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Wednesday, July 16, 2008

An open letter to Adobe Corporation, on the occasion of having bought, and attempted to download, Adobe Flex 3.0 Professional.

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Hi there,

This morning I bought a copy of Flex Builder 3.0 Professional. Hoping to save time, I elected to download the software.

I got to the download page and clicked on the download link. Nothing happened. I clicked many times. Nothing continued to happen.

I called (800) 585-0774 to see about getting the software on CD, since the download wasn't working. The nice lady there said it'd cost about another $30 - on top of the $700 I'd already dropped - to get the media, unless I went to tech support and had them set me up to get CD for free.

Fair enough, transferred to tech support.

Tech support turned out to be a techdroid working from a script, with all the English skills and creativity one expects from a techdroid. Getting absolutely nowhere, and about to be transferred to another techdroid, I made the decision that my time is worth more than the time-sucking frustration involved in dealing with Adobe techdroids. After giving the techdroid a quick assessment of his utility (marginal), I hung up.

I called the 800 number mentioned above, ordered the media, and paid the extra $30 (on top of the $700 already paid). By comparison with tech support, the sales experience was very smooth and professional.

Now I'm praying I never, ever, have to call Adobe tech support, ever again.

Adobe tech support sucks. Absolutely sucks. It's frustrating, time-consuming, and the ultimate F-U to customers who've paid a hefty price for a product.

And that's the point, isn't it: make sure the inflow of money via sales is smooth and painless, and make sure the outflow of money via tech support is so painful, no customer ever calls twice.

Quite a business model you have there. You'd better pray Silverlight really sucks.


Patrick
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