as long as you comply with the terms of this agreement, Adobe grants you a non-exclusive license to use the Software in the manner and for the purposes described in the Documentation, as further set forth below."
There was an official Adobe download page that also lists all the serial numbers, and makes no mention of any other terms on that page. I'd say that satisfies the above term.
And now, you don't even need an Adobe ID to download - they've since removed even that restriction.
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Their online discussion now says:
"36. Community Admin,
Jan 7, 2013 5:52 PM
Effective December 13, Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers. While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for f
Re:Goof. (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that they have official statements on the forum stating that you are NOT legally entitled to use the software unless you had previously purchased it from them.
"found a download on their site" isnt "obtained a license".
Re:Goof. (Score:5, Insightful)
"found a download on their site" isnt "obtained a license".
But "Found a download on their site with a valid license displayed right next to it" is.
Re:Goof. (Score:4, Interesting)
It clearly says "Adobe grants you a license" "if you obtained the software from Adobe."
You are literally granted a license by virtue of the fact that you got the software from Adobe and plan to use it in accordance to the EULA.
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It's 'free' for people with currently active subscriptions to the product, not every Tom, Dale, and Hates the Gimp, alas.
From further down on that same message board, from the "Community Admin" staff account:
Reality check (Score:4, Insightful)
Millions of people are already illegally using more recent versions of the CS suite.
Adobe knows damn well what it's doing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Adobe has been used practically as a case study of the side-effects of piracy to ensure their lock-in. Students pirate Photoshop/CS because they can't afford it, and when they get into the workforce employers suddenly have legions of employees who know how to use Photoshop/CS, making it an attractive choice for licensing because nobody has to be trained. Thus Photoshop/CS continues its reign as the de facto standard, and Adobe gets to set their rates to target the businesses with money without having to worry about the hobbyist market (which is notoriously fickle on legal purchasing of software anyway).
The higher-ups (or the middle-ups) probably saw that the time was right to spike that userbase a bit, that's all.
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Re:Adobe knows damn well what it's doing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Adobe has been used practically as a case study of the side-effects of piracy to ensure their lock-in. Students pirate Photoshop/CS because they can't afford it, and when they get into the workforce employers suddenly have legions of employees who know how to use Photoshop/CS, making it an attractive choice for licensing because nobody has to be trained. Thus Photoshop/CS continues its reign as the de facto standard, and Adobe gets to set their rates to target the businesses with money without having to worry about the hobbyist market (which is notoriously fickle on legal purchasing of software anyway).
The higher-ups (or the middle-ups) probably saw that the time was right to spike that userbase a bit, that's all.
The fact that adobe's products are usually superior to their competition (such as GIMP or paint.net vs photoshop) has nothing to do with it, right?
If your theory were correct, then Pro Tools would not rule the audio world - Adobe Audition or some other free or less expensive software would. Pro Tools has much greater copy protection mechanisms and is not frequently pirated while (as you have pointed out) CS is. Yet somehow Pro Tools is still the de facto standard. If you search for comparisons of the two you will find many comments from professionals even indicating that protools is inferior yet is the one to use. Just as photoshop is a de facto standard for image editing despite high prices, so is Pro Tools for audio. In both cases I would submit that it is because each was vastly superior to their competition for a very long time. In both cases, as time has gone on the competing software has come close to matching the capabilities of the leader.
My point is that your assertion that Adobe leads image editing due to high rates of piracy is not accurate. There are other far more obvious reasons for things to be the way they are.
Cheers to adobe for supporting customers who previously paid for a product and still want to use it rather than forcing those customers to upgrade. Other software firms could take a lesson in this regard.
Not on modern Macs (Score:5, Insightful)
It's made for PowerPC Macs, so the rest of us using Intel Macs are out of luck. :(
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It's made for PowerPC Macs, so the rest of us using Intel Macs are out of luck. :(
You're only out of luck if you want to pirate it natively on your Mac as a Mac App. One still has the option of running it on a pirated Windows XP under a pirated VMWare Fusion.
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Unless you use a version of OS X with Rosetta installed. CS2 worked fairly OK, albeit a bit slow in that setup.
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Simply download the PC version and run it in Parallels.
So do they work or not? (Score:2)
I don't get it. If the serial numbers unlock the applications what is the relevance of the activation servers being off? When someone downloads this stuff and uses those SN do they get a fully working copy of an obsolete version of Adobe software or not?
Re:So do they work or not? (Score:4, Informative)
They turned off the activation servers, and had to release an activation-free copy of the software to continue supporting original purchasers of CS2. The proper thing to do. It's just that they accidentally made the download links available to everyone.
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For CS2, no. That's why they posted the download online with the activation-free serial numbers. Well, you could install it, but it wouldn't activate. You'd have to install the version they are providing online and using the key they provide. Making a backup to DVD, you have the perpetual ability to use the CS2 you paid for regardless of Adobe's future actions. This is a good thing. This is what you'd hope every software provider does when it's time to turn off activation servers.
It's just not normal
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Missing! (Score:2)
Damn, Framemaker isn't there :(
As a comedienne once said (paraphrasing) (Score:3)
What is this Adobe thing on my computer? I see updates for it more than I use it!
Fallout (Score:2)
I'm thinking only advanced users can really benefit from the upgrade as I remember cs2 and it had most of the basic features found in today's cs5.
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You wouldn't qualify for an upgrade from CS2. With the activation servers off, they can't even validate your license to CS2, and you don't have a valid activate-able product key anyway. There's no such thing as an upgrade install that doesn't verify your eligibility (unlike Windows).
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In fact, I'm not even sure if I can use my CS3 upgrade media anymore, since there's no way to validate it as an upgrade. Probably have to do a phone activation - if they can even manually override it. They need the activation servers to verify the CS2 key over the phone, too.
Windows 7 64bit (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Windows 7 64bit (Score:4, Insightful)
Ignore that - it only takes a little effort to get it working.
Simple Marketing gimmick (Score:3, Insightful)
If it was a real problem, they would have at least pulled the download links. However, a day later, you can still download everything. Obviously, not a mistake.
Kills the competition (Score:4, Insightful)
If you need some legal photo editing software at your company, but it's not justifiable to buy Photoshop, you can now use this old version for free. That kills the competition with cheaper products. And if at some point you need something more powerful than this old version, you're probably going to buy a new version of PhotoShop instead of learning to use a new software.
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I'm in exactly this situation right now. I was trained in Adobe Creative Suite at my old job, and started a new job this week at a ~8 person company that has no licenses for expensive software like this. I've been worrying about asking them to spend so much on a license just so I can be comfortable, but if this pans out, I'll be able to use an old version until I can justify to the new company that we should spend the money on the latest version.
I'm still going to hold off until I'm sure it's legal to use
Still available... (Score:3)
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Re:Uhhhh.... (Score:5, Informative)
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Most people are saying it runs fine on Windows 7 x64. Windows 8 has been used with varying success using compatibility mode.
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I have CS2 running on W7 x64. I remember I had a heck of a time installing it because it wanted to install by default into the Program files (x86) folder, and no amount of reselecting the folder would avert that, but I did somehow manage to get it to install (and run) perfectly fine. It's been a while so I can't remember exactly how I did it, but it came up in google searches. I seem to recall it was pretty trivial stuff.
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Uh, the whole point of the Program Files (x86) folder is precisely for 32bit software. So, why were you trying to coax it into installing outside of that?
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Because their installer is buggy and wont accept brackets, you need to use 'C:/Program~2/Adobe' so that it can install, and still ends up in 'Program Files (x86)'.
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Well I just downloaded and installed PS, its running fine on my Win7 system. Only tested it by creating a file and saving it but it worked just fine. Disabled the updates when it popped up since there won't be any.
I would say this is a great move by Adobe, mistake or deliberate. It costs them essentially nothing, they get massive publicity, they no longer need to support this old software, and by giving it away they ensure more people will play with it than would if it was illegal to use. The end result is
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Only if this software were in the "git er done" market, which it most certainly is not. In the trendy "how you do it is all that matters" "theres no other way to measure professionalism than tool one ups man ship" "I am cool solely because I use something cool" this is useless for all but amateurs or maybe beginning students, who they never made any money off anyway.
Aside from freshness issues, giving away last years design wedding cake to the company cafeteria does kinda cannibalize cake sales for the day
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End of December 2012, I believe. The download page has been up since then, too. It only went viral a day or two ago.
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December 13.
I just had Acrobat 8 pro start complaining about activation in the last few weeks; thats why theyre providing the dls and serials.
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