I don't know what Mac user in the past ruined your day, but if it makes you feel better, I'll apologize for them. However, it doesn't justify such a condescending, unhelpful response. I don't know if you really understand the issue from a Mac enterprise perspective, so I'm going to outline it.
The fact is that Adobe failed to notify Captivate 7 users about the Mavericks issue until days after most users had already discovered it, and the "solution" isn't really a solution. Adobe also hasn't been particularly clear about when a fix is coming. The (very poorly written) blog post on 10/28 discussing this issue seems to indicate that a patch is coming "in next couple of weeks", but I saw a response in another thread from the Engineering team today which said at least 2 - 3 weeks. So, for my personal machine and license, I guess I can roll it back (which will take an entire day, basically) or I can buy VMWare. Neither of these are "solutions".
The failure to support Captivate 6 users is also particularly awful and indefensible; if you purchased Adobe Captivate in February of this year (as I did in my day job), you're now required to either downgrade your OS or re-up your purchase of Captivate again. In an enterprise setting, downgrading an OS is really difficult to get done. Also, if you manage an enterprise team of users (like I do), you're going to get laughed at, then yelled at, when you tell your VP that you need to spend an additional $7K on software you just bought earlier this year. I guess I should've chosen the subscri... oh, wait. Adobe doesn't support subscription purchases for volume licensing on Captivate. Finally, I've got two iMac workstations ordered for contracting help, and those can't be rolled back to Mountain Lion. I'm really looking forward to explaining that, not only do I need seven thousand extra dollars, I also won't actually be able to use the software I'm buying for at least a few weeks.
As an aside, It's pretty common knowledge (certainly common knowledge to a software company the size of Adobe) that Mac users have a very high and very fast rate of upgrade to new OS versions - this is also standard with iOS. If the Adobe Captivate team wants to play in the Apple space, they should've been prepared for this. I don't remember any such issue with Captivate 6 and Lion to Mountain Lion. Your analogy about beta Windows users is flawed, since OSX 10.9 isn't a beta release. The beta release was way back in June, which is when the Captivate team should've started testing it. The Creative Cloud team certainly knew this, and were ready on day one.
There's a lot more to this issue than just "stupid Mac users shouldn't have upgraded". It's a huge failure on the Adobe Captivate team's part to support the very customers they've been trying so desparately to attract in versions 6 and 7. The really infuriating part is that there are so many ways in which they could've avoided this; if they were unable to get the patch built prior to Mavericks release (which I still don't buy - I think they just didn't pay any attention until users starting reporting issues), the absolute bare minimum they could've done would have been to send an email to existing customers warning of the update. Hell, that still hasn't happened - it's all in the forums, one blog post, one tweet and one Facebook update. (Really professional, Adobe team). And expecting support for a product that could've been purchased 6 months ago isn't unusual - that's the standard. Failure to adhere to that tells me that the Adobe Captivate team doesn't value any of their Mac customers, which is why I think we'll be going elsewhere next year.
Hopefully this gives you some perspective on where some of us are coming from.
73
Replies
AdChoices