CS2 install on Mac, from what I hear here, sucked. CS2, CS3, and CS4 install on Windows, from what I hear here, also sucked. Since those are all platform native installers (Apple installer and MSI respectively), I dare say that the suggestion to use platform native installers isn’t helpful. It misses the point which is not the technology the installers are built with, but what the installers actually do and why.

HUH? They most certainly are not. THey’re that inane “Adobe Custom Installer” or something powered by iNosso or whatever else someone felt like using. If they were actual Installer Packages or MSIs, we’d not be having the problems we are.

Now it’s being looked at, and given the level of language used in replies to your own blog posts, I certainly do think you should be eating humble pie if this is all sorted out by CS5 because your precocious and arrogant postulating leaves no room for you to claim a position of grace, to honestly suggest that you have an aggrieved status. You’re revelling in the attention, assured that it is your acidic tongue that has burned the powers-that-be at Adobe and forced them to act when there’s no evidence of that, but plenty to the contrary.

I never claimed that I did anything solo. What I said was that when I, and people from very sober and calm groups like MacEnterprise et al talked with Adobe reps and pointed out the same list of real problems that make not only installing, but applying updates, (like, you know, SECURITY UPDATES) take *far* longer than they need to, we were politely ignored.
Nothing changed at all to make this easier. In fact, CS2 to CS3, the “silent” install got more fragile and worse. CS4 slapped a package installer on a stub that required an even MORE fragile process.
So that’s bad to worse, to worse. Lots of sober, constructive feedback. No change. Not even word one from the Installer team(s). Nothing.
I finally snap, because it’s happened once too often, and caused people to get behind in work, (yeah, because when updates lock up a computer for hours or days, that messes with more people than just IT), and vent. No holds barred venting, and guess what. I’m getting emails and phone calls from people who REALLY want to work with me.
You’d be hard pressed to call that coincidence, but do try.
Had Adobe taken positive action YEARS ago, this installer issue would.not.exist. Period. They chose to blow it off, regardless of reason, and not really talk with the people who were actively setting aside their frustration and trying to be constructive. Those choices by Adobe lead to the current situation.
If you stop poking people, they don’t get mad because you poked them. Blaming the guy getting poked for finally getting mad about it is hardly going to make the pokee stop being mad.

Go and sit in the corner for a while, John C. Welch, and when you’re ready to act like an adult, come back and make some positive contributions.

Hey Mom, I just published a primer on using SNMPv3 on Mac OS X so that sysadmins can check their network more securely, a number of SNMP-related articles on my own site, any number of IT-focused scripts that I give away, and am doing a two-day session on network monitoring fundamentals and practices at Macworld Conference & Expo.
What have YOU got?
[I'm no longer paying attention to this brawling, and I won't accept future back-and-forth comments on this point. I'm not going to let the blog devolve into shouting matches while quieter people stream out of the room. --J.]

chmod -R is going to hit the chmod(2) system call 300 times. chown -R is going to hit the chown(2) system call 300 times. There is absolutely no material difference at the end of the day whether you make those 600 calls as you create the files or after. You make numerous excellent points, but peppered with enough rants about things which you clearly don’t understand to undermine your credibility on the things you do have valuable contributions on.

Ah, but you missed a critical point…
Each operation is individually logged. So 300 chown and chmod ops result in 600 log entries. The physical log file is written to for each of them. I watch it grow.
chmod-R and chown -R would create…two log entries. So your way, you not only take the hit for the ownership and file permission changes, but the log writes. That’s 1200 operations for 300 files.
My way, you get…602. 600 for the chown and chmod -R, and 2 for the log writes.
I’m still seeing a significant improvement with my way.

The other thing going on is that the uninstall is tolerant of post-install relocations. Want to move Photoshop.app after you install? Go ahead. Uninstall will happily remove it from its relocated position (within limits, it can’t track relocations across filesystem boundaries). Not surprisingly, this isn’t entirely free either. Apple’s installer is famous for being completely intolerant of relocated applications, not to mention their uninstaller…oh…wait, the Apple installer has no uninstaller.

1) In CS3, moving things broke the install. IIRC, InDesign or Illustrator never recovered. CS4, you only have to “fix” the install once. However, that’s still bad. So I moved it. Big deal. Why do I have to fix the install? As long as I move the entire Photoshop Folder, the internal path hasn’t changed. The full path to the /Library support folders hasn’t changed. What exactly is getting hard coded?
2) Uninstallers are a sign your install is too complicated. Here’s an alternative: Make your install directories clear and obvious, and the need for an uninstaller goes away. If I only have to delete product folders, a “CS5″ directory, and *maybe* some prefs files, (if those are doing harm, you have bigger problems), then the need for an intelligent uninstaller goes away. If you make your install simple in the first place, the need for a complex uninstaller *goes away* or is *greatly* reduced. Uninstallers perpetuate the problem, they do not fix it.
3) I agree that Apple’s rigidity with regard to application locations is silly. *However*…I can install Apple software remotely using any one of a dozen tools, no repackaging required. Their updates, even if I push them out myself, work unchanged with Apple Remote Desktop and other tools. I’ve never seen the absolutely repeatable pain from Apple installers that I do with Adobe installers. Not being able to install or update iTunes in the directory of my choice is minor when I consider that at least I can remotely install and update iTunes on 200 machines in less time than it took me to remotely install Adobe Reader 9 on *one*.
In addition, Apple’s silliness in no way validates Adobe’s. If Billy kicks a puppy every morning, that doesn’t make your punching of a baby any less wrong. It just means Billy’s wrong *too*. Using other people’s mistakes to justify your own shows a lack of ability to accept those mistakes.

Since you apparently have the solution to everything, and everyone else is wrong when they don’t agree with you, perhaps you could save us all a whole heap of trouble (and possible bring the price of oil down ’cause that would be waaay cool) and tell us the solution?

Read my site, I’ve done it there a few times.
But here:
1) Use the OS provided installers. That goes for all vendors. Period. You’re not that clever, nor are your installers.
2) (apply to Windows as appropriate) Here’s the new support directory structure for CS5:
/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS5/
Within that you have [application name] subtrees or [common files]
3) All support directories have human-readable and human-obvious names. Not a string of random letters and numbers. Yes, there are directories in the Adobe support files with names like “5b32a167b200d54265ab48248b7c614″
What’s that mean? I don’t know. You don’t know. No one but a programmer at Adobe knows, and I bet they need notes.
Or was I not supposed to actually have given the solution to this any thought and just been blindly ranting? Because if that’s what you thought, sorry. I’ve been thinking about this since CS2, and really hard since CS3.

Getting to the point of personal abuse of people involved is just ridiculous (as I hope my ridiculous introduction highlighted).

You’d like to think that…that reasoned discourse and participation is the fast track.
Well kids, Unca John’s here to tell you that I tried that, and got…well, look at the installer for CS4, and you see what that did for IT.
In fact, you know what finally got me noticed, to where people from Adobe started talking? Possibly the most profanity-laced article I’ve ever posted, (Kids, I know profanity. It was a masterpiece of the obscene), and a relentless assault on the evilness of installing CS2, CS2+, CS3, etc.
THOSE created far more, and faster progress than “Hay guyz? Listen, your installer is causing the following pain points.” I know far too many people who sent well-thought out emails to Adobe and were utterly ignored. My rants? Not ignored. So, it’s pretty obvious how you have to talk to Adobe to get stuff done. “Nice” ain’t the label. It’s a shame really, but I’m not here to question effective methods, I’m here to use them.

Do you really think the folks at Adobe sit around thinking, “Hey, this installer sucks but you know what, it doesn’t matter because all the time and effort it takes for us to have to deal with the angry customers has no impact on us at all”. Really?

So here’s an uncomfortable fact…companies, quite often mind you, ingore the installation experience because the mechanics of installing it on hundreds of machines, or thousands of machines don’t occur to them, or if it does occur to them, it gets shouted down for more visible tricks. IT is the bad guy anyway, right? So let’s see…the people who have to support it, or the people who use it..we have to piss off someone…hmm…guess who loses there.
I’m simply unwilling to suffer silently. Deal.

You, Mr Welch, are not privy to the internal machinations of Adobe. You do not know how easy or how hard it is to address this issue within the confines of that corporation. So, instead of pontificating about how you’re so smart and how easy it is to fix and how they’re so stupid and make things so difficult, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and consider what it is you really want to achieve?

i do not CARE what Adobe is thinking. What I want has been stated, clearly and consistently, over and over.
1) Platform-appropriate installers that integrate with management tools out of the box, i.e. MSI on Windows, and Apple Installer packages on Mac OS X. Note that wrapping a custom installer in a platform-appropriate one (ADOBE READER 9) is not acceptable. The benefits from this are legion, and a bright lad like you, I’m sure you’ll figure it out.
2) A clear, simple directory structure that doesn’t require complex scripts, SQLite databases, and full distributions of Python to manage.
3) An installation process that isn’t paid by the disk op.
That’s it. With those, CS would be transparent and quick to install and update. With those, uninstalling would be a snap. What EXACTLY is so hard about that? Even MICROSOFT finally got this with Office 2008. Oh wait, unlike Adobe, they have DEVELOPERS that talk to people. The Mac BU is all over twitter. You’d be amazed at how many people, even if they dislike Office 2008, (and there are a PLETHORA of reasons to dislike that product), like the people behind it, because those folks don’t “craft” messages, they talk to people.

You want the installer fixed. So you have a choice. 1. Stop using the product until it is fixed (if you feel there’s no alternative, then that’s a business decision you’ll have to come to terms with – interesting, isn’t it, that you can’t always do what you want because of business constraints, eh?). 2. Politely and reasonably communicate your concerns and proposed solutions and engage in constructive commentary (in or out of the public arena as may most benefit your ultimate goal) and work toward a common goal of making a better product.

As I said earlier, I and my IT compatriots tried reasoned and constructive. We were ignored. Carrot didn’t work, I used the stick. The stick got *noticed* and now some actual productive conversations are happening. Should they lead to actual acceptable solutions, I’ll be thrilled. Until I see solutions, and not promises, I’m not believing a thing. I’ve been in IT too long to really believe any vendor.

Of course, that would reduce the hits on your blog since tabloids sell, but hey as I said there’s always a price.

I should be so lucky, My bandwidth bills are insane. Please, stop reading my site, I’ll save money. (No, I don’t really try, nor wish to sell ads. I like the freedom I have without them. Google to date has made me…I think 40 dollars.)

So if you see the installer issues fixed (to the extent that the majority of users are satisfied) will you post a nice video on your blog eating a large serving of humble pie, or will you simply rant about how you were right (as you liked to tell us in regard to the SNMPv3 Article, you clever guy, you)?

Humble Pie infers that I was wrong to point out that based on *actual behavior and product code*, the chances of Adobe fixing this are slim and none. *Adobe* created this problem, not me. I’d have been happy to not have to deal with this idiocy. If there’s humble pie to be eaten, it’s by the person at Adobe who keeps insisting on these bizarre installers. I’m just a guy yelling about the stupid, *THEY’RE* the ones inflicting the stupid.
How come it’s more wrong to complain than to do stupid things that cause people pain? When did THAT happen?

Seriously, people. Complain when it’s valid (and it is) but haven’t you all learned that screaming and yelling and cursing does *not* make people want to help you?

What, Adobe’s a company of oversensitive tweens? We have to blow kisses at them and pat them on the rump? Let’s try this: When a group of sysadmins, release after release after patch after patch say “What you are doing is causing us harm. it is causing us to have to delay BUYING YOUR PRODUCT so we can confirm that we can work around this bad thing you’re doing, and what is needed is for you to not do it that way, but to rather do it in this way that makes it easier for us to GET YOUR PRODUCT ON PEOPLE’S COMPUTERS” then maybe, instead of ignoring that, and doing the same stupid thing over and over, and insisting you’ve really improved it by adding yet more complicated steps to it, maybe, just MAYBE, you should actually listen?
What is this whinefest of “We’re not fixing our product until you talk nice to us”? Baloney. Don’t do stuff that’s stupid, and you don’t get yelled at so much. What, you’d rather spend all your time dealing with installer fallout instead of real customers, just to show you can take your ball and go home?
Cowboy up and fix the installers. That’s the only way to fix the bad feelings.
Here’s an example of not doing things the Adobe way:
A PM for Entourage got up *at macworld* mind you, and *apologized* for how bad E’rage 10.1.X was with regard to Exchange support.
Publicly apologized for this in a room full of people who were not fans, and by and large had not been terribly nice to him. You think Adobe catches guff from people? Try being in the Microsoft booth at Macworld. They catch more guff in 30 minutes than Adobe does all year.
Even better, with every release, and even *off release*, there are material improvement to E’rage’s Exchange support. So it’s not just promises and apologies, they actually do fix things. As fast as we’d like? No. But are there obvious improvements every release? Yes.
Maybe Adobe should learn some OTHER lessons from Microsoft.