Why does it feel like Acrobat gets worse with every update?

[Adam23256214f5uf]

The new comment features are horrendous to use. Does anyone at Adobe test the usability of these features?

The speed of using Acrobat is horrendously slow. How is it that the company that invented PDF format appears to be the worst at handling them? Do better. I don't care about AI features, focus on getting the core features right first.

[try67]

Because it does... Updates are now a source of problems, it seems, not solutions or improvements. The last update to Acrobat and Reader broke the functionality of all form fields, for example.

And hear hear about the AI stuff! Adobe, get the core functionality working properly before you move on to more advanced (and mostly useless, in my opinion) features.

[bodywise02]

This may be the inevitable evolution of great products.  Just stop "updating!"  Stop making it more improved, Just make it more stable.  So many updates today make products worse.  Everyone but Adobe knows it's getting worse.  Crashes and freezes more and more frequently.  Here's to one, " get your act together!"

[J. M. S.]

This is from an article about Google (by Ed Zitron), but it fits the current Adobe development quite well:

This is what I mean when I talk about the Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it.

This is the result of taking technology out of the hands of real builders and handing it to managers at a time when “management” is synonymous with “staying as far away from actual work as possible.” And when you’re a do-nothing looking to profit as much as possible, you only care about growth.