Adobe's New Corporate Strategies

[Alan T Litchfield]

So Chris,

If we extend your prehistoric analogy, Adobe has become like the semi- 
stationary sauropod who's legs are so vast that it must stand in one  
place and swings its great neck to reach the greenest morsels. The  
reach of its head and mouth are limited to the extent and range of  
motion afforded by that great appendage we call the corporate  
marketing department. Any future it has is relative to how fast it can  
move to get at shrubbery further along its path whereas long ago it  
used to search out and hunt down niches of greenness, when it was  
smaller and lithe. Now it is a huge behemoth, waiting for the  
inevitability of destruction as hungry carnivores range about its feet  
and soar above its head. And as with any large bodied and small  
brained creature, the Adobesaurus takes an apparent random path in  
search of new fodder, settling when a new and desirable shrub is found  
but without displaying intelligent logic when passing up other shrubs  
along the way.

Of course the issue for us not that the Adobesaurus has ceased to be  
innovative, but rather that it has passed up on succulent morsels of  
energy giving technologies in the mobile space, amongst others. That  
and, as with the monstrous sauropod, it is increasingly unaware of its  
surroundings, relying on its bulk to carry its momentum forward, its  
ability to shed annoying and parasitic customer complaints through  
slick external processes, and its armour plating of lawyers to ward of  
threats, that is until some great cataclysm destroys the environment  
that made its growth rate possible in the first place.

Alan

On 27/04/2010, at 12:07 AM, Chris Despopoulos wrote:

> 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.

--
Alan T Litchfield
AlphaByte
PO Box 141, Auckland, 1140
New Zealand
http://www.alphabyte.co.nz
http://www.alphabyte.co.nz/beatrice