The past Friday, Adobe created something resembling a firestorm due to the company asking users of their popular Creative Suite to pay money ($375) to upgrade to version 6. The problem is that the update was to resolve security vulnerabilities found in Creative Suite 5.5. The Adobe solution created an outrage on a variety of social media services and tech blogs that spread like a wild fire.
Truth be told, patches and upgrades are something that is quite normal in the software world. The process is normally as follows: An issue is found; the developers of the software create a patch and then sends that patch to all authentic users. The users then depending on their individual settings receive a notification of an update being available, which then leads to a software download on their device. This is the normal process and in general it is free. The idea is simple, you have already paid for the software once and then everything thereafter is the responsibility of the software company.
The above is the normal scenario but Adobe saw fit to use the issue as a chance to get users to update from Creative Suite 5.5 to version 6. The vulnerabilities were found on both Mac and Windows based machines. This lead to a lot of very unhappy Adobe Creative Suite 5.5 users. I think this situation has hurt the image of Adobe in a big way and it will take time for them to rebuild the trust that they broke.
At least Adobe management reacted to the outrage and have subsequently done a complete u-turn. They will now provide free updates to the affected users.
“We are in the process of resolving the vulnerabilities addressed in these security bulletins in Adobe Illustrator CS5.x, Adobe Photoshop CS5.x and Adobe Flash Professional CS5.x, and will update the respective security bulletins once the patches are available.”
I wonder how many users who paid for the update are now asking for a refund?
