Dear Adobe-
You suck. Allow me to expand: Your software installer is broken. It has been for years. It's broken across many of the packages in your product line. It's documented in your knowledge base. Confirmation on the brokenness of your installer is only a Google search away. It's a known issue that's been known for a LOOONG time. Yet you have done nothing about it. Given the abundance of the fine print, and the considerable length of your EULA, I have to assume that the art of reading has been mastered somewhere there at Adobe, and I must assume that occasionally somebody cracks your own KB and is aware of this? On Windows machines with a Documents & Settings folder redirected to a network drive, your installer erroneously complains that the network drive letter is "invalid". I know... it just happened to me while trying to update Read (and please don't' get me started on your software update virus that manages to reinstall itself to run at startup no matter how many times I try to squash it. . "Invalid Drive H:", you say installer? That's funny, I'm browsing the contents of that directory right now. Now I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but I do have a pretty good handle on the alphabet... so when I see the output of a "dir /s h:" pouring past me in a CMD window at the same time your installer is telling me there is no drive H:, I have to assume somebody's lying to me... and I have a pretty good idea who. Now, your KB has all sorts of suggestions like editing the registry, modifying directory permissions, etc... but quite frankly, it's much easier to just temporarily unmap the network drive, plug in a thumb drive, and temporarily change the drive letter to H:, so that way your installer can go on its merry way. However, that's the kicker: YOUR INSTALLER DOESN'T EVEN NOTICE THAT THE SETTINGS DIRECTORY ISN'T ON DRIVE H: AND IN FACT WRITES NOTHING THERE AT ALL! Yup... that's right, your installer complains about a network drive existing where it wants a physical drive for... NO REASON WHATSOEVER. Awesome. Now, you will say that you license the installer from another company. OK. You will also say that there are software packages form other companies that also suffer from that same 3rd-party licensed installer bug. To which I say: "Yeah, you're right... they suck too.". Here's the response to all of that: there's a buttload of software packages out there that DON'T suffer from that bug... so it can be done. Take somebody off the team that is in charge of confusing us with the different packages of Acrobat, Reader, Professional, that deal with PDF's, and have them look at this for a couple of days. So in summary: PLEASE FIX YOUR FRIGGIN' INSTALLER. You guys can write some great software. The new CS5 suite rocks... particularly the Mercury engine in Premiere Pro.... So I know you guys can do it. And while you're at it think about 64 bit flash... it's only been what... 5+ years we've had 64bit windows now? Sincerely- -Steven Caesare ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
