JohnnyL’s Blogic

I sometimes hear about Creative Pros who - in an effort to save money - decide to use open source applications instead of Adobe's Creative Solution products. I come from a company that believes strongly in open source. I actually was the guy that helped open source the Solaris operating system, arguably the crown jewels of the Sun Microsystems software product portfolio. Open sourcing Solaris allowed that community to do what they really loved - tinker with the code to their hearts content. It made sense to open source Solaris for that community and in the right circumstances, I absolutely believe in the model.

And obviously, I have thought about whether open source has a place in Adobe's creative products strategy. But what designers need is tightly-integrated workflows and high reliability right out of the box so the really important question to ask is what's the impact to the user. Yes, clearly it's cheaper, but does it really save money in the end?

I read a really interesting blog written by Eric Vreeland, a creative professional who works across print, web and video - virtually all of the CS3 product line. His description of the time it took to manage the lack of interoperability between those products, reduced feature sets, differing interfaces of the various free products, inconvenient file formats, etc. really gave me some insight into his business. He used so much of his time "fixing" all that free software that the savings on the cost of the software evaporated incredibly quickly. Time he could use on new projects - and by the way, bill to a customer to help drive up his bottom line - was taken up being his own system administrator and software integrator.

In the end Eric decided that the open source products had too big a cost to him for this set of tasks, and he bought our Master Collection -- an integrated suite of some 12 individual products like Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver and Flash software, all with a common user experience, interface, installation, etc. He found he could spend his time taking full advantage of not only rich feature sets but the incredible integration of the products. Less time on getting things to work meant he gets to spend more time on what he really loves. Being creative.

Don't get me wrong, open source software can be a perfect solution. It's just not right for everything. Or for everyone - like many creative professionals who are on deadline and prefer to innovate vs. integrate.

For people like Eric, it has become clear. Less time per project. More time spent on the work he loves. More dollars to the bottom line. Priceless. Just proves the old adage. Time is money.

Posted by John Loiacono at 05:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

As I said in my last blog, we promised to look into what we could do to address the concerns raised by the print industry regarding the deal we signed with FedEx Kinko's. We’ve done that.

Adobe announced today that we will release an update of Adobe Reader and Acrobat Professional which will remove the "Send to FedEx Kinko's" button from those products. The update will be released in about 10 weeks. I know that there are a lot of folks who will be asking why we can't do it this afternoon. The answer is we can't just go back to the 8.0 release since the 8.1 release that contains the button included a lot of critical security and quality updates in addition to the new print option. We have determined the best way to move forward is with an 8.1.1 update. We have moved as many people as we can on to the project, but it takes time to do the standard testing that is required to ensure that we don't cause more problems by not performing sufficient testing.

We made a commitment to the print industry to address the concerns they raised about the FedEx deal. We made a commitment to all our customers to deliver the best, most secure product possible. We plan to deliver on both those commitments, and it takes time.

I'd like to acknowledge that FedEx Kinko's really went the extra mile to work with us to come to a resolution. They could have taken a tough line, because we do have a formal contract, but they showed a lot of class and understanding about the concerns within the print community. I do want to say that FedEx Kinko's has a great vision for enabling worldwide remote printing to increase speed and convenience for their customers. So I'd like to give my personal thanks to the team at FedEx Kinko’s.

Thanks to those of you who have shared your ideas on how to resolve this issue and thanks to everyone for your patience as we addressed the concerns.

Posted by John Loiacono at 04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)