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Super products, but the licensing is a surprise
All products are superb. e,g the Workspace feature in Photoshop is a dream, it opens preselected floating windows that relate to the type of tasks you are performing.

But the licensing is draconian. I thought I was buying a product bundle that I can install on different machines. But it turns out that you need to install all products in the suite on the same machine.This needs to be very clearly declared in all promotional materials for this suite so people like me can make better purchase decisions.

Incredible software, less than incredible company
The CS3 software is, as previous Adobe releases have been, great. Very great potential for creating and altering your own work, easy to use once you got your head around it, and with good interconnectivity.

However, there are a couple of problems, as one reviewer also points out. Firstly this software is rather pricy and quite greedy memory wise, which is a bit of a bother. Secondly, as the same reviewer also remarks on, installing and uninstalling these products can quite quickly turn into a proper nightmare finding small obscure files in obscure places on your harddrive and risking your entire hard disk in the process. Thirdly, and this is connected with my second point, Adobe dosen't seem to care about anything but themselves. Their obsession with anti piracy implementations becomes a weight around the paying users ankles, and, as far as I know, dosen't slow down the pirates. Their customer service is unfriendly at best, and their greed second to none (this is sort of expensive software).

In the end though, I wouldn't recommend any other software because this is the best out there, but it would be nice with an alternative. If only for the sake of shaking up the people at Adobe.

Great package, great price
This is a must-have package for creative professionals. Amazon offers this suite at the most competitive price I know of.

Bloatware CS3
As a Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign user since the very start Adobe has it easy. They have made the dominant series of software for so long it is a given that they should continue their regime.

The problem is they have gotten insane with power. Without anyone to check them, the price grows along with the absurd use of memory.

Examples:
- Adobe used the worst installation process ever created by man and made a quick joy of using new programs into a day or two slog through hell. If there ever was a reason to pirate software, this punishing of paid users is definitely it.

- You can't throw this application away. You need to find a hidden program in your computer to uninstall it first, then trash.

- If you accidently trash it you need to run a script that they provide. The problem is this script (which isn't exactly simple) could erase you hard drive. Have fun!

- If you decide that you'd just like to reinstall after trashing you can't. You need to use the script. A bit of DRM will not allow this to be installed, thus forcing you to potentially destroy your computer so they can avoid possible piracy.

- Bridge while in concept is nice, is in functionality, less then useless.

- Stock Photos? See above.

- And Acrobat is the crown jewel of uselessness. It is so bloated and unintuitive it makes me wish Adobe had some real competition. When every other program can open a PDF faster then the company who created the file type you know there is an issue here.

- Updates are welcome. Auto-updates are even nicer. That is until you learn the hard way that auto-updates delete preferences and color-palettes. So behind the scenes you are about to lose all of your work randomly. Sweet.

- The improvements to all other applications are fairly minor outside some solid GUI tweaks

My main complaint here is that the much touted connected community of applications still doesn't work. Transferring from one application to another is meant to be seamless and quick, but it is still a chore. These are not streamlined apps nor are they speedy workhorses - they are stuck in between and set to make very few power users happy. Even less for first time folk.

On the plus side, the intel boosts are wonderful. And the rewritten InDesign makes me love that I switched from Quark so long ago. The new Flash is nice, and it integrates the best of all, but Actionscript 3 is a major step backwards in my opnion. It is far too code oriented for designers, and almost useless to coders.

But in total, if you have a version of any of these apps on your computer this simply isn't worth your money or your time.

Love it.
Great product. I use CS3 every day and I'm still learning better ways to use it. I rely on Illustrator and Photoshop for most of my work, but I'm also using InDesign.