Adobe's New Corporate Strategies

[quills at airmail.net]

On 4/26/10 7:07 AM, Chris Despopoulos wrote:

> 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.

Yeah, well, I suppose someone will have to try doing it that way. Good 
luck to you if you are the one. I don't suppose that writing that way 
will be easy, or even doable with a coherent result within the, 
probably, agile development cycle. So deadlines and quality will 
definitely have a problem.

Scott