Was pumped tonight to see Mashable’s post about Adobe offering a paid upgrade for their Acrobat.com service. There are things I enjoy about Adobe’s  service, none the least of which is the ConnectNow webconferencing capability which I use often. One thing I don’t like is embedding a PDF in their viewer (see below) and having it’s ugly branding slapped prominently on it.

Knowing I’d upgrade if the embeddable PDF viewer could have it’s branding removed, I reached out to their live chat tonight and the Phillipines call center person was sort of dumbfounded by my simple question (chat transcript after the jump).

I reached out to ask one, simple question after reviewing the website and other materials for half an hour: “If I upgrade, am I able to remove the ‘Acrobat.com’ branding from the embeddable PDF viewer?”

This is important to my business since I want *my* branding on my website and blogs vs. Adobe’s. If any company gives us their service for free, it’s tough to argue with them slapping their brands on the viewers. If I pay for the service, I want their’s off and mine on (or none at all).

That should’ve been a simple matter for the Phillipines customer center to answer (if it’s NOT a bullet point on an Acrobat.com feature list, it should be). I understand they’re playing a support function for the service (and are not in pre-sales), but Adobe really needs to empower people like this to answer no-brainer questions like this one since people like me (with those simple-but-possible-deal-killer questions) will simply not keep working so hard to find an answer so we can give Adobe our money.

As it stands now, I have to make a phone call to find out if branding can be removed. [Read more...]