Back in January of this year, I documented Adobe’s wild succes with their attempt to prevent people from downloading Acrobat Reader by utilizing getPlus(tm) from NOS Microsystems.

Today, I downloaded Acrobat Reader and much to my surprise, getPlus is no longer front-and-center.  I simply downloaded the executable and installed it.

What happened to getPlus?  My interest was piqued, so I had a look around the NOS Microsystems site to see what they offer.  As it turns out, some pretty cool technology.

“We offer the only simultaneous download, extraction and installation platform available.”

Sounds pretty cool, right?  Unfortunately, it has the side effect of modifying the all-too-familiar download and installation experience from Next -> Next -> Next -> Finish into something that looks like this:

You’ll find plenty of diagrams and literature on the NOS site about their technology, how easy it is to customize and how it increases customer satisifaction through ease of use and simplicity (this, I strongly doubt).  What you won’t find is screenshots.

Countless companies employ “Download Managers”, as though the Save File functionality in Internet Explorer or Firefox is insufficient for the task at hand.  Typically these serve as advertising shells or simply an excuse to get more software on your machine.  They all miss the mark; additional software downloaded and installed under the assumption a download will be interrupted or some marginal increase in download and installation time will make up for the additional complexity.

If Adobe has indeed continued to utilize getPlus, they’ve done a terrific job of hiding the complexity so that we reap the rewards without paying the price.