[hardik988]

This is aside the point of your blog post, but IMO it is entirely unreasonable to assume that you'll receive a digital download when you've bought a software on DVD.

I'm a huge proponent of DRM-free and open software. But think about this: It just happened to be that you were dealing with Adobe, who have the resources to make huge digital downloads available. What if the software on your DVD was made by a small company who can't afford to host multi-gigabyte downloads? When you bought the DVD, it was with an explicit assumption that you could use the DVD in a DVD drive.

Finally, yes, customer-service chats suck (except for Amazon - I continue to be amazed by how awesome their service is), and calling a company up is almost always more effective.

[neeharc]

In today's day and age I think its reasonable. Even when I bought it, I knew I could download it online and use the same license key. That was an option until Adobe released the new CS6. Further, this download is still available to you if you bought the digital download. What I couldn't understand is why they would not provide the same service to a customer who buys via DVD.

[epylar]

Amazon's EC2 service's most expensive data transfer to-internet option is 12 cents per gigabyte. So at most $1 to give a customer a direct download of a product with no marginal cost that he paid hundreds of dollars for. I think it would be reasonable to expect a small company to do this too.