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Comment by nitrogen | Hacker News Reader

Why can software engineers and companies get away with such horrendous practices?

Because most of us who write software believe that the risks associated with effectively zero liability for software failure are far outweighed by the costs of government intervention. General purpose software is far too "easy" to create for mandatory liability to make any sense.

The better solution is for the market to demand simple security fixes in situations like this.

[Edited to clarify that software risk is less costly than government intervention]

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Steve Jobs was right. Adobe is lazy.

They're not lazy. If you've ever used Fireworks in the Macromedia days and compare it to the massive behemoths of slowness they've added to each subsequent CS version, I can only conclude that they're not lazy. An effort this concerted to make no progress in ten years and add naught but a twenty second startup time on processors that weren't even conceived back in Macromedia Fireworks 8 days cannot be a product of laziness.

Just like I think that this here thing doesn't have anything to do with laziness. It's that Adobe wants you to pirate the crap out of CS6, because they know they won't get money from you anyway. They do know, however, that every cent they don't get directly from you is a cent they'll get from your future employer or customer or small business which is forced to buy Adobe CS6. It's not laziness, it's doing exactly what they need to to make sure that they keep their repeat customers upgrading.

>> It's that Adobe wants you to pirate the crap out of CS6, because they know they won't get money from you anyway.

Interesting. I've heard this thing before, with Photoshop and Windows too. Is there any evidence for this?

Microsoft have the technical capability to deactivate pirate installs of Windows through WGA. Instead, they choose to display a nag message and disable software updates. Microsoft spent a ton of money developing a really sophisticated anti-piracy system, but decided against using it to prevent piracy by end-users. To me, that speaks volumes about how piracy fits into their business strategy.

The CS6 sub offer (50 bucks a month for everything) and preorder for old customer special ($30 bucks a month for everything) are making TONS of people sign up.

Sluggishness is not evidence of good or even hard work.

I’m fairly sure it was sarcasm :)

I am not so sure that they are lazy, per se - but I will say they have zero cult of personality in that company.

Name one famous employee of adobe along the same lines you would recognize with any of the tech titans: gates, jobs, ballmer, brin, zuck, etc. etc. etc.

Never has an Adobe's leader's name been in that list.

The reason this is important - is that there is no personal image attached to adobe's products. This lets them get away with more mediocrity than you would see with any of the above.

You don't have the scorn of the user all pointed at one person's identity - you have it pointed at the nebulous "adobe" as a whole.

If they had a charismatic, public figurehead I a sure there would be a lot different about how we view adobe and its products.

I was thinking this the other day, and given that Adobe is a company that could struggle with the demise of Flash on the web and growing discontent over its core product line the time is almost right for an evangelist to take control and make sweeping changes. If a person came along and made drastic changes, such as the re-branding of Flash, a complete overhaul of the Adobe Creative Suite and the stripping-down of the PDF format I can see a lot of people turning their heads.

That would be John Nack.

There's an old joke - field marshal Model is asked the secret of his success as a commander. He says the key is managing the men under you. They are smart or stupid, energetic or lazy. The smart and energetic make excellent field commanders, the smart and lazy make good staff officers, and the lazy and stupid can handle supply. And the lazy and energetic? Transfer them elsewhere.

Adobe isn't lazy. It takes extra work to implement multiple cross platform ui libraries with twenty different slider widgets none of which work quite right.

I think you meant that the "dumb and energetic" should be transferred elsewhere.

Somewhere I heard a variation on this quote, attributed to Napoleon, that his solution for the dumb and enthusiastic was to "shoot them".

I heard a variation say that the dumb and energetic were cannon fodder.

Right, dumb and energetic, oops.

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