Brainnovate

I finally did it.

After making noise about it for better than 8 months, I bought a Macbook Pro over the weekend, and joined the “Apple Elite.” Having sworn off Microsoft months ago and using Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon as my mainstay OS, I was already aware of the greener pastures awaiting me on my trip out of Redmond.

The first few days in Macland have been great. I got most of my stuff moved over from Ubuntu with no problems, got Ruby installed, Gems, Rails, Mysql, the whole stack working great.

However, the biggest problem came from another, slightly smaller, but no less over priced monopoly of Enterprise software, Adobe. Now most of the Adobe CS3 suite is great, albeit a little bloated. Like many, I wish they had a little competition.

As a veteran of the web world, I have been using Macromedia, and then Adobe’s Dreamweaver software for building web sites for a long time. Longer than I could remember as it turns out. I learned this when I decided to go about moving my CS3 license over to the Mac platform.

Having bought a Dreamweaver license before Macromedia started keeping track of online purchases on their extranet means a couple things:

• You are a very loyal customer
• You are among their oldest customers
• They have sucked more money out of you then most people
• You probably have a lot of friends and maybe a lot of influence online
• You are among the most experienced web people around, and cheapest to support
• You run into the most trouble if you need to go from Windows to Apple platform

Now to me, this stinks, and it smells of a broken system. Come on Adobe, compared to newer purchasers of your software, I am sure those of us who bought way back at the very beginnings of Macromedia’s existence are relatively few. At least give us a perk for sticking around for so long.

The problem is that to upgrade your license, your purchase history with Macro-Adobe doesn’t matter. Your golden ticket, so to speak, is the first product you ever bought. I looked on the extranet and saw the oldest one was circa 2000, “Macromedia Ultradev 4″ and figured, “I am all set!”

But as I learned over 3 consecutive calls and over 60 minutes on hold, this was not it. No, I had bought something even more antiquated, and now I had to produce it to complete my move to Macland, and avoid a $1600 Adobe fine along the way.

After rumaging through box after box in my basement, and plenty of cursing, the earliest I actually had on hand was Dreamweaver 2! If you remember Dreamweaver 2, you have better memory than I, because that had to be ten or more years ago. But there it was stacked neatly with Fireworks 2, Dreamweaver 3, Fireworks 3, and Ultradev, the License code for each scribed neatly on the disk in my handwriting. And oh yeah… Microsoft Office 97 was in the stack too. Are you kidding me? It was a little like returning to the incarnation of the web!

Anyhow, once I had the required documentation in hand, things went relatively smoothly and about a week later FedEx showed up with a box containing my packaged CS3 suite box- for the Mac. I installed, and everything is great now.

I am truly scared to “destroy” my old software now, even though Adobe made me promise to do so. What if I need to move from Mac to some new unheard of system in 30 years? I just might need them then!

Note- I wrote most of this story about two weeks ago and held off on posting it- I wanted to make sure I had the new version in hand before writing my criticisms. And yes, I love Adobe stuff, its just this process is broken! Clearly!