Dear Adobe,
You have a lot of room to improve with your Acrobat line and I’m not even talking about the performance of the application. Sure there are alternatives out there like FoxIt reader and other open-source PDF readers/writers that can do your primary function faster while using less resources. Heck, you don’t even open DRM-protected PDFs? I have to get another Adobe product to do that? But no, I’m not even talking about the performance of your Acrobat line. I’m talking hook, line, and sinker we’ve bought the licenses for Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional. The issue is your slow installation, your eternal patching, and I wish your uninstallation. Uninstalling alone takes 20 minutes on a fully-capable Windows PC.
Installing and patching is the biggest issue. How I dread when you release a patch no matter how concerning the security flaw you are fixing! Installing and patching Adobe Acrobat 8 up to the latest version can take a good 45 minutes. I am not a pleased customer that this takes this long. I can literally watch file by file copying over with the new version. Many of these files I will never even use as the German, Japanese, Korean, and many more language help files copy at a visible rate. I should be able to select which languages are going to be used and save you the hassle (and time) of copying over language specific files. The other thing you need to learn regarding patching is something called “Comprehensive patching.” Allow somebody to install from scratch and install one recently released patch to get fully up to date. This is the current process for installing Adobe Acrobat 7 (standard or professional):
Install Adobe Acrobat 7.0
Install patch to Adobe Acrobat 7.0.5 Reboot
Install patch to Adobe Acrobat 7.0.7 Reboot
Install patch to Adobe Acrobat 7.0.8 Reboot
Install patch to Adobe Acrobat 7.0.9 Reboot
And here’s the process for Adobe Acrobat 8 (standard or professional):
Install Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Reboot
Install patch to Adobe Acrobat 8.1 Reboot
Install patch to Adobe Acrobat 8.1.1 Reboot
With such a slow install, it is quite frustrating and exhausting to sit down at a machine and have to go through this process, not to mention if I was doing a unit/department upgrade. Oh wait, I already have done several of those unit/department-wide upgrades from Acrobat 7 to Acrobat 8 Professional. Painful at the least, and this is my soured opinion of your producted before it is even launched.
I look forward to many improvements in your future. I fear that you bought Macromedia and what you will do to their products. I cringe that your improvements may come in patch form.
Thank you,
Many Concerned IT System Administrators.
Update: Yay! Acrobat 8.1.2 patch (that provides a rather significant security patch) is a 67 MB comprehensive one.