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.