Adobe Creative Suite Cross-Grade
About a year ago, maybe a little more, I bought a copy of Adobe Web Premium CS3 for my Windows box. I don’t remember why I bought it for Windows, but it was the right decision at the time. After enduring Windows Vista on my PC for some time, I have gotten to the point where I would just rather do things on my MacBook pro. I know…big surprise.
This week I made the switch. Started using the Macbook for everything. There are a few tasks that I do that still must run on Windows. So for those I have parallels. But I really wanted my Adobe products to run on the native Mac side. So I called Adobe to see if there was a cross-grade option. I figure they were going to tell me “No, just pay us $1600 again.” But to my surprise they have a cross-grade plan in place.
You give them your old serial number (which they deactivate), fax them a nice little letter that says you are deleting/destroying the old software, and they send you a new serial number and DVDs. Sounded good to me, right up until the part where they deactivate your serial number immediately, it takes up to 48 hours for them to process your faxed letter, and then you have to wait for the DVD shipment. There is no electronic delivery option at all! So basically you are without use of your products for days (I haven’t tested so see if my products have actually stopped working yet, but the guy on the phone claimed that is what happens pretty much immediately)!
I’ve heard of people that just download cracks and key-gens off of BitTorrent and run Adobe products that way. That seems easier. Why is it that doing it the “legal” way is so hard!
July 8th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
It’s so hard because they don’t actually stop and think about what the customer might need/want.
Anyway, I’d be shocked if the products you have quit working. I don’t know this first-hand, but I’ve heard that when you have a bittorrent version of Photoshop with a shared serial number, that it will still work. I mean, it’s possible that they just never catch it and deactivate it, but I’d be more inclined to think that they would have somebody trolling the torrent sites looking for valid keys.