The four stages of software upgrade grief

Sometimes what starts out as a fun upgrade to improved tools can turn into an emotional roller coaster for no apparent reason. First, you get one error message, and then another. There’s a call to tech support, as well as the up-and-down ride of hope and apathy. Frustration, despair, apathy, and intervention — it’s happened to all of us. Eventually you decide to cut your losses.

Jan was already at the end of this cycle with Adobe by the time she wrote to the Gripe Line. After a seemingly simple purchase of Adobe CS4, she was at wit’s end, trying to make up for lost work and despairing the thought of ever reaching a satisfactory resolution.

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“In April, the charity where I work as IT manager purchased two copies of Adobe CS4,” Jan says. As it turns out this was an ill-timed acquisition — a few days later, Adobe announced the release of CS5.

“We are a nonprofit and our license does not entitle us to upgrades. So we decided the simplest solution was to use this, now older, version,” explains Jan.

The catch — a major one, at that: The software wouldn’t work. In fact, for the most part, it wouldn’t even install. What it did do was eat up the company’s limited time and resources.

“We downloaded it multiple times to multiple computers,” she explains. “Every single download was corrupt and ended with an error message that read, ‘A problem has occurred with the archive. Please try downloading again.'”

Jan asked several of the nonprofit’s staff to download it from their home computers in case the problem was with her firewall or security, but the results were identical. In one or two cases, the software got past the error message and asked for a serial number, but none of the serial numbers Adobe gave her worked. She got new numbers from Adobe; they didn’t work either. She tried to work with Adobe’s technical support before she gave up and wrote to the Gripe Line.

“We opened trouble tickets only to have Adobe close them as resolved when nothing had been done,” she explained. “My staff spent many three-hour shifts on the phone with technical support but got no resolution.”

But the final straw — the one that convinced her there was no way to resolve this without help — came when a member of the nonprofit’s technical staff had already spent several hours on the phone with Adobe technical support.

“The phone support person asked to see the actual desktop of the person where an installation had failed,” writes Jan. “That was my computer.”

So, in the middle of a busy work day, she stopped what she was doing to share her desktop with the technician — for more than 90 minutes. This session would have gone on even longer if the support person hadn’t failed to respond to Jan for over 15 minutes, after which Jan took back control of her desktop.

Jan reports, “My colleague — still on the phone with Adobe several hours later — was finally told there were no more DVDs of the product and nothing Adobe could do for us.” At this point, Jan wrote to the Gripe Line.

“It has been three full months since we made this purchase,” she explains. “And we have nothing. If CS4 is so unusable, could Adobe just give us CS5 instead?”

I immediately contacted Adobe on Jan’s behalf but felt I was getting nowhere — until I received a note from Jan this week.

“Two things have happened since I wrote to you,” she notes. “First, we were able to get the DVDs from a local reseller.”

And second, she received an email from someone at Adobe in response to the Gripe Line’s queries. He wanted to know how he could help. Jan told him she had — only just — managed to get the software working by locating the disks. But she shared her intense frustration with the product, the helpless support staff, and the company’s unwillingness to take care of a customer who had spent so much money on a new product.

“He wrote back to say that Adobe would like to send us a free upgrade as an apology for our frustrating experience,” she says. “This is very generous and much appreciated!”

Got gripes? Send them to christina_tynan-wood@infoworld.com.

This story, “The four stages of software upgrade grief,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Christina Tynan-Wood’s Gripe Line blog at InfoWorld.com.