Much ado about Acrobat 8

Scoble wants to know why there hasn't been more noise about Adobe's announcement of Acrobat 8. My guess: the product isn't shipping until November, it costs a lot of money, and the last version was a nightmare for a lot of people. I had such a profoundly lousy experience with Acrobat Pro 7 that I ended up going back to version 6. Now that I've changed jobs, I opted to spend less than 25% of what Adobe asks for Acrobat Pro and bought ScanSoft PDF Converter Professional from Nuance instead.

In version 7, Adobe instituted a software activation scheme that was so profoundly broken I was never able to reliably use the software once I upgraded to a new PC. After activating the same product half a dozen times, requiring a horrible voice-mail menu from Hades experience every time which inevitably lead to a conversation with a human whose tone let me know that he or she was doing me a big favor by generating a new activation code for me I decided the previous version, which used a much more simple license key mechanism, was sufficient for my needs.

It's too bad really. I liked a lot of what Adobe had done with version 7. It was definitely easier to use and sported a much more task-driven user interface than prior releases. It appears that version 8, based on what I saw on their very movie-heavy marketing site, continues in that direction.

But these days, I'm no longer working with hi-res graphics, creating a lot of PDF forms, or participating in enough document mark-up to warrant the expense, not to mention the aggravation, of dealing with big price tags and onerous licensing schemes. So excuse me for not getting too excited.