I wasted more time with faux Acrobat support having Indian names than the sealed retail Acrobat X Pro software was worth. The software installed and activated fine 4 years ago. I never could get a straight answer why it would take Adobe 4 years to flag a bad serial,(which I do NOT believe). I was run in circles and told to seek a refund 4 years after a sale of bona fide software that Adobe has suspiciously decided 4 years later is somehow not genuine. Once years ago I ran across a high quality counterfeit of XP and Microsoft had me send it to them for physical examination, and in return MS gave me a free replacement bona fide genuine software for my trouble. Why doesn’t Adobe offer the same consideration? Because that doesn’t sell subscription upgrades. I advised Adobe support that if the problem was not resolved by Adobe, nag screen deactivation would be accomplished by user intervention and the regedit would be published far and wide. A similar intervention had to be done as a workaround when Windows Update malfunctioned and crashed over half a billion XP computers world wide, which was a 100% Microsoft EPIC FAIL. There is a hubris about big corporate entities that never ceases to amaze, with endless tasking of consumers at bug fixes for crappy resource hogging “improved” user profiling spyware / software that isn’t always any real upgrade. It is frustrating, and “cloud computing” is not my cup of tea. I buy zero “subscription software”. And “automatic updates” are eventually a proven security risk any place they are allowed in my experience.
I’m of the same mind regarding subscription software. I simply won’t do it. I’ll stick with my Windows 7 and Office 2010. When Microsoft makes those obsolete and tries to get me to upgrade, I simply won’t do it. I don’t trust “the cloud” and I don’t trust any corporation that tries to push me in that direction.