Robert Scoble had a recent blog post where he wondered why there was not much in the way of interest in the press and blogosphere around Acrobat 8.0. It reminded me why I run as little as I can of Adobe’s products.

Licensing, Code Bloat, Instability, Licensing, Cost, Instability, Cost, Licensing.  You get the point. I have not used or recommended any of Adobe’s PDF related products since version 5.

Versions 6 and 7 were crash prone, and VERY slow to load on my high end (for their time) systems. I have used numerous 3rd party rival products that load MUCH faster, and are a fraction of the cost, have clear licensing and don’t crash every 3rd time you load them.

I have participated in enterprise projects that made heavy use of creating and distributing PDF documents, and in every case the decision was made to go with anyone except Adobe, since even corporate lawyers could not make heads or tails of their licensing, and the cost was always prohibitive as well.

(For fun we had 3 different people call Adobe once, all 3 asked the exact same licensing question of the Adobe rep, all 3 got very different answers!!)

So in conclusion, Acrobat 8 is more of the same, and that makes it un-news.