One of the woes I thought I could avoid with switching platforms was to not have to buy another version of Photoshop. With a lot of effort you can switch the license from one platform to another. But did I ever hit an unusual speed bump when I tried.
The first hurdle was getting past an Adobe customer service person with an inadequate grasp of the English language (the call center was, I believe, in India). He also ineptly transferred me to the activation department, and I got disconnected after 40 minutes on hold.
When I got a live voice again, things were going swimmingly, finally. I downloaded the "Letter of Software Destruction" and was nearly all set. "You wouldn't have the serial number for your original version, would you?" he asked. Of course I did. I'm very organized. I bought Photoshop 4.0 a decade ago, and I read him the serial number off the original disk package.
"There's a problem, he said. "This is registered to a Dream Systems, at this address," (he read me a Seattle Ballard address), "a David L___ He has a number of registrations of retail copies of Photoshop. Did you buy this at a retail location?"
"There is a mistake somewhere on your end. I have never heard of this person, I have no connection to him. I bought the disk new." Of course I don't remember, a decade on, where I bought it. Maybe Glazers Cameras. Who knows?
If I hadn't done an office reorganization this winter, and thrown out my records that were more than seven years old, I could have put my hands on a receipt in minutes. But there's organized, and then there is obsessive. It would have been useful to have been more of the latter.
"I'm sorry, the back office won't grant me an exception. Every upgrade is registered to you, but the original version is not."
Is this some weird identity theft, or what?
Do you think you bought a pirated copy some how?
Posted by: Paul | July 07, 2007 at 12:32 PM
Unlikely. I'm pretty sure I bought it at Glazers Camera, or at an otherwise mainstream retail outlet. It's a total mystery to me. If I were the confrontational sort I might show up on the guy's doorstep and ask him what he knows, but I'm not.
Posted by: Doug Plummer | July 07, 2007 at 12:56 PM
I went through a different yet quite annoying experience recently changing platforms (PC->Mac) for Photoshop also.
Repeated hang ups and poor connections on their customer service lines, among them:
Customer Rep: "Let me get your number in case we get disconnected so I can call you back" "Now, how can I help you"
*disconnect*
Never called back.
The Letter of Destruction is a PDF, created in none other than Microsoft Word, with no editable forms. You can't just fill it out and email it back, you have to print it, fill it out, scan it in then email it back. So much for the paperless office.
Their customer service center handling the reply scans can only handle small JPG's created in particular programs, I attempted over 10 times to send them PNG, TIFF and JPG's created on OS X until I finally got below their email limits, within their format constraints and within the JPG constraints. Completely ridiculous for ADOBE!!
I won't even go into how going through a same platform license change of ownership completely failed on Adobes end after jumping through all the hoops. Terrible customer service.
Posted by: cjwl | July 16, 2007 at 12:32 PM