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So while John Nack is busily doing his John Nack thing of "managing the message" with regard to the debacle of Adobe's Installers, I thought I'd help craft what Adobe should be saying:

"We've gotten, over the years, a lot of email from people about the custom installers we've created at Adobe. Most of it has been negative. Very negative, and to be honest, rightly so. To be fair, we didn't set out to create a bad installer. We wanted to create an installer that worked the same on both platforms. We thought we could do this. Maybe we could have, but that would have required far more resources than we gave it, and still would have ultimately been a failure.

We forgot that the installer for both the product, and product updates is a critical experience, especially in the case of the former, since that is a customer's first experience with the product. We forgot that installing software is, in the end, the copying of data from one location to another. We forgot that while people want a simple, easy to use install, that doesn't justify making a mess of their drives, and creating ever more complicated schemes that require ever more complicated install and uninstall procedures. We forgot that we aren't the sole source of good ideas in the computing universe. We forgot that one size fits poorly.

So here's what we'll do. While we cannot change the initial installation for CS4, what we can do is ensure that any updates for any Adobe product are designed in the way that is best for the platform that product runs on. For Windows, that means MSI installers, for Mac OS X, that means Apple Installers, and so on. It means that we will not make people quit applications they aren't updating, or that aren't Adobe products. We won't make you quit your browser just to update Flash, especially if that update is being applied remotely. For someone installing manually, we'll give them the option of restarting their browser at the end of the install.

For CS5, we're going to again, use platform-correct installers. We're going to ensure that we're doing things efficiently, but safely. You're all right, we don't need 5-7 disk operations per file copy when installing, and we certainly don't need to log permissions of files we're going to delete during an uninstall. We're also going to have a major, and hopefully welcome change to our directory structure. All common CS5 support files will be in one directory called "CS5". Within that directory, application - specific support files will be in a subdirectory with a name that clearly indicates that. Common support files will be in another clearly named directory. All directories will have clear, concise names.

We're also going to make sure that we vet new installers with a team made up of not just our traditional customers, but IT professionals, so that we know that installing our software on one, or one thousand machines is, if not pleasurable, at least not painful. Finally, the days of treating only certain platforms as "business" platforms, at least from the installation point of view are done. There are no more "business" platforms and "designer" platforms. There are only platforms our customers use, and we need to make sure that installing our products on those platforms is simple, easy, and "just works", no matter the platform.

Adobe has always prided itself on the care and quality of our applications, and now, we're going to make sure that our installation procedures show that care and quality too."

It's not hard. Admit you screwed up, then talk about how you're going to do better. It's even easier when the way to do better is right there. Trying to pretend otherwise is, at best, treating your customers like they're stupid, and at worst, treating them like they're stupid while lying to them.

You want to send the right message, just tell the damned truth.

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Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy, Installers MATTER

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