Web Performance Matters

Lately I've been working with a lot of documents, so I was getting ready to invest in an Adobe Acrobat licence. To be able to merge documents of different types would be particularly useful. So it seemed like serendipity today when I got an email from Adobe with the title, Combine it all into one. It offered a free 30-day trial of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, which it said could "combine spreadsheets, e-mails, web pages, and forms into one searchable PDF package". Perfect! I thought, I'll download it now. And that's when the problems started.

Site registration and usability

First they wanted me to register. Knowing that I'd probably registered with Adobe before, I entered my email address and clicked the link saying I'd forgotten my password. So they sent me an email. It listed my email address (the one I'd just told them about, except that it was now in upper case) and listed a couple of links that took me back to pages on their site that I'd already visited. But it did not contain any password information. (Well, if it was there, it was cunningly hidden, or perhaps printed in a white font. Anyway, I couldn't see it.)

So I decided I must have been mistaken about having registered previously. I knew I'd registered with Macromedia, but maybe Adobe's database didn't know that. So I set about completing the form. After a couple of iterations for missed fields, re-entering fields I'd already entered before, etc., I finally satisfied all the form validation rules. Then guess what! I got an error message saying (in effect), Someone has already registered with this email address -- please enter a different email address.

Unbelievable! This must be one of the most stupid error message ever composed -- who else could possibly be using my email address? Especially since it's the one I already entered previously. Who are the idiots who "designed" this stuff?! Have they ever heard of the word "usability"? This is not the way to delight your customers.

Software bloat and usability

But I am persistent. So having already spent about 20 minutes trying to get my free trial, I was not about to quit at this point. After considering my options, I revised my earlier thinking. Since Adobe's database obviously did know about me, I decided to try some possible passwords, and (naturally) the first one worked. Why didn't I do that in the beginning?

Never mind, the prize is in sight -- now I can get my software. But not so fast ... it turns out the download is a 263Mb file. Yes, you read that correctly -- 263Mb!! I was shocked -- what can they possibly put in there that requires that much code? How many programmers did it take to write it? What about performance? If your software takes up that much space, either it contains lots of code that is never used, or there is just no way to make it run fast. And, since it's just about impossible to test that much code properly, how many bugs does it contain?

Anyway, at this point there was no turning back, so I started the download process. Shortly after it started it told me that it would take another 4 hours and 36 minutes. As you can imagine, I was not optimistic about this. And sure enough, it had downloaded 54% of the file after 2.5 hours when something I did made it quit altogether, leaving nothing on my laptop.

I guess I'll just try setting it running overnight tonight, and see what happens ... [see comments for update]

Wirth's Law

Last week I wrote about Wirth's Law: Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. I could not have asked for a better example.

It appears that I am not the first person to complain about Adobe Acrobat bloat. In fact, it may even be costing Adobe business. And if a company has enough programmers to create a 263Mb software package, then why can't someone write a few lines of code that make their Web site more usable for potential customers? Adobe seems to have its priorities wrong.

Tags: Adobe, Acrobat, software bloat, performance, Web site usability, usability, Wirth's Law, download time