Adobe Acrobat Professional
I purchased Adobe Acrobat Professional under a perpetual licence in 2015 for AUD $635. The whole point of a perpetual licence is that you own the software and can continue using it. After deactivating Acrobat so I could reactivate it on the same computer, Adobe reported that I had reached my activation limit. My Adobe account clearly showed no activated devices, yet the software still refused to activate. I spent over four hours trying to resolve what should have been a straightforward issue. I went through countless support pages, community forums, activation troubleshooting, deactivation procedures and virtual assistants that simply sent me around in circles. Contacting a real person was far more difficult than it should have been. When I finally reached an Adobe support advisor, I was told that Adobe no longer supports perpetual licences and that nothing could be done to reset the activation. I was promised a follow-up email confirming the outcome. That email never arrived. The only email I received was an automated "Case Closed" notification containing no explanation whatsoever. The most disappointing part is that I wasn't asking for a free upgrade or a refund. I simply wanted to continue using software that I had legitimately purchased and registered with Adobe. In my opinion, Adobe has abandoned customers who purchased perpetual licences after happily taking hundreds of dollars for those products. If Adobe no longer intends to support perpetual licence holders, it should make that abundantly clear instead of leaving loyal customers to waste hours trying to solve a problem that Adobe ultimately has no intention of resolving. After this experience, I have lost confidence in Adobe as a company and will be using alternative PDF software in the future.