Jeremy, this is a good question. I agree with you completely on a couple of points - I do believe they want us to succeed using their software; that's what keeps them in business and as long as their security protocols are robust and up to date our credit card information should be safe with them, and no I don't expect to see charges on my Visa card from rogue employees even if they had any.
But that isn't the whole story of "trust" - it's a broader concept. Perhaps expectations are higher than they should be in some quarters, but people - I believe - generally expect to have a relatively seamless experience up-grading their software, knowing what they are up-grading from-to, understanding the differences and implications between various purchase options available to them (because it has become a bit more challenging to understand than it used to be - but not by that much), and being able to use the software pretty much as they had been - or if features are changing, adequate notice and instruction about how to deal with what's new. If they feel let-down on stuff like this, they become wary, uncertain and uncomfortable, and that impairs "trust" very broadly conceived, as in: "can I trust what I'm into with this software"?
Mark, you're obviously right. People expect a lot from software. To a very large extent, they get a lot, too: I consider Lightroom, for example, to be probably the most impressive piece of software I've used in some 40 years of working with computers.
In the old days (ah, the good old days) computers were difficult to use, unforgiving of mistakes. People who installed software had to understand what they were doing: how to use make, whether they had the correct libraries, whether their search paths were correctly set up and so on. Tech support people, some of whom at least partially understood the issues, were vital.
Now, expectations are different. There's an expectation that an update will run smoothly and that the result will be an improvement. To a very large extent, those expectations are met. Lr, for example, has improved enormously. But sometimes, things go wrong; and people then get irritated. And angry. And blame the software provider.
They may be right. But the fact that Hogan's update went wrong doesn't mean that there's an egregious error which warrants the ludicrous overreaction of "never trusting Adobe again" or the ridiculously hyperbolic "nobody trusts Adobe": the paucity of complaints suggests that for the vast majority of people, it went well. Maybe Hogan did something wrong. Maybe there's something sufficiently non-standard about his setup which results in the installer's failing, because perhaps it's so non-standard that it never occurred to the programmers that it might ever happen. Some comments above suggest that the last possibility may be right.
I don't know Thom Hogan from Adam, so I won't argue with Jeff about whether or not he knows how to use software; however in a way that's not the key issue. More importantly, from all the stuff I've been reading, other seemingly intelligent people are getting confused (e.g. about versions, upgrades, LR import dialog), and if that's happening it implies that the Company may have at least some communications issues to address. Different people have different levels of comfort and agility with software as it takes its twists and turns, and the developers need to address a fairly broad spectrum. I don't see any of this as a train-smash, and we've read that Adobe is fixing-up certain things. I wouldn't read much more into this. All companies make mistakes - we all do - the more responsible ones will fix them and move on, as perhaps we should! :-)
Quite. It's a mistake. If you find malicious code embedded in your (non-pirated) version of PS, then get upset. If your money is stolen by the company, get upset. But if software doesn't work, be irritated, if you must, kick the cat and devote some attention to finding out why and fixing it.
Perhaps the lesson is that it's a mistake to assume that everything in an update will work exactly as expected. Some things require effort and understanding.
Jeremy
