How not to make trial versions
A few months ago, I wanted to try out Adobe Dreamweaver
However, it failed to install, and when I tried to get help from Adobe, they told me I had to purchase the full version to get any form of support apart from using the web forum.
Given that the installer didn’t get very far, I concluded that it was probably incompatible with Vista in some way, and I obviously didn’t buy the full version.
Recently I needed temporary access to Adobe InDesign
This time it actually installed correctly, but when I tried to run it, it came up with a license key error.
I searched for the error message on Adobe’s support forum, and it said that the error was caused by some wrong values in the license key registry (typically caused by another Adobe program being installed wrongly), and that the only solution was to have Adobe’s tech support guide me through changing some values manually – reinstalling it wouldn’t make any difference.
But again, Adobe’s tech support is not available to me, as I’ve only downloaded the trial version, so I can’t try out InDesign on my machine.
Adobe wrote to another user on their forum that if he’d just purchase the program, they were certain they’d be able to get it to work on his computer, but that kind of defeats the whole idea behind trial versions, doesn’t it?
Why don’t Adobe understand that they’re losing lots of potential sales by not providing installation support for trials?