Arguably a company strategy of moving work from skilled people to unskilled people is likely to apply in more than one area of the company, and therefore could well explain problems such as a poor shopping experience.

I can assure you that every person he talked to during the order process was in an offshore call center somewhere. The order processing is probably outsourced to a third party too. I see no other explanation for something that should be:

    if (validatePayment()) {
      emailCustomer(generatedSerial);
    }

I went through the process of helping someone attempt to get license codes for the 32 bit, CS 4-ish versions of some programs that are included, for compatibility with older systems, with the CS 5.5 Suite -- it says so right on the tin that they are included, and the installation programs for them are right there on the DVD's.

The process was atrocious. Each phone call essentially started from scratch. One time, I actually got a U.S. representative, and while they were more coherent, ultimately they were no more help, insisting I go back into the other support "flow", which dumped my right back into an Indian (I'm assuming) support center.

It took a fucking month. By which point, the person's original deadline and need had passed.

At the end, I was explaining to the support staff what they needed to do. I finally got someone with a bit of initiative, and after they went to their manager once and received the wrong information, I convinced them to make a second attempt, again with my clarification.

These "managers" have access to a system that generates keys. All the manager had to do was look up and generate the right kind of key. Which they finally found, after my strong insistence and detailed description.

This was one of many support center "managers" consulted by staff during multiple calls, none of whom had a fucking clue about their own product.

If they had, and had demonstrated any motivation, let alone initiative, this month of purgatory would have been reduced to one 10 minute support call.

You can see why they "need" to shift support overseas. It must be the only way they can afford endless hours of utterly useless support staff time.

Fuck Adobe. I'm generally reserved on HN. But these bozos really deserve the outrage.

P.S. I've nothing against overseas (for me) staff. The staff were consistently polite and patient on the phone. They were just utterly untrained and unempowered to solve the problem. (The "managers", OTOH, were in front of the fucking key generation system. They merely had to actually identify the right product and generate a key for it.)

Even if you were able to talk directly to the manager, you'd have been stuck. (I talked to a woman who claimed to be "manager of customer care and sales in North America", and she didn't even know how to work their systems.)

There seems to be no support management team in any normal sense, and no upper-management concern about the lack of support management.

Here's 59 ways they failed to deliver me a working product:

http://consumerist.com/2008/03/adobe-needs-eight-employees-t...

To clarify, I never did speak to a "manager". That quite apparently simply is not allowed.

I did, finally and purely by chance, end up speaking with a front line support representative who not only came to understand what I was describing but who also demonstrated some initiative.

When they, after my lengthy -- starting "from the top", once again -- explanation, inevitably "went to their manager", they were given an incorrect response. I explained this, and how I had encountered it before, and what was actually needed. And this person actually went to the manager a second time and "pushed back" enough to get the manager to look again. Lo and behold, they found the right product in the licensing system (a special combo installer created for the CS 5.5 32-bit support) and finally supplied me with a working key for that installer.

Unfortunately, my intuition is that that front line representative was probably not long for that job.

P.S. Upon reflection, I now recall that I may have spoken to such a manager, once. Just long enough to get the brush off.

I don't doubt that they are using offshore call centers, but I still don't think the situation is the same as Quark, where the actual end-user product suffered mightily due to the poorly executed offshoring. Adobe's CS products are still pretty great. Overpriced, maybe, but hardly the unusable buggy mess that Quark became.