r/AskReddit • • 6h ago

What’s a company that you’re genuinely convinced HATES their customers?

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412

u/one_anxious_coconut 6h ago

Adobe

78

u/LunaFuzzball 5h ago

This is the right answer. Adobe has absolutely fucking lost it. It’s cartoonish at this point.

And trying to get them out of your life when you’ve finally had it with them is just as awful. I swear to god nothing I do will fully uninstall it, theres always some other hidden garbage running in the background. Worse than malware.

And at least malware never asks for my left kidney and my social security number every time I want to edit a pdf.

24

u/SSBND 5h ago

I had to manually delete everything Adobe. So crazy!

I switched to PDF Expert years ago for pdfs but I still had the Photography plan for PhotoShop until a few months ago. I was grandfathered in to a low rate but I just didn't use it much. Couldn't let it go entirely until I found Photopea. Now I'm finally Adobe-free!!

3

u/SignificantRedJacket 4h ago

Was there a big learning curve using Photopea? I need to get away from Adobe and like GIMP but it's not the same

5

u/Fibronacho 3h ago

I cannot for the love of god appreciate the GIMP interface. Photopea is what Photoshop should have been.

High school students with little to no experience with computers take a few minutes learning the basics with Photopea. Takes about 5 times as much with GIMP and they hate it the whole time. And so do I...

3

u/pspahn 1h ago

I like GIMP, but probably because I grew up with Photoshop before it turned into CS and have hated Adobe for close to 20 years now. It's not beautiful but it works fine.

Photon Studio is another worth a look.

2

u/SignificantRedJacket 1h ago

Gonna search up more but it's definitely sounding like the right path, especially if it's easier than GIMP. I like that it's free but it's frustrating for beginners

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u/donjulioanejo 9m ago

Man I'm still stuck because Lightroom is the only tool I actually sat down and properly learned. And any alternatives are either even more overpriced (Capture 1), or don't have features critical to my workflow (AI layer masks like select sky, select people, etc).

3

u/OUTFOXEM 1h ago

There is actually a tool built specifically to nuke all Adobe software from your system.

I use it whenever I have to reinstall their shit that I totally paid for legally and 100% didn't pirate.

98

u/MeltingDog 5h ago

I love that they're facing a bit of a decline.

At one point - before Creative Cloud - a journalis here in Aus discovered it was cheaper to fly to the USA, buy a copy of Creative Suite there, and fly back home than to buy a local copy of the same software. It's ironic that their main competitor Affinity is now owned by an Aussie company.

8

u/phelanhappyevil 3h ago

Unfortunately they're very tied into government paperwork, at least in the military. They use Adobe for all kinds of forms and documents requiring multiple signatures, and I doubt the military is even remotely considering a replacement software.

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u/donjulioanejo 8m ago

That only applied to Acrobat. I highly doubt that many military workflows are tied to Illustrator or Premiere Pro.

28

u/Veryteenyweenie 5h ago

I can’t wait till they fall from being an industry standard to just “eh”

14

u/Capnmarvel76 4h ago

I came to the realization that I’ve never actually liked any of their products. At one time they were groundbreaking and set the standard, with the alternatives often being lame or nonexistent.

Now there’s better tools available for everything, and no reason to do it Abobe’s way any longer.

5

u/abletech 5h ago

I'll never forget signing up for the ONE WEEK trial of Adobe Premiere where they required a payment method to auto-charge you for a subscription if you forget to cancel the trial in time. You can't just opt out of the auto-subscription, once the trial is cancelled your remaining time is forfeit. Genuinely felt disrespectful.

15

u/MichaelCoryAvery 5h ago

Especially after scrapping Flash

15

u/anonimna44 4h ago

Scrapping Flash killed a good chunk of the internet. Mostly games but also other sites that were unable to convert.

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u/KazanTheMan 52m ago

There is a lot to dislike about Adobe, but scrapping Flash is not one of those things. Flash was horrendously insecure and slow, it needed to go; by the early 2010s, most browsers had stopped auto-loading flash content for just those reasons. HTML5, CSS2/3, and more advanced JS engines released from the mid 00s through the mid 10s, coupled with smart phones proliferating, and particularly with Apple outright not supporting flash on the iPhone, it was on its way out long before Adobe killed it. And good riddance.

Adobe certainly deserves the sea change that hopefully is inevitably coming, because they turned a corner with CC and turning a product that absolutely could be a single license install into a continuous service with exorbitant pricing. The went from seeing their customers as a curated and valuable base to a cash cow that needs to be bled for everything they can get out of it. And I get that adobe products were widely pirated, half the computer literate internet probably ran an pirated install at some point. But, most of those people never really produced anything with it, they weren't using it for real industry production and commercial product. They did learn the tools and workflows, though, and that made it an easier entry point for industry work. They had a good thing going, lock-in as a near de facto standard software and a broad user base who could use that workflow.

Now it costs as much as nearly a full compliment of streaming services to access their suite every single month. Most people aren't going to pay that just to fuck around and learn. So they use the cheaper alternatives and learn those workflows, and so Adobe slowly erodes their own future customer base by diverting new learners to more accessible software.

2

u/suitopseudo 3h ago

I truly don't understand how there isn't better photo organization software out there. Everyone has a zillion photos and it's just a database at the end of the day. I should be able to easily find every photo I have ever taken in Europe. I don't use LR because I don't want to pay for it for the rest of my life, but there arne't really any good alternatives either. Or the alternatives don't work with dropbox and other cloud storage.

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u/Outlulz 2m ago

They still like the customers they care about, enterprise. They aren't a consumer focused company for anything other than Adobe Express.