Tateru Nino has received word on why the weekend Amazon offer was pulled with a reply from Peter Gray of Linden Lab:
“This offer was terminated early due to repeated attempts to circumvent the one-per-customer limit, but we saw great demand for the deal and hope to be able to offer similar special promotions in the future”
Inara Pey has decided to award Linden Lab’s Amazon offer the inaugral SL Palme d’Face Award, for not seeing the blindingly obvious. However Linden Lab don’t appear to be the only people unable to see the blindingly obvious, Adobe have been at it this week too.
Yesterday it went viral that you could download the Adobe CS2 suite for free, this included old versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, which generally won’t play nicely with the latest operating systems. This rumour started due to Adobe announcing that the activation servers would be turned off and they placed the serial numbers on their site, in no time at all word spread that CS2 was now free, people were downloading away like mad and then the links stopped working and Dov Isaacs of Adobe quashed the rumours in a forum thread:
“On behalf of Adobe Systems Incorporated …
You have heard wrong! Adobe is absolutely not providing free copies of CS2!
What is true is that Adobe is terminating the activation servers for CS2 and that for existing licensed users of CS2 who need to reinstall their software, copies of CS2 that don’t require activation but do require valid serial numbers are available. (Special serial numbers are provided on the page for each product download.) See <http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1114930>.
You are only legally entitled to download and install with that serial number if you have a valid license to the product!
– Dov”
When I say this rumour about CS2 being free went viral, I’m not talking about forum threads, it was reported by the likes of CNET and Forbes.
Forbes later ammnended their report about the freebie offer, with Dov Isaacs comment added there. This is similar to the LL offer, misconceptions, people taking advantage, call it what you want, in both cases people have taken advantage of something that wasn’t intended, the thing is, is this bad?
Some people will be disappointed that LL pulled their promotion, but the thing is, it gained publicity about their steps into Amazon, although there are flaws with that system regarding US customers only being able to download software with Amazon, I see this as good news and as Peter Gray commented to Tateru Nino, there was great demand, although free Linden Dollars did help that along, plenty of folk were happy to link their Second Life accounts to their Amazon accounts, compare this to the reaction Linden Lab has received when they’ve tried to encourage people to link their Second Life accounts to their Facebook accounts in the past.
Adobe managed to shake life into an eight year old product and they got a measure of just how much interest there is in their products, many find their products price prohibitive but it’s a sign of the esteem that Adobe is held in that such a rumour not only went viral so quickly, but that people were desperate to get their hands on Adobe products. There’s no such thing as bad publicity and all that.
Whatever direction Linden Lab take with their Amazon advenutres, I wish them well, it’s good to see them looking at partnerships like this. I just hope that Linden Lab poke Amazon about the US customers only restriction on such deals, I’d have happily linked my SL account to my Amazon account if I could, I know plenty of others don’t want to, but I’d have happily done it.
Overall, I don’t think much damage has been done to Amazon, Linden Lab or Adobe over the last few days, now if Linden Lab could talk to Adobe about making a later version of Adobe Photoshop cheap for Second Life users for the creation of content in Second Life, we might be getting somewhere!