Adobe's New Corporate Strategies

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Reposting this to the frame list serve for people who aren't on HATT.
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Hi Jeremy,

Let me say at the outset that I really like Adobe products. I think
FrameMaker and Robohelp are good products and that they serve most technical
writer's needs at this point in time.

That being said I couldn't agree more as a current Adobe customer and user
of TCS2. While Adobe FrameMaker 9 and RoboHelp 8 qualify as "good enough",
are they best in class? I knew that used to be true, but now I am not sure
anymore.....

First, let's consider their official customer service: its simply
horrendous. Not only are you required to wait at least 20 to 30 minutes
simply to speak to a human being, but once you find a person that individual
inevitably tells you "that you are in the wrong queue"....which means
waiting yet another 15 minutes on hold. I recall a time when I was placed on
hold for over four hours, switched around to multiple queues, to finally
find out that my six months of complimentary customer service had expired
and I would have to purchase tech support. I don't think anything should be
free, its perfectly legitimate to charge for customer service, but you
couldn't tell me that within the first hour?

Admittedly, as long as FrameMaker and Robohelp are stable and non-buggy
(which they are for the most part), its not a problem. But god help you, if
something goes horribly wrong. Last week, after a year without problems,
FrameMaker 9 suddenly started crashing at start up. I was dead in the water.
What to do? I pinged various list serves, I checked adobe's support forum,
rebooted my system, system restore, and reinstalled FrameMaker. I couldn't
find anything on my problem. After a day of searching I ended up
reformatting my computer. I found out 2 days later from someone (with an
adobe address no less !!), that I could fix my problem by deleting the adobe
files in my application data folder. I might have been able to avoid
reformatting altogether. I think this clearly illustrates that  customer
support is not a priority to Adobe. I understand why. Customer service is a
gigantic cost and it hurts the bottom line. It just seems like they haven't
considered how their current customers would view that nor how that would
affect customer retention. Because I assure you, if I ever end up in a
situation where we are transferring over to new software -- customer support
will be a big concern for me.

But set aside customer support -- what about the products themselves? I
think FrameMaker 9 and RoboHelp 8 were really great improvements over the
previous versions. And yet they seem really rough around the edges. There
are little things about the product that clearly just fell through the
cracks. For example, if you are a power user of framemaker then you use hot
keys all the time, especially for paragraph tags and variables. However,
randomly and without warning, they'll just stop working. You either have to
resize the window or restart Framemaker. Its absolutely maddening. In any
case, I keep coming back to FrameMaker's future and how it just doesn't seem
like Adobe gets it. The future of technical documentation is XML authoring.
While there's structured framemaker, dita, and a host of third party plugins
can anyone really say its a simple, painless, and quick process to
transition from unstructured framemaker to either structured or dita? I
doubt it -- though of course if I am wrong someone please correct me because
I would love to transition to a pure XML solution (but not DITA). If
FrameMaker provided a robust, simple, intuitive UI wizard that could walk
someone through the process of converting their unstructured documentation
into some sort of generic XML structure, it would be worth their weight in
gold. And then if they provided not only robust XSLT support to transform
the content into a help system and a PDF but a simple intuitive way to
 create use XSLT stylesheets....well that would be amazing.

I know there are products out there that do this already. The only reason I
haven't gone over to them is product lock in. One of these days, the product
lock in is going to cease being a factor and i'll end up dropping framemaker
for a true XML authoring environment. I wonder if Adobe realizes this?

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini