“Now I have various keys that keep double bouncing. Or doooouble booooouncing, as they’d like to type”
Adobe needs to up its cloud licensing skills if it wants to retain Jon’s custom, while an upgrade to Wi-Fi 6 means he won’t be buying a new MacBook soon
As I needed to edit some video, I thought I would give Adobe Premiere Pro 2020 a whirl. After all, I have a full Creative Cloud licence, and the install was but a click away. A few minutes later, the app was installed and ready to go. There was but one problem: it wouldn’t start. I kept getting error messages about my account. When Lightroom refused to work as well, I looked at status.adobe.com and found a sea of red warnings. I headed to the always useful website Downdetector ( downdetector.com) and found an even bigger mess there: Adobe was having an outage, and it was a big one. Because I couldn’t get access to the licensing server, my apps were dead in the water.
Looking over the smoking crater this morning, it seems that the outage lasted from about 3pm to 11pm. Normal service has now resumed, I can get access to my stuff and
Premiere Pro works just fine.
There are a few takeaways from this, starting with the truism that “services in the cloud are inherently more robust than services held locally”. Perhaps “untruism” would be a better term. That statement might be true for some services, but it’s certainly not a general position. Strip away the marketing bluster and a cloud server is someone else’s computer in a location that doesn’t belong to you. A well-designed solution can indeed be extremely robust and reliable – I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have lost access to our Office 365 Exchange Server, for example. And it’s a blessing not to have to worry about keeping it running, although I regularly archive the contents to local storage and tape because, after all, it might fail in the cloud.
With this Adobe outage, however, it has become clear that its licensing services make no account of the possibility that its cloud servers might go offline. Given that I had licensed Adobe subscription products on my laptop, it should have fallen back to “something is wrong in the cloud, let’s just give you 24 hours grace to tide things over”. I can accept loss of access to cloud-based storage, but licensing is extremely annoying when handled in such a clumsy fashion.
Yes, implementing such a licensing scheme is difficult, and makes it easier for hackers to find holes in the system. But hackers will hack, whatever you do. And reminding customers who are paying a significant monthly subscription that things break might not be the wisest course of action. Especially since, as of this morning, the Adobe status page is all sweetness and light, as if nothing happened. You can dig in and get a few red blobs about some “major issues” but the detail is scant at best.
What to do? Well, the word out there in the social media chatterati is that there are better solutions that are fixed cost, and I’m seeing a lot of support for the Affinity products from Serif. It has a photo app, a vector graphics package and a DTP tool. And they currently cost just £23.99 per package, which is something of a steal. I might just buy all three and
“Whilst it’s fun having ‘name brand’ tools, it’s less enjoyable when they don’t work”