Good for Adobe

Moving to a direct sales model and linking its products and services into an Adobe controlled cloud is a great move for Adobe as a company. This is good for Adobe for a number of reasons:

• It can cut out the cost of packaging and distribution. Not only the cost of manufacturing but also the transportation and margins lost to distribution and retail are now all Adobes. It also eliminates a great deal of grey marketing.
• It can know with greater certainty who is using its applications. The more gatekeeping they do, the harder it is to pirate their software. You know Adobe applications are pirated a lot because they are expensive.
• It can change prices any time they like, and if you don’t like it, you are screwed. Pricing for the channel is a challenge. You can’t turn on a dime and there not be consequences. Adobe knows just how much pain you will take.
• It can tie you into various services and bundle services you don’t particularly need. You don’t get to choose. And on top of that, these services become redefined as features. A feature I have to pay more for, even if I do not want them, isn’t a feature – especially if its a service.
• They want to control your files and use that information. Look, Cloud technology is cheap. Everyone is offering it, because it gives them control over your files. What your files are, their size, even their content, also provides Adobe with information about you that you shouldn’t have to share. But you will anyway. They can track with certainty exactly how you are using their products.

Bad for You

For every good bullet for Adobe, there’s a bad bullet for you.

• You will have fewer competitive price options for getting Adobe products. Welcome to the new monopoly model. Adobe has never been very competitive when it comes to pricing anyway, and prices have steadily increased, version to version. Sure, you can calculate a savings by buying bundles – but that’s really only relevant if you have equal need for everything in the bundle.
• You can get cut off from the applications you need to open/use your content. Site service terms are not the same as a software EULA. If you violate any terms of service, you can get cut off from the service. How will you open your PSD files if you no longer have access to Photoshop?
• Not only your applications, but your files too are no longer completely yours. No doubt there is a way to get your files off of Creative Cloud.   Adobe executives are too smart to do that. But this is a cheap way for them to make it extremely unpleasant for you to decide to jump to some alternative solution.

When applications become a service, you have fewer rights and less control. There is less marketing competition. The same thing applies to inserting a store within an operating system. What appears to be a new business model is actually an old, monopolistic model that used to dominate the console game industry.

I can’t blame Adobe for doing this. If people are not willing to look beyond the short term, why shouldn’t a company do it?

While the state auditor states “Cisco representatives showed a wanton indifference to the interests of the public in recommending using $24 million of public funds to purchase 1,164 Cisco model 3945 branch routers,” where is the statement that the employees of the State of West Virginia showed both incompetence and negligence in its governance of the project and accountability in spending?

State and federal employees are often placed into positions for which they do not have competence. They are often held to a single metric of an agreed upon standard of what makes a competent bureaucrat rather than rewarding the competence needed in the field of governance. For this reason, state and federal employees who are placed in management positions end up spending much greater sums of public money on hiring contractors to the actual work.

In the Cisco example, certainly Cisco as hired to assess needs, should be held somewhat accountable. The overkill of technology, as one responder indicated, does show the technology works and that savings for the equipment over years to come will be realized over a ten year period (whereas a different choice may require additional upgrade and maintenance costs in the same period); was a 10 year lifespan of the technology a part of the specification? Certainly life cycle costs are a part of any technology decision.

What Cisco has demonstrated is that its a company that wants to make a profit on a government contract. The motivations of corporations are clear. What is unclear is how those involved in this project in the State of West Virginia will be held accountable.

Microsoft has followed several other companies into the subscription model plan. What is new and interesting in a train wreck sort of way is the introduction of boxed version of Office 365 into retail. Now this product is different from Microsoft Office 2013, but that may not be apparent to retail buyers.  Microsoft Office 2013 is the real deal and you can get it in the Microsoft Office Home and Student 2013 for $139.99, Microsoft Office 2013 Home & Business for $219.99 and Office Professional 2013 for $399.99.

So where is the trainwreck? On a recent visit to Costco, I visited the bright, two colored display for Microsoft Office. But this display was for Office 365. It was filled with very small key card boxes of Microsoft Office 365. The display was fairly informative but really, there is no way to tell from the display that there is a difference between Office 365 or Microsoft Office 2013. There wasn’t any real warning that this is for a subscription only product of Microsoft Office. Unlike you and me, not everyone who uses Microsoft Office thinks about subscription models. They buy Office to use Office, and that is it. They aren’t interested in subscription models, or surprises at the end of 12 months that their copy of Microsoft Office is going to die. The few buyers I saw clearly thought they were buying old Microsoft Office.

Microsoft is putting Office 365 into the channel for two reasons. The first is that like many other companies, they want to move to a metered, subscription based service. You have better, direct customer engagement. While some retailers have made some effort to embrace this model, such as Best Buy offering subscription based anti-virus,  retail and the channel are not fooled by this move. Once you engage a customer in a direct, subscription based system, the customer ceases to be yours and now belongs directly to the vendor. Kiss your upgrade and return sales goodbye. And that leads us to the second reason.

Microsoft knows the channel knows. They are putting Office 365 into the channel because they know the channel is still a major source of revenue. Microsoft made itself on its partnerships with distribution and retail, and they continue to make it there. If major store chains like Best Buy, office chains like Office Depot or direct / catalog / site resellers like CDW  and Amazon decided they have had enough of Microsoft, it would really hurt. The channel also knows that Microsoft already burned its hardware partners by making the Microsoft Surface, rather than relying on OEMs exclusively. They get it – Microsoft wants to go the same way as Apple, and move its goods as expediently as possible to direct sale – at least in areas where Microsoft knows it can do so and still meet customer expectations.

It will be interesting to see what happens in 12 months when so many buyers realize their software is about to die and they will have to pay again. While I may end up using Office 2013 because I get it with a new PC, I will be deleting the Office 365 trial shortly after opening the box.

• Ignoring your Customers and Their Real Needs
• Underestimating Your Competition, Direct and Indirect
• Letting Your Focus Drift
• Thinking that Sales is Someone Else’s Job
• Being Naive, Unrealistic or Soft on Team Members and Leaders
• Doing a Bad Job of Raising Money
• Running out of Money
• Letting Your Company Culture Define Itself Rather than Architecting It to Support Your Goals

LiveCode is the true descendant of HyperCard, the one-time Apple product that made it possible to program visual objects in an English like language. Runtime did though what Apple didn’t do – instead of killing a wonderful product, they made sure you can build your apps on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, and also deploy to Windows, Linux, MacOS X, iOS (yes, iPad and iPhone apps!) and Android. There is even a server-side solution.

Why use LiveCode? For one, its an extremely productive environment. The language is easy to learn – especially if you have no background in programming and do not want to become a hard core programmer. This allows specialists of all kinds – doctors, artists, chefs, etc – anyone with a specialized set of knowledge, to build applications around their specialized knowledge sets. The first company I owned, which was a translation/localization/testing company in Japan, had a set of localization tools built with the predecessor to LiveCode – which I learned to use with just the product itself and a stack of manuals…in Japanese.

Now even if you are already a programmer, or you want to pursue a career as a programmer, LiveCode is still an excellent product. You can get started sooner rather than later on building useful applications and, you learn in the process most of what you need to know conceptually that will carry you over to any other languages you might pick up later (and LiveCode is fully extensible with extensions you can write in other languages like C++).

The sales team member was excellent, helpful and well informed. Then she had to look up my customer account. Clearly, this used a web form of some kind, which required keying look up information. Even for a small woman, typing on the virtual keyboard was slow and uncomfortable looking. Her fingers could not assume the comfortable position associated with using a physical full sized keyboard, or even the more natural approach of using a stylus. Getting into the system was very slow.

What surprised me next was the authorization process. When it came time to sign – the expected signature is done using just your finger. No, not a finger print swipe. No, not using a stylus. Yes, using an actual finger, like you would finger paint your name back when you were in small pants. I managed to use a fingernail edge to get enough point to approximate a signature, but the results were quite dissimilar to my actual signature.

I can understand employing technology you sell in order to sell the technology. AT&T has a vested interest in selling iPhones and iPads with plans. Yet why are we having to adapt to shortcomings of technology like this? Years ago, I learned the shortform way of writing with a stylus in order to leverage the fantastic handwriting recognition of the PalmOS platform – but that was me, the technology professional doing that. I could also carry about a small, folding full sized keyboard to attach to it for writing on the road.

At some point, we’ve been convinced (again) that we need to adapt to the technology, rather than the technology adapting to us. It isn’t that difficult to convince a professional user of technology to adjust what they do to achive better productivity – but somehow joe on the street is convinced they need the iPhone or the iPad (or Android equivalents) along with a data plan, and in exchange for a few recreational capabilities, a few rarely used enabling applications  and some extensive learning of new (and not necessarily improved) processes to use it.

Before protesting how phone based GPS, address look up and other such applications are useful to you (and me, too), realize that the vast majority of users of these devices very rarely use these features. For every savvy user like you or me, there are hundreds of others who just need a phone or could have used the laptop they already have with equal or more often greater productivity. If you are reading this, you are likely not an average consumer user – a member of the 1% not the 99%.

When you talk politics, politicians, pundits – please do the following:

Stop employing absurd sensationalism like every other dumb-ass blogger

The sort of sensationalism that used to make you chuckle while reading tabloids at the grocery store checkout seems to be the norm now. At best, the only thing you can achieve by that is making those who agree with you anyway to laugh. Like a funny bumpersticker, it draws the eye. It also shows your utter contempt for the intelligence of anyone who is reading it. I don’t know anyone who changed their political views by seeing a bumpersticker.

Stop using broken child logic to support your cause, no matter how noble you feel it is

Voting one way or the other on a measure may remove funding about something you care about. If there’s a logical reason for a funding source to funding whatever it is funding, then that’s an easy way to convince people to vote the way you want. If there is no logical way to connect the two, then you are on weak ground – eventually those who are negatively affected by the ill-connected moneytrain will find a way to pull it, and when they do you it will likely be on their terms, not yours.

Stop trying to dress up hate and revenge; if you go that way, its what you will get back later

Hate and revenge are the way to support the claims of that which you oppose, and its something that will come back later. French history doesn’t seem to be much of a priority for anyone outside of France, however I can’t look at the political climate without thinking of the Reign of Terror. Yes, hating people you identify as haters is the same thing as being a hater yourself.

Stop ignoring the obvious for your own political ends, you craven bastards

No matter how big or small the race, there are third rail topics. No matter how much food, water and clothing you give to someone, if you are slowly cutting off their air supply the rest just doesn’t matter. And while some topics are sure to invite a world of hurt, along with the suggestion of a solution for the third rail topic, come up with a way to assuage the damage.

Avoiding specific political topics, you can assume I am a dumb-ass, craven bastard. I can live with that. Now go out and vote.

There are evil scum who repost our 3D content as well as are market images. Sending out DMCA takedown notices is a very tiresome task. Usually it doesn’t do much good to contact the warez site where its being given away, but more effective to send DMCA takedown notices to the sites that actually host the files.

One problem with this is that Google indexes just about everything it finds, and sometimes the warez results end up being higher in Google’s search than the original creator. Ive decided to see what I can do about that.

I found some of our models on a warez site, and already got the 3D models themselves removed from the file sharing sites that host them. However, this same warez site took our original marketing renders and reused them. These images have been indexed by Google. We are trying to get Google to remove those links to those images.

After following the reporting methods provided by Google, we’ve gotten our first feedback from Google – stating that they got our DMCA takedown notice,  but do not understand it. They also replied asking for links – which were already included in our original post. Now,  Ive followed this up with a more detailed explanation. It seems clear to me: you are linking to our images, and caching those images in the Google web search. The original images they are indexing are illegal, therefore they are copying illegally posted images into their search engine – pretty clear to me – remove the links and the associated images.

Ill follow up with updates on how this goes.

Apple makes for a convenient poster child for this, but they are not alone. Most of these “innovations” are modest tweaks of the work done by others, and the only thing they do is buy time for the company that patents them first, until the time comes that those patents will get tossed. But time is all they need – time to keep other companies from implementing them. This doesn’t even equate to standing on the shoulders of giants.

In some industries, especially in software – we saw much of the traditional distribution channel disappear. Sure, you can still find some utility software, MS Office and some Adobe products, and maybe a few games – in stores – but precious few compared to five years ago. You would think the natural evolution of the digital distribution channel, especially with pervasive availability of internet access, would lead more people to buy directly from creators of content. But we have Amazon selling packages and digital downloads.  Apple (and soon, Microsoft) playing on our fears that somehow vendors cannot be trusted. And generally speaking – customers who don’t really want to look very far. We’ve really replaced Channel 1.0 with a Channel 2.0.

But I believe Channel 2.0 has a much shorter lifespan than 1.0, but it will improve in incremental .1 updates until some great comes along to smash it. Channel 2.0 is built on web services, and web services constantly evolve. It doesn’t take much to lose customer loyalty – explaining the plummet of MySpace and the triumph of Facebook. But then again, many of the big market players are also hedging their bets by filing for patents on unremarkable things like bouncing the screen when you reach the bottom of a list on a digital device.