Adobe and Its Digital Clay Bricks: No Search Needed
August 25, 2010
Former Ziffer John C. Dvorak (the real Dvorak and podcast personality) posted “Adobe Has the Right Stuff.” In the write up, Mr. Dvorak points out that Adobe has some competition-killers like Photoshop and the company has an opportunity to roll out some interesting new money makers such as a Linux-centric content creation center.
I don’t agree.
I am not too interested in graphics, although I know that is Adobe’s cash cow. I do know that Adobe has been unable to deliver acceptable search and retrieval across its own content for as long as I can remember. The company has floundered from search vendor to search vendor and still seems unable to make a snappy, intuitive search system available. Federation across Adobe’s wacky line up of sites is not working for me. Anyone remember Lextek International in Acrobat 6? Didn’t think so?
Adobe’s patent application US2010/0185599 underscores how Adobe’s own approach to content is designed to allow other vendors to index content created by an Adobe application. Adobe has worked hard to convince publishers to standardize on the Adobe platform, not the evil empire’s Quark system or even more expensive, bespoke solutions from specialist firms.
Adobe is rooted in print production and approaches many problems from the print angle of attack. Our tests of Adobe’s rich media applications reveals unstable, buggy and unpredictable behavior. Performance problems plague Adobe products even when the applications run on zippy, multi-core processors.
How’s that Adobe Premier interface grab you? At my age of 66, I can’t read the darned labels. What happened to black text on white background. I sort of can see the color video content. I don’t need it to “jump” at me. And the state shifting controls? Those are a wonder to behold. When Sony Vegas is easier to use that an Adobe product, I know something is off center.
Our view is that Adobe is trying to maintain its position in the market, and it is going to have an increasingly difficult time. Here are the points we noted in our recent review of Adobe:
- Security. Adobe products are potential challenges for enterprise system administrators. I love PDFs with embedded excutables but after a decade no control to permit a specific number of PDF openings by a user in a password protected PDF.
- User experience. Sure, a Photoshop or Illustrator professional can use Adobe products, but this is the equivalent of learning that Oracle’s database is a piece of cake from an Oracle system administrator. Ordinary folks may have a different view of usability. I can’t even read the interface for Adobe’s new products with its wacky gray background and tiny white type. Am I alone?
- Stability. Maybe Photoshop doesn’t crash as often, but there are some exciting moments with Adobe’s video production software. Lots. Of. Exciting. Moments.
- Focus. Adobe has kicked Framemaker under the bus. I abandoned Version 9.0 for Version 7.0. Adobe has lost track of who uses what products for what purpose. The Linux version of Framemaker sucked, and Framemaker once ran natively on Solaris.
- Production. Professionals from magazine make ready shops to printers have learned to live with Postscript, InDesign, and PDFs. I am not sure I am happy with my hard won knowledge because quite a few of the issues have to do with careless programming by contractors or staff in far off lands than what is required to create a content object. Let me give one example that bedeviled me yesterday: Color matching across Adobe’s own products and into whizzy digital printers. Hello, hello. Anyone at Adobe actually do this type of work for real?
In short, search is a core function. Adobe has never gotten it right either on its Web sites, in its products Help function, or in its “content objects”. If you can make information findable, that’s sort of a core weakness, and it is a key indicator of how many “content” issues Adobe has not handled in an elegant, effective manner.
Bottom-line: Revenue growth will be an interesting challenge for Adobe’s management team. I just rolled back to Photoshop Version 7.1 on one production machine. The interface is usable, not logical, but closer to the real world in which I work. Search. Long walk ahead. Linux support. Adobe has to spend a lot of money to keep its sail boats in trim. I don’t think the company has the cash or the technical resources at this time. In short, Adobe is more vulnerable than some perceive.
Stephen E Arnold, August 25, 2010
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