Appropriate given the recent discussion of "Adobe is lazy" and "Adobe doesn't fix flash bugs".
From the link (a tl;dr, if you will):
"""Adobe Reader comes with Adobe's PDF preview handler but the installer has a mistake which means the preview handler does not work on 64-bit systems. People have been complaining about this for over two years with no official response. It turns out the problem can be fixed via a simple registry change.
(Update: Months have passed since I discovered the fix and Adobe still haven't corrected their installer. Having ignored the problem for over two years Adobe seem intent on ignoring the solution as well. That's despite me doing the research for them, giving away the fix for free and having hundreds of grateful people confirm that it works. What a useless company.)
I wish I could bill Adobe for my time fixing their mess. The ridiculous thing is that whenever we've tried to officially inform Adobe of bugs in their code (like blindly calling through a null pointer after a failed QueryInterface), bugs which we've found and worked around for ourselves but which may cause problems for other people, they've asked us to pay them for a support contract. WTF? Who is supporting whom here, exactly?"""
This isn't directly a reply to your comment, but the way I've seen Adobe for a while is not that they are lazy, but that they are not focused.
They keep coming out with new products for Flash (Catalyst, iPhone apps, Air, Flex 3/4, Stratus...) and new features for Photoshop (like import of 3D models) instead of really polishing what they have.
When I develop for Flash, I stay away from the IDE as much as possible and use Eclipe/FDT/Ant instead. The IDE is just wasting my time for most tasks since it's slow and buggy and their recent interface overhaul was a major step back.
If they simply take what they have or even cut back a bit, make all of their products work together beautifully and easy to use, I think they will be fine. Right now it feels like they are chasing the latest and shiniest tech.
Well it's like they have no concept of maintenance at all in their product management. Literally they produce some code and never touch it again. Witness the hundreds of various similar UI elements in any single piece of their software, all of which act essentially the same. Why not go back and retrofix the old stuff? Because they don't maintain anything they've previously built. If they could solve the registry bug messaged previously by simply piling on some new features, it would be done. But since that's not how one fixes registry bugs, it'll never be done.
It's like the Soviet model for building software. Build it once, build it shoddily, never maintain.
Well this just goes to explain why Adobe is failing and why apple is boxing plugins in separate processes and everyone is pushing for HTML 5's <video> and <audio> tags. The fact is, nobody wants adobe's crap, because everyone seems to be able to fix these stupid bugs except for adobe.
From the link (a tl;dr, if you will):
"""Adobe Reader comes with Adobe's PDF preview handler but the installer has a mistake which means the preview handler does not work on 64-bit systems. People have been complaining about this for over two years with no official response. It turns out the problem can be fixed via a simple registry change.
(Update: Months have passed since I discovered the fix and Adobe still haven't corrected their installer. Having ignored the problem for over two years Adobe seem intent on ignoring the solution as well. That's despite me doing the research for them, giving away the fix for free and having hundreds of grateful people confirm that it works. What a useless company.)
I wish I could bill Adobe for my time fixing their mess. The ridiculous thing is that whenever we've tried to officially inform Adobe of bugs in their code (like blindly calling through a null pointer after a failed QueryInterface), bugs which we've found and worked around for ourselves but which may cause problems for other people, they've asked us to pay them for a support contract. WTF? Who is supporting whom here, exactly?"""