For a long time Adobe has been my personal favorite source of all design related software from Photoshop to InDesign. The move from Quark 6.5 to InDesign was like night and day. Adobe also has a great community and fanboys that publicize their products to no end. But they are starting to forget that the community made them what they are. Now that they are the “Big Company” on the block it seems that the bottom line is all that matters.

The recent news that they will not support CS3 on Snow Leopard is just another sign, but it has been going on for a long time. For me the first time I noticed it was when I tried to upgrade to Windows Vista 64. Back then CS3 was the newest release and people running Photoshop are the most likely to want more than 4GB’s of RAM that a 64bit OS provides. However first off Adobe Acrobat Pro 8 would not even install without several error messages and trips to the message boards. Once it was installed the PDF printer would not work at all. It took several months for them to release a fix, and to this day CS3 still has some more minor visual bugs that stopped me moving to 64bit Vista.

Now they are going one step further and just saying if you move to Snow Leopard you are on your own. So the software I spent nearly $1,500 on (more than the total cost of my main computer) just over a year ago is now unsupported on OS I might want to use it on. I have heard some people say that CS3 runs on Snow Leopard, but that is not the point. CS3 is so large there are many features that may not work properly, and even more situations we can not predict. That’s why rely on Adobe to release patches and fixes when these bugs crop up. With this announcement they are basically saying screw you to all the more cutting edge people trying to upgrade to Snow Leopard, but can not afford the several hundred dollars “UPGRADE” cost to move to CS4 from CS3.

Adobe is creating a lot of bad will by trying to force people to pay $500 dollars a year to get a few features each year. Which is pretty much what you have to do if you want to get updates to your software and keep the thing working.

What scared me more was when I looked around at my alternatives they are really thin. There is no option with the amount of integration Adobe CS provides between applications and bridge. There are a bunch of separate apps that provide some of the functionality. I do not like where this is leading at all.