JohnnyL’s Blogic

Thanks for taking the time to provide more insight on today's Print Industry Advisory Forum. I hope you continue to keep the dialog going on your blog.

I hope these lessons are being learnt across the whole of Adobe, and not just where you meet your very large corporate customers. I cannot tell you how annoyed I am that you are not developing Ovation - a perfect little "niche" product which I bought eight copies of, only to find it does not work and has no chance of working soon, once we updated office.

The key lesson is live in the real world with your customers, not your idealised view of how the world should be.

As I have stated before, count Kahny Printing, Inc. as another business Adobe has lost until the Kinko's link is removed. Don't muddy the waters with talk of added features or future partnerships. YOU have a simple singular "next step" ... REMOVE THE LINK!

Michael T. Kahny
Kahny Printing, Inc.
Cincinnati, OH

Stop with the corporate double talk and take down the link! I will be dropping out of the ASN network when my contract expires unless this link is taken down NOW!!

Firstly, thanks for such an honest blog entry - one of the sole reasons 1% of blogs can be worthwhile, IMHO.
Anyways, at the risk of being censored I have to say that the Kinko's minor misdemeanor is just another in a series of similar Adobe screw-ups, so it seems to me.
Bottom line is that Adobe strikes me as a nice sorta company, but some departments really should get out more often ... i.e. actually canvass opinion BEFORE you build stuff into a product.
I know that focus groups etc. can end up being totally unrepresentative of Joe and Joanna Public (as indeed can beta forums) - but for you guys and gals not to see the possible backlash from everyone except Kinko's means that either there are a lot of heads in the sand at San Jose or - to be fair - you are so rushed off your feet (probably with pointless meetings and conference calls) that you sometimes can't see the wood for the trees...
Next time - just ask! (before you release the product)
But, thanks for a great product anyway!!

While I can certainly see where the inclusion of the FedEx Kinko's button is problematic on a number of fronts, I'd like to suggest the possibility that the core functionality the button achieves is not the problem: it's great to simplify the print order process for the SOHO business, especially.

Rather - what about exploring possibilities that would enable other printers to create and distribute their own buttons that can be added to the toolbar that would enable their customers to send PDFs directly to them?

Who wins with this? Obviously, FedEx Kinko's continues their partnership. But enabling or assisting the addition of buttons to the Reader toolbar would also provide graphic designers and local printers opportunity to take greater advantage of the power of PDF and the extreme popularity and availability of Reader.

I am not a printer but a designer and the service at Kinkos is just so horrible I can't image that anyone from Adobe would have opeted to do this is they had walked into a store to get something printed. Case in point: I go with my CS2 files on a CD (burned on a mac) They can't open the mac made CD. Go back to the office copy them to a jump drive and go back. The can't open the file. Takes them 30 minutes to figure out they only have CS not CS2. Bet they still haven't upgraded, let alone use CS3. They can't open the PDF we have on the jump drive either to print from that. Took it to my regular printer and it all worked fine.

While I can certainly see where the inclusion of the FedEx Kinko's button is problematic on a number of fronts, I'd like to suggest the possibility that the core functionality the button achieves is not the problem: it's great to simplify the print order process for the SOHO business, especially.

Rather - what about exploring possibilities that would enable other printers to create and distribute their own buttons that can be added to the toolbar that would enable their customers to send PDFs directly to them?

Who wins with this? Obviously, FedEx Kinko's continues their partnership. But enabling or assisting the addition of buttons to the Reader toolbar would also provide graphic designers and local printers opportunity to take greater advantage of the power of PDF and the extreme popularity and availability of Reader.

Create a print network that has an API that any printer can plug into. Providing an API to this network puts the ball back into the printers court. Obviously Kinko's can be in there as it would be open to anyone. You could still take part of the revenue stream, in various manners.

As a plus side for your users they would get the ability to print more then just the standard Kinko's product offerings, at prices that are competitive.

I still find it hard to believe that Adobe felt the addition of the Kinko's link was not offensive to the remainder of the printing industry. Leaves me with a choice of incompetence or corporate evil. Proper oversight would have prevented this controversy. As long as the link remains, printers will be seeking alternatives to PDF. Is that a good thing for Adobe?

In my long experience with Kinkos, they never seem to have anyone who can tell you how they prefer you to create a PDF file for their equipment in theiur stores or online. Yet, of course, they want you to give them PDFs. Moreover, they are not Mac nice. How stupid is that?

Dear Adobe:

Adobe can quickly resolve this mess to everyone's benefit...

1. Suspend distribution of Reader 8.1

2. Remove the Kinko button from Reader

3. Install a "Print at a Printer Near You" button.

4. "Near You" button will be a -Find a Printer by Zip Code- function.
User enters up to 3 zips codes at one time and retrieves all
Partners in that area.
If Kinko's is lucky enough to be in those zip codes, good for
them.

5. Every Partner gets a FAIR SHAKE.

FAIR... makes everybody happy. You say so, yourself. Have you read Adobe's Code of Conduct lately?

George Croft
The Print Shoppe, Inc.
Dallas

I say, print companies should simply post instructions on how to aquire Adobe software at no charge via piracy on their websites.

It would be illegal to actually post the software, but Adobe cant do anything if you post information. Information is free.

If Adobe wants to jeopardize our success. We should do the same to them.

We can remain legitimate Adobe customers, and knock them in the dirt at the same time.

Those of you looking for alternatives to Adobe software...

There really isnt much. But you can choose to download the pirated software rather than buy it.

All you need is a program called bit torrent, from there you can just search on google for "Photoshop torrent"

Download the torrent file, and open it with Bit Torrent, or another Bit Torrent client.

In most cases the torrent files come complete with serials, and activation cracks.

Large print companies should avoid using pirated software, but the little guys arent worth the money Adobe would need to pay their lawers.

And the only way to get caught using pirated software is if someone reports you. So just dont tell anyone you dont trust.

If you want to resolve this problem, you need to do exactly the same things you'd expect one of your vendors to do if they'd done to you what you did to all of your print production customers, except for Kinko's.

I'm guessing that the two things you'd want done are, at minimum, that the vendor offer you profuse apologies, which you've done, and that the vendor rectify the problem immediately, which you have NOT done.

There is a single problem here: It is that, in exchange for money, you trapped yourselves in a contract requiring you to embed Kinko's links in your software, thus giving Kinko's a very great deal of advertising (and your implicit "Stamp of Approval": The joint press release that went out under your logo was a shameless - and disgusting - commercial for Kinko's) and making it very easy for everybody else's customers and prospects to send their work to "your favored" vendor (Kinko's).

There is also only one solution, and that's the immediate removal of those links from your software. NOTHING else will solve this problem...and it really is that simple.

In my role as a senior contributing columnist for Quick Printing Magazine for more than 20 years, as well as 37 years in this industry, I have never witnessed a situation where a key supplier has so turned its back on the vast majority of its customers as Adobe has done with its new "Send to Kinko's" button.

Until this issue is resolved, I could not in good conscience recommend to any client or reader that they use, or renew any existing relationships they may have with Adobe products.

Are the rumors true? They say Adobe has a new product called "Arrogance" that has been under development for years by a crack management team composed of the blind, deaf, and dumb. If FedEx wants to deliver THEIR version of Adobe Acrobat and Reader to THEIR customer's, fine. But what Adobe has done is to force everyone get the "Kinko's Version" whether they want it or not, whether they are a Kinkos customer or not. Adobe should drop the "we did it to help human kind" B.S. Adobe did it for the same reason any prostitute would - for the money. The result is a huge groundswell in the printing community to start using and recommending non-Adobe products. Not that management will care. They apparently unloaded a huge amount of stock just before the sh*t hit the fan.

PDF was made a standard because the viewer is free, so competition amongst portable document formats would prevent competing companies from inhibiting standards development. The printing industry elevated pdf to an ISO standard which replaced TiffIt. I ASSURE you the technical committees and graphics arts companies, such as Kodak, Heidelberg, etc., who helped make pdf a success in our industry did not have Kinko's personal success in mind. Kinko's cannot be a part of the win-win equation you describe because printers who are not Kinkos will not win, which means we will lose. I sincerely hope win-win means Adobe-Industry rather than Adobe-Kinkos. Whatever Kinkos paid you for this, please return it and remove the co-branding from your product. I wish both Adobe and Kinkos great success but not at the expense of your Adobe's clients.

It seems to me that the only way you can reach your desired "win-win" goal is to get rid of the button and keep it, too.

As a likely user of such services and as someone with awareness that there has to be at least 10 years of hard work behind the button on the bar, I'll back Adobe on this.

Giving business users this capability is incredibly important.

Adding underpinnings to support other printing businesses in the mid-term is critical, but Adobe & Kinko's should certainly realize some return on the years of hard and insightful work that went into this innovation.

Probably those making all of the noise about this move should expect to pay a
premium on the engineering and infrastructure dollars that were spent on making
this work in the first place. After all, this wasn't simple work and
Adobe & Kinko's put out the money up front.

Cheers,
Matthew

It seems that the problem can be fixed by making the button customizable for any printer -- I doubt few of the complaining entities would ever bother to make work that much easier for their clients, but if they did, good for them! -- and then for Adobe to go back to the planning table and look at what other innovations are on tap that might influence the experience of its brand. This entire shebang was a communications error more than one of strategy: it was planned poorly, and announced worse. Where were the marketers? I've written a bit about it from a branding perspective on my blog, Dim Bulb, if you'd like to check it out. Good look sorting through this crisis. http://dimbulb.typepad.com

Perhaps the win-win answer is to provide an update 8.1.1 to:
1. Remove the Kink-link.
2. Add an Upgrade to XPS link: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx.

Allow the link to remain up for the same length of time as 8.1, then release update 8.1.2 without either link.

Sounds fair to me!

It's not about how much money or how long it took Adobe/Kinkos to create the button. That actually has no bearing on this discussion.

It is about Adobe willfully turning its back on printing franchises (like PiP, Minuteman, Sir Speedy, AlphaGraphics, etc...), independent print shops (mon and pop store) that dot every town and small to medium sized commercial printers. These shops more than likely use the PDF workflow, so Acrobat is exceedingly important to them and many have insisted that customers and designers give them a print ready PDF. This makes PDF the de facto file format for printing.

If you cannot see how adding the Kinkos button to Acrobat and Reader has a severly negative impact on EVERY print shop that is not Kinkos, then you do not understand the fundamental issue at hand.

It would be like being a graphic designer and seeing a button in Reader that said "Need help with your design? Click here." and the link took you to your competitor's site.

Not very fun is it?

There is only one solution: Remove the button.

My company was an early adopter of the digital workflow, and we have been Adobe customers for 18 years or so. I promise you that we will actively explore any alternative to Adobe products in the future. I am curious as to how many licenses for Adobe products are held by FedEx/Kinko's, compared to the number of licenses held by all other customers, and how many of the "all other customers" are printers of one sort or another. It is beyond me that any company would think it is fine to so seriously offend the vast majority of it's customers, and only offer an apology as a reply. (I am sorry, but offering me a "cleansed" version of the software, which I must then try to distribute to my customers, is not a solution at all, and is more insulting than the blasted button all over my customers' screens.)

Perhaps what we need is for a consortium of Adobe's customers (the ones they have demonstrated they do not care about, the ones who are NOT FedEx/Kinkos) to band together and offer up an X-Prize for the software engineers who can successfully develop a serious competitor to the Adobe suite of graphic programs. If there were no monopoly, Adobe would have to compete in the marketplace instead of fearlessly and carelessly stomping all over it's supposedly valued customers. Adobe is a virtual monopoly, but it doesn't have to be unless we, the users, allow it.

Marla Pinaire
Vivid Impact Corporation
Louisville, KY

1. Right after you fix acrobat fix yor blog site so that we dont have multiple posts.
2. I think the idea of getting competition to PDF is critical- I am sure apple is paying attention to this. Adobe has managed to make me even think it would be good for microsofr to to compete with them. Or maybe google could come up with something!
3 ten weeks to fix the problem is too long to remove a link.

Kind of like when Adobe wooed me into buying Acrobat 8 Professional to use for sharing AutoCAD files, then didn't update the program to work with the latest version of AutoCAD, making Acrobat useless to me after four months. The software still has not been updated, and still does not work as advertised, after 10 months. Of course, if I would like to "upgrade to Acrobat 3D..." [File under Corporate Evil]

So, the inherent evil of the "Kink Link" does not surprise me, coming from Adobe.

Adobe is an evil corporation.
THios is an example of their evil.
They are as evil as Microsoft.

Boycot them.

I can't expect all my customers to go to Adobe's website and download a fix that has a disclamer about changing the registry of Adobe.
I think the thing to do is a global automatic update for this version of Adobe. The same way you fix other problems with the software after the fact.

This makes me strongly reconsider future purchases of any Adobe software.

I am unbelievably disappointed. To think that a software that I practically sell to every fellow printer, freelancer, and designer I know would stab me in the back this way.

Despicable.

What Adobe has not acknowledged is that they needed to outmaneuver Microsoft. When Microsoft releases their pdf clone, don't you suppose they'd love a link to Kinko's? That would give their (most likely) inferior product an advantage over Adobe. So Adobe had to beat them to it. They weren't thinking of graphic designers or more sophisticated users. They're not going to use Kinkos. It's the MS Office users who are currently using Acrobat but are in danger of shifting to Microsoft's format who drove this partnership.

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Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Unfortunately I believe most of these posts to have validity of some sort or another. Adobe you whether you like it or not you shunned the many hands that feed you (independents) in trade for the guy at the front waving the $100 bill (Kinko's). History is going to show a period of sleaze and the business plan that looks no further than maximising profit (at any cost) in the shortest possible term.

I had always thought of Adobe as an industry leader and with such great successes behind them it could afford to have greater more admirable goals. Adobe now, is akin to the Oil industry "Hey who cares let's make hay while the sunshines" attitude, no matter what is coming (or not) down the pipe. If The Microsoft clone is any good this action however unwittingly it was committed will cost Adobe.

Time to look at your customer base completely and view it as a whole. You need to include and service those that have been the biggest asset in driving your company where it is today - it certainly wasn't Kinko's.

So leave the candy shop of corporate sleaze and redress your window with solid products for professionals that work and do what they say on the box. Then you can swing by the bank in 20 years and say "Hey we are still in the game and setting the standards." and not be gobbled up by the Microsoft Global Domination machine.

My 2 cents..

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