Adobe have disabled legacy activation servers 🤬

I bought Adobe CS5 Master Collection years ago on a perpetual licence at full price, which is supposed to mean I can install and use it for as long as I want, on whatever machine I want. Adobe allows two active installations at a time, so when you get a new device you deactivate the software on the old one and activate it on the new one. I've done this a couple of times over the years without any trouble.

I got a new laptop recently. This time, I deactivated it cleanly on my old laptop, then went to activate it on the new one and the activation process timed out. There was no error that made sense or obvious path forward, just silence.

After digging around online I found out why. Apparently, Adobe quietly switched off the activation servers for legacy pre-subscription software in 2025 without telling anyone.

I've never asked them to support the software. What they've actually done is remove the mechanism that lets someone who legally bought a perpetual licence activate their own product. There's a Consumer Rights Wiki page documenting this, and some Reddit threads and here full of other people describing exactly the same runaround.

I feel like I've been battling Adobe's bullshit for years. I tried (and failed) to upgrade to CS6 back in 2013 when they first started trying to force everyone onto Creative Cloud, and in 2015 I struggled for hours just to get routine software update to install due to their poor form. In 2017 I asked them how to use my product on a high resolution screen and their only advice was to upgrade, which was technically wrong - a guy called Dan Antonielli had already published a registry fix in 2014 that solved it without any Adobe upgrade at all, and when Windows finally added its own native high-DPI override in 2019, he documented that too. Neither fix cost a cent or needed a subscription.

Thirteen years on, it's the same company finding a new way to push the same outcome. I'd like to say they are the epitome of enshittification, except they haven't gradually enshittified, they've always been shit to their legacy customers.

What actually happened

The case history is worth laying out because of how many times I had to start the conversation from scratch.

• Case 1 - ADB-45560212-Y9G0 (3 June). Opened and closed the same day. The summary field says "informed regarding EOL," which is Adobe's way of telling me the product had reached end of life without offering anything resembling a fix. I replied two days later refusing to accept that, but by then the case was already closed, so my reply bounced to an unmonitored inbox.
  
  
• Case 2 - ADB-45614666-D7P5 (5-11 June). Reopened through chat and told the backend team would review it. Five days later they came back with an offer to sell me a Creative Cloud subscription at a discount, which wasn't what I'd asked for at all. I said no, told them I wasn't interested in renting software I already owned outright, and pointed them to the Consumer Rights Wiki page and Reddit threads. They escalated again, and two days after that issued a new serial number, which turned out to be invalid. They closed the case before I had a chance to tell them that, so I had to wade back in again.
  
  
• Case 3 - ADB-45714968-L0H3 (closed 12 June). A dropped chat, closed with the explanation "sorry, we were disconnected" and nothing resolved.
  
  
• Case 4 - ADB-45761286-P4T8 (16-17 June). The agent ran a remote support session and worked through everything I'd already reported, finding nothing different to what I'd already told them. He said he'd escalate it. I woke up the next morning to find the case closed, with no further communication at all.
  
  
• Case 5 - ADB-45818350-V0L7 (19-23 June). This is the one that worked. I got through to an agent called Paridhi, who actually engaged with the problem. I had to point out myself that the "new" serial number from Case 2 was for CS6 rather than my actual product - when I asked why I'd been given the wrong version, I was told they'd assumed I'd appreciate the extra features - and Paridhi escalated it properly. My product is CS5. It doesn't have CS6's features, because it isn't CS6. A new, working CS5 serial number arrived within 24 hours.

The best part of a month, 5 case numbers and 2 serial numbers, one of which was for the wrong product entirely, on top of a dropped session, a session that vanished without explanation, and an outright refusal dressed up as a routine end-of-life notice. Not everyone I dealt with was as capable as Paridhi. A few of the advisors along the way genuinely didn't seem capable of troubleshooting or resolving anything. Closing tickets seemed to be the actual goal rather than fixing the problem, which made me wonder if that's a training issue or a KPI. I'm not even sure if there was a single reason it finally got sorted, but I was prepared to keep pushing.

Being handed back what I already own, framed as a favour

When the working serial number finally turned up, it came with a condition attached: a limit of two future activations, with me responsible for managing them from here.

That's presented as a concession, as if letting me use software I already paid for in full is something Adobe is generously extending to me rather than the bare minimum they owe a customer who bought the product outright. I own this licence. Adobe doesn't get to decide, after the fact and off the back of their own decision to shut down the servers, how many more times I'm allowed to install it.

If you're here because the same thing happened to you

Given that my 2015 CS5 update post is still the second most visited page on this blog after all these years, there's a decent chance you found this the same way. A few things that helped.

Understand that this is deliberate, not a bug. Adobe retired the CS5 and earlier activation servers on purpose, and there's no self-service fix or working offline activation option. Some of the "solutions" floating around online involve replacing DLL files with unofficial downloads, which I'd avoid entirely given the security risk and the likelihood it breaches your licence terms anyway.

Don't accept the first no. Every case that got closed without a fix was closed by someone who either couldn't or wouldn't escalate it properly. The one that worked only worked because I kept going back and eventually reached someone who took the problem seriously.

Cite the paper trail. Referencing the Consumer Rights Wiki page and the Reddit threads in my emails visibly shifted the tone of Adobe's replies. It tells them you already know this is a documented, ongoing issue rather than something you've stumbled into alone.

Ask for the case to stay open until you've tested the fix. Not that this actually worked - hence my 5 case IDs - but it's worth asking anyway so it's documented. The first 4 of my cases were closed before anyone confirmed it actually worked, but Paridhi could see this had occurred within my account and they committed to keep the case open, and actually did follow through.

If you're in Australia, mention the ACCC. This behaviour is a breach of Australian consumer law. I couldn't tell you whether it would hold up as a formal complaint, but every little bit helps.

This wasn't incompetence, it was a decision

Adobe have spent years trying to entice perpetual licence owners onto Creative Cloud. It didn't work on me because there's nothing in the subscription that's worth the additional cost to someone who already owns the software outright. Once persuasion failed, they moved to the next option: if you won't switch, you can be forced to. Switching off the activation servers isn't a cost-cutting decision about old infrastructure, it's a deliberate move against exactly the customers who'd already said no to the upsell.

I'm not a lawyer so I can't say this is illegal. But deliberately disabling a paying customer's ability to use software they own outright, then handing it back with conditions attached as if it's a favour, is unethical at best.

I will never pay Adobe another cent. Between open source tools and general purpose AI now handling most of what I'd have reached for Photoshop to do, I don't need to. Adobe knows the subscription pitch didn't land with people like me. I suspect that's exactly why they stopped dangling the carrot and decided to brandish the stick instead.

I got there in the end, but it took the best part of a month I shouldn't have needed to spend. Most people don't have that kind of time, and Adobe is almost certainly counting on that too.

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Privacy Risk in Australia

This week is Privacy Awareness Week in Australia, and I attended a webinar on AI, automated decision-making and privacy risk, presented by privacy law expert Anna Johnston from Helios Salinger. Over a thousand people registered for the webinar, an impressive effort.

The webinar covered a lot of ground. What it mostly did for me was reinforce a view I’ve held for a while: privacy risk in Australia is consistently underestimated, frequently treated as a compliance checkbox, and almost never given the same weight as financial or reputational risk, despite being directly connected to both.

Read the full article 

This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.  

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Using AI to review and optimise your CV

A couple of months ago I returned from a sabbatical and, out of curiosity, asked claude.ai to assess my 2025-version CV the way an ATS (automated recruitment screening) system would.

Turns out I'd nailed it - it was perfectly optimised - for 2010, which was a little confronting. 😂 

The advice back then was to stuff in as many keywords as possible so you'd get indexed in recruiters' databases. Most people with a tech-based CV from even earlier had a "Technical Summary" page which listed every product name you'd ever laid eyes on. I'd removed that but kept the keywords and it used to work pretty well. But systems got more efficient, AI got added, and I hadn't updated enough to stay relevant.

I ended up working through a process using AI to help me to audit and rebuild it. Everything went into a master document, which means now I can pull together a tailored CV for a specific job application in about fifteen minutes. It took some time to set up but I'm quite pleased with how it works now.

I joked with a recruiter recently that AI writes their job ad, AI cross-posts ad to recruiter website and job boards, potential candidate uses AI to mass-apply for roles, recruiter systems use AI to filter - where are the people?! It's not really a joke though. If you're applying for roles and hearing nothing back, it's worth considering whether your CV is actually reaching a human. 

Learn more about What AI actually does well on the ENVEE Digital blog.

This article was first published on LinkedIn 

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"So, how was your weekend?" 😂

I read an interview with a female CEO in the The Australian Financial Review the other day (unfortunately paywalled so I can't share it), and she was asked what was the most valuable career advice she'd ever received. Her answer - "treat people the way they want to be treated."

This reminded me of a workshop I attended in the early 2000s, run internally by the global software company I worked for at the time. All the project managers were put through Myers-Briggs and DiSC assessments and spent the day learning how to apply that understanding when working with others - not just to understand themselves but also to learn to recognise what other people actually needed from an interaction.

The instructor started with a story I've always found amusing. Like a lot of us, he'd grown up being taught to treat others the way he wanted to be treated - "do unto others" - and he'd recently worked out that wasn't quite right.

He was a chatty guy, the type who liked a bit of small talk and would ask about your weekend before getting down to business. He just got a new boss, who was logical, direct, always on the move and clearly just wanted to get sh*t done. The working relationship was proving challenging and the instructor was starting to think about moving on.

Then he did this same workshop and worked out he was a high "I" in DiSC (Influence), and his boss was quite likely a high "D" (Dominance). So he changed his approach. Instead of the friendly small talk, he started opening his boss's door and saying "Morning - about that report - do you want option A or B? And then should I do C or D?" The relationship improved almost immediately.

A few weeks later he was at his desk on a Monday morning when his boss came over, leaned casually on the edge and asked "So, how was your weekend?". Yep - the boss had just done the same workshop. 😂 

I've thought about that story a lot over the years, and told it a few times myself - particularly to IT teams, where the "us and them" dynamic with the rest of the business can take on a life of its own. It's a really effective way to demonstrate the point about how to get the best outcome from an interaction. It helped shape how I approach leading teams, work with clients and navigate organisations - by trying to work out what someone else actually needs from an interaction, rather than defaulting to what I'D want. I realised much later that's basically the foundation for Design Thinking, although we didn't have the name for that then.

Happy Friday 🍷 

This article was first published on LinkedIn 

Cover image: By User:JakeBeech - MyersBriggsTypes.png, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link

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Interview with Institute of Community Directors - Boards urged to close tech gap

A couple of weeks ago I had a great chat with Matthew Schulz, a journalist at Our Community, after my post about the board pipeline problem for technology professionals.

That article landed earlier today - in the inboxes of more than 60,000 NFP leaders across Australia. That's a LOT more people than I expected to be talking to when I originally wrote about my own frustrating experience applying for board roles!

The piece covers the structural catch-22 that keeps technology expertise out of boardrooms: you can't get board experience without being on a board. Boards see the risk of appointing someone without governance history as more manageable than the risk of not having tech expertise - but that's a choice about which risk to accept, not an absence of risk. And right now, most boards are choosing the risk they understand less.

Ben McEvoy from Digital Directors ANZ puts the scale of it plainly: at the current rate, Australian boardrooms are on track to have one director with digital expertise by 2078. That's tongue-in-cheek, but the underlying governance problem it describes is real - and it applies well beyond the NFP sector.

If you work with or on boards, or are a technology professional who's been through the experience-required merry-go-round, worth a read.

Click here to read the article by the Institute of Community Directors Australia 

Learn more on the ENVEE Digital blog - Digital Strategy at the executive level

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Career decisions

I withdrew from a job process this week, for a role I was genuinely excited about, which has had me feeling a little disappointed with the week.

The organisation ticked almost every box, including a solid Glassdoor rating. The role looked interesting, the boss's LinkedIn profile looked promising, and the conversations with the recruiter had been great. And then I sat down over the Easter long weekend with a bunch of solid Red Tulip Easter eggs and a glass of wine and started to think about the commute, which I'd pushed aside in my excitement about the role - 40 kilometres from home on a toll road and no public transport options.

The thing is, I already knew how this ends, because I worked in that exact location 25 years ago when I was considerably younger and it was theoretically much easier. At the end of that contract they wanted to extend and I just couldn't do it, because I'd started to detest the driving and it was wearing me down. I swore I'd never work there again.

And yet there I was, genuinely considering it, because I'd let the excitement of a potentially great role do the thinking for me, instead of using the part of my brain that remembers what it actually feels like to crawl home on the freeway on a rainy dark night in the middle of July, on repeat.

Withdrawing wasn't easy, especially with an interview already scheduled. But I just knew that three months in, things would feel even harder.

I joke about "old age" but it's actually great to be in a place to still feel the excitement, have the experience to sit with it for a bit and then apply some logic, and end up in the best place for right now. 😊 

Happy Friday 🍷 

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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Your team is already using AI. Does your organisation know what for?

I just finished a conversation with a long-time client who was keen to show off their new toy – a Claude.ai account their organisation had recently set up.

They’d been exploring what it could do and had just discovered something that genuinely impressed them. “Claude – can you see my email?” Yes. “Can you look through a specific folder, find all the emails with attached invoices, and compile the amounts into a single spreadsheet?” Yes – it was already running.

They told me this in the way you tell someone about a magic trick. “So cool!” Delighted, as they should be – that’s a genuinely useful capability that would have taken several hours to do manually.

I responded with something that was, apparently, mildly alarmed. Not dramatically – just a beat of “you did what?”

Read the full article 

This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.  

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Australian Boards and Technology Governance

 

My husband attended the AICD Australian Governance Summit in Sydney earlier this month. He called me a couple of times to check in and give me a run down.

Almost every session, he said, touched on AI and technology governance, and the urgent need for boards to have more digital expertise.

I've just read the AICD's report on AI use by directors and boards (link to their post in the comments). It's thoughtful and well-researched. It talks about AI literacy, the risks of directors using public AI tools on sensitive board papers and the importance of human judgment remaining central to governance. It doesn't mention the pipeline problem though.

I hold the AICD Foundations of Directorship credential and an MBA. I have 30 years of hands-on technology experience across enterprise, NFP and SME organisations. I've reported directly to boards and CEOs on technology strategy and risk. By the AICD's own definition, I'm exactly the kind of person they're saying boards need.

I also can't get onto a board without prior board experience. And I can't get prior board experience without being on a board. 🤯 

This isn't a new problem. Australian boards have long operated as a relatively closed system, with roles going to people who already hold board roles - predominantly lawyers and finance professionals, predominantly older and with limited technology expertise. ASIC Chair Joe Longo noted recently that directors with a technology background represent less than 8% of Australian boards, numbers which have scarcely changed in the past year.

Now the institutions that built that system are saying boards urgently need people with technology and AI expertise. The people who actually have that expertise at depth are, on average, not lawyers or CPAs, younger, and mostly haven't yet accumulated the governance CVs that get you into the room.

I don't have a clean solution to this. Boards are genuinely trying to grapple with a fast-moving space, and the AICD report reflects that seriously.

I do think it's worth naming the gap between the problem being described and the structural barriers preventing it from being solved.

AICD report referenced in this post - AI use by directors and boards: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/australianinstituteofcompanydirectors_boardroom-conversations-are-shifting-from-activity-7441589560666615808-xx4H/ 

Learn more on the ENVEE Digital blog - Digital Strategy at the executive level

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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"Well, you're still an executive"

A couple of months ago I met a woman at a networking event - someone I'd connected with on LinkedIn but never met in person.

She asked what I did.

I said I was coming off a sabbatical. My kids call it my 'Gap Year', which I'd started to find quite funny. I made a little joke about technically not being an executive at the moment.

She looked at me and said: "Well, you're still an executive" and then we moved on to small talk.

I've been thinking about those five words ever since.

She didn't make a big thing of it. Just a statement of fact, delivered matter-of-factly, from someone who had no reason to be anything other than honest.

But she was right. I'd spent months using my kids' affectionate framing for a period that was actually a deliberate pause, to recover, recalibrate and work out what came next. Somewhere in there I'd started to believe the lighter version of the story.

That one comment quietly triggered something in my brain.

In the weeks since, I've rebuilt my entire professional presence - rewritten and rebuilt my website, updated my profiles, set up systems that make me more effective, and started applying selectively for some senior roles that would really mean something to me.

One comment. Five words.

I don't know if she remembers saying it. I doubt it meant much to her.

It meant quite a lot to me though. ❤️ 

This article was first published on LinkedIn

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The referral network has changed: have you adjusted?

Many small service businesses have relied on referrals for years – and for good reason, because it worked. A solid local reputation, good relationships with complementary professionals and clients who mentioned you to people they knew was enough to keep the phone ringing. Nobody needed a marketing strategy.

But in my experience working with small and medium businesses, that reliable flow of referrals has quietly dried up for a lot of them lately, which has come as a bit of a shock.

Read the full article 

This article was first published on the ENVEE Digital blog.  

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