Adobe CC installation woes

[Ross M]

My son is attempting a fresh install of his Adobe CC suite on a new Windows 10 laptop. The installation fails during the first step, even before downloading the suite of apps.

When downloading the Adobe CC Desktop App, the download stops and either an "Unknown Error occurred" or "Error P50" results. According to both the Adobe website and dozens of user forums, this error usually occurs after a failed update or re-installation, but also during an installation. If I understand this correctly, the most common cause is existing Adobe files triggering a problem with the installation.

This confuses me because this is a fresh install on a very lean Windows installation. The download looks exactly like that - a download, with a progress bar and estimated completion time. It does not look like some sort of simultaneous download-and-install. But perhaps it is. This would explain why existing CC files are a source of a problem. The consensus advice is to download and run Adobe CC Cleaner Tool and try again. So I have told my son to try this and I'm waiting for the results.

After searching for solutions and reading countless complaints about Adobes slow servers, convoluted , inefficient processes and lack of information available during downloads, I find myself wondering why Adobe makes life with it's products so difficult. I'll be avoiding use of the Creative Cloud for some time based on this painful experience.

Rant over for now.

[Hawthy]

Just guessing, but Adobe has free products that might be already installed on your computer and could be the issue here. Adobe Acrobat Reader is one obvious example. The CC Cleaner tool should sort it out.

I have been using the Adobe Creative Cloud suite for the last four years with zero issues. The internet is full of people complaining about minor issues. That is all I am saying before I become one of them.

[Ross M]

Just guessing, but Adobe has free products that might be already installed on your computer and could be the issue here. Adobe Acrobat Reader is one obvious example. The CC Cleaner tool should sort it out.

I have been using the Adobe Creative Cloud suite for the last four years with zero issues. The internet is full of people complaining about minor issues. That is all I am saying before I become one of them.

Thanks. I was wondering about that, given that Adobe Reader is ubiquitous. But I didn't get a chance to check while my son tried repeatedly to finish the download. Yes, therre is a lot of gripers regarding Adobe. I will admit when Adobe products work, they work well and I am using Lightroom classic and PS Elements myself, albeit not CC.

- - - Updated - - -

OK, its humble pie time. I fired off too quickly. My son just informed me that the installation of CC desktop was finally successful.

The issue was not relevant to Adobe - Windows had not finished all of its updates. It's not surprising that there were a significant number, given that the laptop is out of the box. I had assumed that my son ensured that the Windows updates were complete before trying Adobe installation.

My brain is a little fired following the hinges breaking on his previous laptop, requiring the unscheduled purchase of a replacement.

Hopefully the downloads of his 3 key Adobe Apps, InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop, go smoothly. Some patience will be required if they are large downloads, because our internet connection is slow.

[Tannin]

Andrew's conclusion is just plain wrong. Photoshop is notorious for installation problems, and also for undocumented or poorly documented major, repeat major issues which develop for no reason at all. Example: my Photoshop CC just stopped working. No warning, no reason, it just stopped. No error message. It just started crashing out half-way through startup. Adobe was no help. Reinstalling was no help. Uninstalling manually and then reinstalling was no help. I wound up having to get into heroics with manual deletion of system files and then reinstalling.

"Minor problems". Pfft!

The reality, and everyone in the IT caper knows it, is that Adobe products are badly written, cumbersome, buggy, and poorly supported. Some people say that is because Adobe write on Apple and then translate to Windows afterwards - translations are often poor compared to original works - but I think it is much deeper than that. It goes to poor corporate culture, and the overall flavour of their products hasn't changed much in many years. They have no competition and it shows. They don't take robustness, simplicity, design integrity, or security seriously - look at their horrorshow Flash product for the most spectacular possible example of that - and you generally wind up having to troubleshoot Photoslug yourself.

Try - very carefully - hunting around in Windows data folders for Adobe-related items and get rid of them manually. c:\users\yourusername\appdata\adobe would be the place to start.

Good luck!

[Hawthy]

Andrew's conclusion is just plain wrong.

Well, I have been wrong before and, no doubt, I will be wrong again. Of course, I defer to your expertise in the IT area. However, I was simply commenting on my own experience with Photoshop CC, which has been trouble free.

If I knew how, I would put up a poll asking people who use Photoshop CC if they experience major, recurrent issues. Given that Photoshop probably has the lion's share of the photo processing market [citation required] I would be surprised if it is as buggy and cumbersome as made out. If it really is that terrible, Adobe have done a truly remarkable marketing job to capture that market share.

I don't have a background in IT so maybe I just can't appreciate how clunky it is and how much better it could be. It does, however, meet my rather modest needs.

[Tannin]

No worries, Andrew.

You've got the cart before the horse here, cause and effect wise. As is pretty much always the case with monopoly and near-monopoly products, the product quality (or lack thereof) is not a cause of the product's dominance, and does nor precede it, it is an effect or consequence of market dominance, and follows it or (surprisingly often!) appears when dominance is close but not yet complete.

Taking the first and obvious case, quality naturally goes down the dunny once a company (pretty much any company, ever) reaches effective monopoly status as there is no market penalty for low quality of service. With no competition, they can do as they like. Most monopolies have spectacularly bad service (the old pre-NBN Telstra is an example), or spectacularly bad product quality (Microsoft in the decade either side of the turn of the century is an example), or both (Sydney Airport). Some, however, maintain excellent quality and good service as well, but grossly over-charge (a good example is Standard Oil). If you can think of a monopoly anywhere in the world today, or during any historical period we have good records of which has not done at least one of these three things, I'd be most interested to hear of it. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been such a thing.


Now the second point. You might wonder how it is that a company can let its quality drop off just as it making a supreme effort to achieve outright monopoly. Surely this would be the time when the company tries its very hardest to produce outstanding quality so as to seduce the last few remaining other-company customers into the fold? You'd think so, but it often isn't the case. This is because a lot of the early part of building a monopoly has to do with seducing new customers with quality and value, but the final part of the process usually has much more to do with eliminating competition, typically using a combination of strategies including such things as buy-outs and mergers, bullying via the legal system (or illegal bullying up to and including arson and murder in some places and times - look at Standard Oil in the USA for a great example), political bribes and lobbying for favours and legislation, bullying of merchants for, service providers to, and retailers of other products, and so on. By the time a would-be monopolist gets close to success, these non-market factors are the primary drivers of growth, and tend to soak up most of management's attention.

No citation required re Adobe's market share. I don't have an exact figure, but it is certainly over 90%, probably over 100%, and in several market segments almost certainly an even 100%.

If you were to do your survey, you'd probably find that something like 60% or 80% of users had experienced either no issues or only minor issues. Hell, maybe even 90%, though I doubt that. The corollary, however, is that 10% or 20% or 40% or more have experienced one of the many major Adobe software problems. This is completely unacceptable, of course, and is orders of magnitude greater than one might expect for a product of this nature.

As for clunky, well, they are making progress on the UI, so kudos there. It is still horribly slow on simple tasks (as compared to dozens of other products which do those simple tasks vastly faster) and clearly has massive inefficiencies in its bloated code-base.

[jim]

If you can think of a monopoly anywhere in the world today, or during any historical period we have good records of which has not done at least one of these three things, I'd be most interested to hear of it. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been such a thing.

Late 19th century British Post Office. 12 deliveries a day in London, totally reliable, and at very reasonable rates.

Not quite a monopoly, and not a private monopoly, but still...

[Tannin]

Not a monopoly within the meaning of the act, Jim. Publicly owned services are not businesses and are not responsive to the laws of supply and demand, nor are they tasked with maximising profit. Very different animals. They can be outstandingly good when properly managed, and spectacularly bad when corruptly or badly managed.