Mark Pilgrim on the latest version of Adobe Reader.

Adobe® Reader® 9 is out. It’s now almost half as fast as Foxit Reader. It lets you embed Flash in PDF and embed PDF in Flash. Adobe supports both kinds of music, country and western. They’ve also “conveniently” bundled Adobe® AIR™ for no apparent reason and added synergistic integration with their cloud, which claims it doesn’t support my browser and then requires both Javascript and Flash to sign up for an Adobe® ID, the use of which is governed by this draconian service agreement, which is a PDF. You can’t make this stuff up. And apparently it gets worse if you try to, you know, actually install it.

Adobe today reminds me a bit of Apple in the mid ’90s when I bought my first Mac. Tremendous engineering and design talent, loyal customer base built over 20 years and a management that just doesn’t get it at all, and seems hell-bent on running the company into the ground.

Tags: Adobe, Acrobat, PDF, Design