Adobe makes some of the most prevalent and expensive software around. Which is what makes it so frustrating when it's crap.

Just today my browser crashed on two different computers when viewing websites with flash content. While viewing Samsung's website, I got a bunch of "stack overflow 60" popup windows and then my whole browser crashed -- all 10 tabs. Three times. Later in the day on a different computer, BMW USA's website did the same thing. First it told me to get Flash 9; then it crapped out.

It is one thing for a website not to work. It is something else entirely for a website to crash your entire browser. Thank god for Firefox's ability to reload the entire session at startup.

The experience today reminded me a previous experience I had with Adobe software this month.

I think I am already on record complaining about Adobe's intrusive patch/update reminders and their infuriating licensing/anti-piracy system.

The licensing system in particular makes me want to steal their software but instead I paid a small fortune for Adobe Create Suite 2. With that kind of investment, I have some expectations that I dont have with, say, a free app like Gimp. My main expectation, call me unreasonable, is that the darn program works at all.

Well it appears that some time in the past 4 months, a patch to my MacbookPro caused Photoshop CS2 to stop working. Of course, I never patched any Adobe software and I dont have any clues about when things might have broken because I didnt find out there was a problem until the night when I need to get something done.

It is a 20 minute job in Photoshop but instead of getting it done, I spend an hour debugging Photoshop before giving up in disgust. Dont you love those PC-moments? Priceless.

You see the last time I used photoshop, say 4 months ago, it was fine but now it refuses to load any files. The other CS2 apps are fine but when I try to load a file in Photoshop, I get an error. And what a wonderful error message it is:

"Could not complete your request because of a program error"

Gee, that is helpful. As is Adobe's famously excellent website help pages, which happily resolve all of your Adobe software woes with a simple fix: re-install your OS. Good grief. This particular error suggests that I have problems with my hard drive or possibly my printers. In fact, the only thing it does not suggest is broken is the software itself.

So do I re-install my OS? Do I run the license gauntlet and re-install CS2 (again)? Do I find an alternative program and write off my purchase or worse, do I upgrade to CS3 in the hope it works? None of these choices are a customer-centric solution.

Software is hard to write. Software lets us do amazing things. But there are few things more frustrating than expensive bloatware that does not work when you need it most.

Ooops, Acrobat just popped up a warning that it needs to update to a new version. Gotta go...