Dear Adobe – A Lesson On Lowering Transaction Costs

Another great snag from Twitter (make sure you click on the “love it”, “hate it” , “more bitching” links).

There are a few things to mull over here. First off, Adobe should buy the site and integrate it prominently into adobe.com. In fact, every company should have one of these pages. It should be a place for short, heartfelt and funny commentary from customers. No more hiding behind obscure support pages and difficult to find / use feature request and bug pages. I love the simplicity. There’s just a single-line text field and a submit button (one of the reasons I don’t often use the “feature request” pages is because there’s way too much form data they’re forcing me to jump through).

The bigger takeaway is the strong reaction against bloat and complexity. Even pros crave simplicity. Now Adobe is in a really tough spot. They’ve got a mature software suite that’s been enormously successful and that means lots of disparate and often competing interests. Users who have invested the time in learning the software will often resent any changes which force them to restart the learning process while pros will continue to demand more and more features. They’re also chained to a revenue driven product cycle with all the pressures that marketing and sales bring to bear. This scenario usually results in paralysis and continued bloat.

Essentially we’re looking at the classic innovators dilemma. A successful, mature offering that’s consistently moved further and further up the consumer food chain chasing higher payoffs from the so called pro / enterprise market. There’s a huge opportunity here for Adobe to lower the transaction costs of learning and using their software, but maybe at the cost of some of their entrenched users. What’s been increasingly clear over the last year or two is that Adobe is looking to fill the “low transaction cost” void with consumer oriented web applications spun off of their successful desktop offerings. Based on the “Dear Adobe” campaign it doesn’t look like this will be enough.

Hype Meets Reality: Silverlight Finally Reaches The Olympics

Holy freak, the Silverlight Beta 2 plug-in install is 17 MB.

I’m assuming things will get optimized down a bit for the final release, but it sure doesn’t look it will ever be a skinny plug-in. On the plus side, the plug-in for both Safari and Firefox was included rather than having two separate installs which is nice, but I didn’t expect an install anywhere near this size.

The install process went much better than previous Silverlight installs have gone. For once, Safari didn’t trip up the detection script.

I’m a little underwhelmed by the video players that MSNBC has rolled out. The branding is heavy handed. Do I really need to be reminded that I’m using Silverlight after I’ve already installed?

Standard video player on MSNBC:

Larger video player on MSNBC:

The Olympics are definitely a cool and unique opportunity to push a technology. Taking advantage of disruptive events is something I expect to see more and more energy spent on in the tech world. Sure not all of us have the deep pockets that Microsoft has, but we can all ride the wave.

It would be fascinating to see what events actually propelled people to install Silverlight. Was it general interest in staying informed or was it a particularly special moment? For me it was seeing Jason Lezak hunt down Alain Bernard in the 4×100 free relay. What an incredible sporting moment!

A few things I just don’t get. Why is there no fullscreen? This is supposed to be the opportunity for VC-1 video to shine, but we aren’t able to check out fullscreen, high quality video? Seems a bit bizarre. Also, every time I push the replay button on a clip I’m forced to watch a commercial. That’s just plain annoying and greedy. I’m watching a progressively served video (I believe since its not a live stream), so why do I get punished every time I replay the video (I’m not even leaving the page)?

This was just a quick initial reaction. I’m interested, as a sports junky, how much I actually turn to the MSNBC coverage. I’m getting an HD feed piped into two rather large screens at home, so the web coverage has to be pretty compelling to compete.

*Update*

Apparently I’m a bit late to the game with my criticism of the player. If it helps anyone out, I arrived at my conclusions independently and hadn’t read the previous articles / comments on the subject.

http://newteevee.com/2008/08/10/does-the-olympics-video-suck-for-you-too/

Ryan Stewart also just posted some links to viewing data which is an important consideration if you’re watching the space.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=896

One Small Step For Silverlight

When you take the devil into your mouth, you’re doomed! For he is lying there waiting for you inside that air conditioned chalet at the PGA Championship.

If the path to a man’s heart lies through his stomach, then golf is the Cour’souvra for his soul. All kidding, aside it was awesome to get the CEO treatment from Microsoft RIA evangelist Josh Holmes. The funny part is I wouldn’t have had the opportunity if I hadn’t run into Josh at the Mid-Michigan FlexCamp last week–its a strange world.

There are a few takeaways from the whole experience:

• RIA nerds, regardless of their platform of choice, are more alike than different. It’s not a zero sum world and we should dialog / get together more often.
• After talking to Josh I’m totally stoked to see the Silverlight apps and video MSNBC has put together for the Olympics. I hope its a “shock and awe” effort that propels RIA and web video forward.
• Michigan is a great place to live and work. We’ve got bright, funny, down to earth people, world-class universities, great quality of life, affordable cost of living and fantastic entertainment options. Through tech connections I’ve been to Major League Baseball, NHL and big time college football games. Yesterday though, was the icing on the cake. There aren’t too many places where you get to see major championship golf tournaments and Oakland Hills is a national treasure worth seeing on its own. The best part is there’s so much still left to do and see (NFL, NBA, auto racing, etc.).
• We ran into a PGA-IT staff member, Kevin Donahue, at the event and it turns out the PGA is excited about Adobe AIR and is using an AIR app for its POS system (weird how nerdy we managed to make a golf outing). AIR has a ton of potential. In my view, Adobe is riding a big wave in the deep ocean–its going to be interesting to see just how high the crest actually is.

It was a fantastic day and I’d like to once again thank Josh Holmes and Microsoft for their generosity. My expectations for tech evangelism just went sky high. ;-)

For those inclined, there’s a photostream below the fold (pretty much straight from the camera as I haven’t had a chance to weed and color correct).

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RIAs Blur Lines – Add Something New

There’s a great interview with Mitch Grasso, CEO of SlideRocket, over at InsideRIA.

Mitch mentions one of the things that differentiates SlideRocket is presentation analytics . This is actually one example of the tectonic shift content creation software is undergoing. Content creation tools, desktop or otherwise, must leverage the cloud (push and pull). What makes software owners successful is how their audience receives / interacts with their content. The rules of the game are changing. Content creation apps must not only create and deploy content to engaging presentation tiers, they must connect to or provide a great set of web services that bind creators to their audience. The audience is everything — risk losing sight of it at your own peril.

Mitch also notes how he fully expects SlideRocket’s AIR client to dominate the web tier Flex client.

This is the argument Dare Obasanjo was making the other day.

So what is SlideRocket doing? Maybe the web service just expands your audience reach and makes the product more accessible. Maybe the web service will be tiered with a free web client and a premium desktop client. However, the real differentiator between SlideRocket and PowerPoint or Keynote is the presentation, sharing and community building that a killer web service can bring. RIA is software and services packaged together and SlideRocket is schooling us on how it should be done. Wake up Neo.