Adobe's New Corporate Strategies

[Chris Despopoulos]

RE the good ole days when men were men and software was innovative.  

What we're witnessing is a natural part of any innovative curve.  Back when FrameMaker first made waves, you could subscribe to three different magazines that printed monthly articles about new and interesting software.  When's the last time you heard of new and innovative software?  I guess it was about 10 years ago when you could subscribe to magazines just to read about new and innovative cell phones (as a replacement to software zines).  Even that has dwindled to nearly nothing.  

Read up on your biology -- Try Stephen J. Gould's writing on the Cambrian explosion.  The idea is that we make steps along a meandering path of punctuated equilibrium.  Some cataclysm radically alters the environment.  An explosion of innovative life forms answers the new context.  This is winnowed down through time by the success of the best designs.  Lather, rinse, and repeat.  Lest you raise alarms about "best", the success of Microsoft, or the word "design", don't.  You can only talk of design in this context in retrospect, as a human construct overlaid on an inherently arbitrary and chaotic (or at least hopelessly complex) process.

So it is with technology.  The bicycle is an excellent example.  It began with an explosion of different designs, and finally settled on the one we know and trust.  There are occasional incremental improvements, but nothing truly innovative.  The bicycle has become a commodity, where you can buy a 30-speed mountain bike for $95.00 at your local Wallmart.  But try buying a 1-speed kid's bike these days...  It can't be done.  Sure, there's the cachet market for hand-made bikes and so on.  But on a global scale, the technology has stabilized into a commodity market.

So it is with computers.  I just went through the exercise of trying to get a laptop with portrait orientation.  After all, I'm a tech writer -- I use portrait pages.  My old Inspiron 5150 has more than 1200 vertical resolution, and I can see a whole page on it.  It turns out that I have to get a full HD screen just to get close.  More machine than I need, and a significant increase in cost.  And if it wasn't for BlueRay and video games, such a display would be completely unavailable -- the're all landscape wide screens topping at 1280X800 or so.  OTOH, the FIRST thing and MOST IMPORTANT thing you see about any and every laptop configuration is the choice of colors.  But that's how it is with toasters, blenders, tooth brushes, and computers.  

And with desktop software.  The next wave (you heard it here) is servers and services.  Currently, the software innovation I'm aware of is in managing networks, whether managing an array of devices and applications, streams of financial data, or encoding/decoding & QOS for multimedia.  Even if you just run it on a local host as various servers and/or virtual machines, your software will soon all be services swapping information via XML an/or other transports.  FrameMaker per se has a limited shelf life in this scenario.  Instead, technical documentation will be written in pieces scatterd across the cloudscape, and glommed into a coherent thought at the last possible moment.  The race will be to the last possible moment.  Ultimately, that will be as the reader asks about his current concern with his current (and fluid) configuration.  

Are you surprised that companies are putting 20-year old software out to pasture?  FrameMaker still works, so go ahead and use it.  But think about this...  What was the latest innovation they gave us?  A new GUI.  Big whoop.  Why don't they implement a WIKI-to-Book round trip application?  Why doesn't Adobe implement a document server that steps ahead of Eclipse Help, that you can install on a local host, a LAN, a WAN, an appliance machine, or to federate a cloud of appliance docs?  I can't answer that.  But that's where this is headed.  Changing FrameMaker from a 10-speed to a 13-speed doesn't cut it.  Neither does an amplified choice of colors.