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Adobe's Rich Media Foray
Adobe’s recent announcement about the release of Framemaker 8 is interesting not only because of what it says, but more so because of what it doesn’t say. Framemaker is the reigning behemoth of authoring systems for professional technical writers (somewhere in the range of 300,000 users, depending on whose numbers you believe). I don’t include the millions of Word users in this group, since that is a general purpose rather than a power user authoring system. With this announcement Adobe has finally brought Framemaker back into prominence, and now they’re elevating it to the level of a rich media transport device. The press release Adobe put out July 23 specifically says:
“With FrameMaker 8 software, authors can integrate 3D models and rich media contained in Adobe Flash Player compatible .SWF files directly into their Adobe PDF documents. This enables anyone with Adobe Reader® software to experience dynamic and interactive assets such as 3D, video and animation directly within the document.”
Although Adobe has great technology, they have always been focused on a desktop/print paradigm (reflecting their PDF legacy, as evidenced by the quote above). They have always called themselves an enterprise play (“we’re on 5000 desktops in Company Z”), however being on 5000 desktops in a company doesn’t necessarily make you an enterprise play, it just means you've been successful at getting on a lot of desktops. Being an enterprise play means being an integral part of a production workflow, and providing enabling technology that supports interactive collaboration across multiple functions, processes, and locations. The Macromedia acquisition has taken Adobe a huge step in this direction in terms of delivering an engaging end-user experience, but there is still a core process leap they need to make.
Adobe’s Print and Classic Publishing (PCP) division is explicitly going after the professional technical writer market (by our estimate a market that is worth at least $4 billion per year in recurring revenue), while the Creative Solutions business unit is targeting (for lack of a better word) “creative” types. I’m guessing here (and a number of people who work for Adobe have told me it’s a good guess) but I’d bet the Creative Solutions BU and the PCP BU are not that tightly integrated (why would they be, they target different markets). This is actually fairly typical for large, rapid growth companies that are constantly innovating, of which Adobe is a good example.
The really interesting part is that the recent Framemaker 8 announcement implies a tight coupling between the CS and PCP business units in Adobe, and at the same time this “tight coupling” fails to engage where it really matters—the end users need for specific, searchable information. I’ll talk to this in my next blog.
