« Flash/iPhone sentiment | Main | Sneaks links »
October 03, 2007
Buzzword wrap
Buzzword wrap: I was a bit annoyed with the techpundits' "Watch Out, Office!" stories this past week -- Scoble had phrasing of "Adobe joins rest of industry in going for Microsoft's throat" which just made me glad I was too busy to read or reply. Even worse, our corporate FAQ was vague and inwards-facing on the rationale ("Adobe believes in the value of high-quality document authoring and the power of working together more efficiently"), so it's no wonder that people were all over the map on the significance. But Dave Coletta has a very sane and practical overview of what it means here... the challenges to move their organizational structure over while still developing... the balancing between different text initiatives at Adobe... less drama, more workaday. This is the quote that reached me: "I don't think either Virtual Ubiquity or Adobe is saying that we're going up against Microsoft. The message we're trying to get across is really more about Buzzword as a disruptive technology that we know is considerably less capable than the established ones. Right now we're a back-hoe lifting five hundred pounds, not a steam shovel lifting a ton. We don't have revision tracking, or mail merge, or offline support, or any of a dozen other major features that any mature word processor has.But when the press portrays us as a Word killer, it creates expectations that are downright silly." A demonstration of a disruptive technology... that's the big value that I see here too... lets us also know that new things are possible.
Posted by JohnDowdell at October 3, 2007 01:48 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mtadmin/mt-tb.cgi/9109
Comments
Sorry to be off topic...
I'm a bit disappointed there (at MAX) was no announcement for a Public Beta of Director 11 on labs. That would have been very nice!
[jd sez: Hmm, yes, I haven't heard anything from them either. The Director engineering team will comment at weblogs, but I haven't seen them speak for themselves in their own weblog. Wish they would... JT would have done it.]
Posted by: Jennes at October 4, 2007 09:59 AM
I find that your appraisal resonates with me far more than the nonsense I have seen elsewhere.
Somehow, the community of product adopters and what they are up to in accomplishing their work seems to be too far over the horizon of the pundits who see fights and want to pick winners. I guess they think those of us who don't fit their picture are simply misled by astute marketeers and, uh, ... other pundits.
Posted by: orcmid at October 4, 2007 12:31 PM
A little more on the "why", from Kevin Lynch at CNET: "We thought that (Buzzword) was just a great example of potential of the runtimes that we are working on and also a great application in its own right. So it's not so much as getting into the Office market space as it's just seeing a great Web application that has a lot of potential and shows what the technology can do. And I think it's a good example of the direction that we think that application development is really having now."
Posted by: John Dowdell at October 4, 2007 03:12 PM
This is the first comment I've come across where Adobe DIDN'T make it sound like Buzzword was going to be my next word processor (over MSWord that is). I've seen it demonstrated at least 3 times and every time the Adobe employee pointed out how one UI or another was so much more intuitive than MSWord. Also, when I asked whether they were really serious that they thought it would replace people's word processors in every case they appeared to believe it would. It's just silly as the performance and "mature" features are just not there. I will say the performance is getting really excellent now... and the UI touches are a great exercise in a better design. Alas, it's not going to replace MSWord any day soon.
Posted by: Phillip Kerman at October 5, 2007 01:18 PM