Radley Marx

Adobe’s “Giant” Quality Problem

Over the weekend, Lee Brimelow created a brave post hoping to address some common critical questions he’s asked concerning some of Adobe’s inconsistencies. From this post I wandered over to Dear Adobe to catch up on user criticisms and was happy to see Adobe respond to two of the (twenty-five listed) applications: InDesign and After Effects.

Mordy Golding, a former product manager (’01-’04) for Illustrator was kind enough to step in and offer some of his insight as well. Unfortunately, most of his responses really set me off and encouraged me to offer my view on Adobe’s four primary quality issues.

1) Adobe the Giant

Adobe is huge. A monopoly looming over our creative community, which is counter-productive. Just look at Microsoft Office to gain an understanding of the direction Adobe is already going in. It’s not a nimble start-up focussed on their customers. It’s a corporation, now responsible to their shareholders. How big is Adobe? They can build a direct competitor to Joost or Hulu, and nobody blinks an eye.

Adobe products are also HUGE. Bloating is causing problems two-fold: it takes apps longer to load and run, and upgrades are more focussed on interoperability between apps than on streamlining. I can’t count how many software products Adobe offers, but most are sold in bundles. So for one application to see improvements, at least 30+ other application have to be ready to ship as well.

2) Adobe Ate Macromedia

When Adobe acquired Macromedia we lost the most important need: competition. Macromedia was small and kicking arse with amazing apps like Dreamweaver and Flash, while Adobe kludged along on GoLive and LiveMotion. Macromedia also had an amazing website that was easy to use, while Adobe’s website was so garishly bad, it was an embarrassment.

With the big gulp, Adobe quickly adopted Macromedia’s applications and website. But, sadly to say, it pretty much stopped there. Aside from Flash’s big AS3 bump, CS3 offered fixes to “the low-hanging fruit” including minimal integration between core applications (Illustrator/Fireworks artwork -> Flash).

Launched just over a year since CS3, CS4 does more of the same. Most of the obvious changes are in the UI, but each application gets only a slight bump. I do appreciate the improvements, but overall I’m having a very hard time seeing these improvements qualifying as two unique, high-price upgrades to their product line. Instead, what I see more is Adobe boldly pushing it’s customer base to pay for the Macromedia meal.

And as for the website, I almost want to cry. I remember the old Macromedia website - it was fun, easy to use, creative, and hot. I remember companies trying to copy the look and feel of macromedia.com. Adobe’s website at the time was a major tragedy. The layout was confusing, the messages were unclear, and the overall appearance presented a company that simply didn’t understand this “new internet thing”.

When Adobe bought Macromedia they adopted the MM site immediately… but not the creative experience team. In three years, the once bold and beautiful site has become a grey-ish load of square tables and a Drupal-like catalog presentation.

The current Adobe site is all about “buy buy buy!” The first word in every body is “BUY” with a pricetag. If you stay on a page for more than 30 seconds a pop-up window tries to connect you with a chatbot to help you “make your choice”. And the true horror - the Adobe webstore has an image in the top of the right column (straight out of Web Design for Idiots) featuring a 800-number along with 90s clip-art of people wearing headsets who are “eager to take your call.” The final insult - the Adobe store is now completely built in Flash (or Flex), even though it looks like an HTML/CSS web page. My god, man. Take a design class.

3) Adobe Developers Dominate Creatives

One of the most critical mistakes Adobe has made is to allow their developers to drive the direction and image of the company. Macromedia was empathic. Their products and marketing was about creative people doing fun stuff, with creative names like “Dreamweaver” and “Flash”.

The new Adobe simply doesn’t understand people. I’ll give them credit for “Flex” - a fantastic product name. But “Adobe Integrated Runtime” doesn’t mean squat to a 12-year old or even a 30-year old or anyone who’s not fascinated with Tech-speak - which is 99.9999% of our population. Saying “Adobe Integrated Runtime” feels like chewing bolts.

One of the biggest complaints is Flash Player’s identities. As a developer, I finally learned that Player 9.0.0.115 mean versions, branches, and trunks… but consumers don’t care about this. “Do you have the latest version of Flash player?” shouldn’t require the knowledge of in-house revisions.

[Update 10/26 - Adobe fixed the player numbering and announced this change on 10/20 - the day before this big rant. Very cool ^_^]

Using a public code-name like “Moviestar” helped the problem a little, but it pointed the bigger issue: Adobe offers almost no empathy through public relations, marketing, and communication. Last week, Adobe launched CS4 with almost no fanfare. I only discovered the update by accident. Where was the press releases? The big Apple-like teaser videos, speculation, and overnight lines of people? It felt like something was seriously missing. 

This problem carries over into things like bugs and technical support. For some reason, Adobe feels justified in pushing JIRA to their creative community. In reading Golding’s responses to Illustrator criticisms, his first response was to formally outline the proper way to complain, else Adobe was justified to ignore it:

Adobe can only log a bug in their system if THEY can repeat it themselves. Adobe has labs with all types of computers running all types of operating systems. Once a bug is reported, the first thing Adobe will do is assign someone from Quality Assurance Engineering to try to replicate the issue. The most important reason for this isn’t because Adobe doesn’t believe you really have a bug — it’s because if they develop a fix for the problem, they need a way to verify that the fix actually solves the problem.

You don’t expect SQL programmers to draw a still life. Similarly, just because creatives use computers doesn’t mean they must adhere to the fundamentals of programming. The key here is Adobe’s work model and ethic focusses on putting the brunt of the work on the customer, not on a robust QA team. Sure, it’s really hard to find little bugs when you’re a giant. But again, Adobe ate the meal to get bigger.

I’ll just brush over the remaining dev-centric issues:

• Unlike Macromedia, Adobe doesn’t print manuals - they only available online, since developers are *always* connected to the web and think real people are too.
• Enterprise-minded managers and programmers crashed the Flash party. Designers now need a class in entry-level OOP programming to do anything useful.
• Dev-centric application Flash/Flex & AIR are quickly growing and changing, but creative programs like Illustrator which “require a tremendous amount of architectural work under the hood” are barely getting band-aids.

 

4) Dog Food

In the start-up community there’s a phrase about whether or not you eat your own dog food, i.e. do you use your own product.

Adobe has a problem with their dog food. Sure they all use Adobe apps in house, but they’re not eating the same food that they’re serving. They’re getting meat instead of the “meat by-products” that they process, bag, and ship.

At any release point, the in-house creatives are already 6 months ahead of the curve. So with Flash CS4 release, we didn’t get better design integration with Flex, we got animation tools. The design integration is coming in Thermo, which is already being toyed around with inside Adobe, but is yet to be released to the general public.

The same goes for tech support. If you work at Adobe and have a tech problem, you don’t have to search through Google or Adobe’s (*cough*) dev support. You walk over to the other side of the building, stopping by to pick up a chai latte, and directly ask the developer that built that particular feature. (Make it red. I like red. Red is cool.)

Same goes for Adobe’s website. I’ve already lamented over adobe.com (that poor beast), but Adobe’s intranet site is a gilded swan. Quickly look-up anyone you want, download software updates, plan & scheduling meetings, etc. It’s all ultra smooth and easy. I may be exaggerating a bit, but at a recent Flash meeting I happened to briefly see Adobe’s intranet on someone’s screen and it made me scream quietly in my mind.

Conclusion

First, my apologies for my sharp tone and criticisms. I can’t help it; I’m still a blogging noob, it’s still fun to write this way, and I need to get this off my chest. Hopefully I’ll outgrow this perspective as I write more.

I don’t hate Adobe. I’ve staked my career on Adobe products and enjoy using them. But I’m also going to call them on their BS.

Yes, we all want updates, but we aren’t falling for major upgrades when in fact they’re only incremental changes. A $199 upgrade for Flash’s CS4 improvements - maybe. Another $199 for Illustrator to finally have alpha gradients? God no (but damn I really needed it, so yes). And the other $399 - I have no idea what that’s for. Now I’m not so sure I’m willing to shell out $899 for CS5 next year just for them to finally add command-Hide to Illustrator.

I have Microsoft Word on my laptop, but I never use it - it’s too big, bloated, and takes minutes to launch. I use TextEdit for all my writing.

Adobe isn’t going to be able to walk through CS5 like they did with CS3 & CS4. They’re really going to have to work on it this time and make sure they’re giving us something solid, streamlined, and competitive.

Or many of us long-term devotees may end up moving to open source.