I don't usually ascribe any kind of emotion to corporations, so I was surprised that visiting the Macromedia homepage this morning made me sad. "Formerly Macromedia" indeed. But, it seems like it's only 10% cloud and 90% silver lining, because a quick scan of the new bios reveals that Kevin Lynch is in charge of PDF and Reader in addition to retaining his leadership on Flash. Given that PDF's always been something of a pain in the ass, despite its usefulness, and that Reader's user experience has been inconsistent, this could be fantastic news for all of us who love the web and use it all the time.
Now just give me something more reasonable than these huge, monolithic bundles full of redundant functionality. I know it's just a quick first step, but I wanna know which tools to bet on!
Well, honestly, I think even though Adobe's made huge strides with their products, I think these guys really really need to figure out their business models.
Case in point: Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions
(it lets the creator of a form embed special permissions in a PDF so a user with just Adobe Reader can save a fillable form locally - something you can't do right now).
Please, god, why wont they sell Adobe LiveCycle Extensions cheaper? It is pointless to create forms that people can't fill and save.
I spoke to an Adobe exec and she patiently explained why Reader extensions are expensive - because they do not want to cannibalize the sale of Adobe Acrobat Professional.
Oh come on. Given what Extensions can do, its sale will outstrip that of Acrobat Professional so far that the numbers will play just right.
Yeah, I am not inside Adobe and I am sure you know the numbers better. But somehow it just does not make sense. People will still buy Acrobat Pro to create the forms in the first place. And people will still NOT buy it just to save forms.
What am I missing??