PR to the MAX?

This October, Adobe will let the cat out of the bag. They'll announce the availability of both Catalyst and Flash Builder as well as show sneak peeks of Flash Player 11. Not only that - they'll also announce ten other technologies that you'll probably never hear about. Why is Adobe so allergic to press coverage?

It's that time of the year again. Every product group inside Adobe dig up their coolest stuff, so they can show it at the MAX conference. The result is that most of them are drowned out by the larger announcements like new products and hardware acceleration for Flash Player 11. Why do they blow all their horns at once? Everyone hears the big blast and then there is slience for months.

Adobe's PR vacuum

It has always puzzled me why Adobe doesn't try to MAXimize their PR efforts. I once asked an Adobe Product Manager about this. He told me that there really is no company policy inside Adobe that says that departments should save up announcements for MAX. It just kind of happens and he agreed that it was unfortunate.

The only exciting thing that has happened from Adobe the last four months is the announcement of Flash on the HTC Hero. This buzz soon faded when it became clear that this was still Flash Lite and not a showcase of the Open Screen Project. In other words - the only thing new was that it was now working on the Android OS. While cool, it's not really something to excite Flash Developers.

If we don't consider the announcement from Nvidia (since it's really just a declaration of intent) the only two things for developers to play with are the Catalyst and Flash Builder beta's on Labs. These are very "beta" so while they're fun to play with, you can't really use them at the moment. The problem here is that while it seems very quiet at Adobe these days, there's loads happening. They just blew all the announcements at MAX last November...

The media Wave

Let's start with a prime example. Adobe Wave was announced at MAX. It's a cool little service that'll let you build apps that send and receive notifications. What? You never heard of Adobe Wave? No wonder really. It's no longer available from any of the core navigation pages on Adobe Labs. You have to know the name and either Google it or search the Labs site to find the product page. Speaking of Google - they recently announced their own Wave-branded thing that is also based around small messages. The entire tech world noticed and wrote about it, but way cooler tech such as Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (formerly called Cocomo) barely got a mention. Why did you only notice Google's Wave and not the Adobe one?

Well, there was all these other cool things at MAX 2008 such as AIR 1.5, FMS 3.5, Flash Builder 4 (Gumbo), Flash Catalyst (Thermo) so it's no wonder you and everyone else missed it. This is really sad as Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) is really cool! It'll let you build real-time collaborative applications with all the features in Adobe Connect (formerly called Breeze) such as screen sharing, video sharing, audio sharing as well as a more solid messaging implementation than Google offers. All delivered online in an easy to learn package where only the pricing structure remains to be solved.

Time and time again I meet Flash Developers that have not heard of either Wave or AFCS. These are not ignorant developers that don't pay attention. These read both blogs and aggregators, follow the Adobe evangelists on Twitter and try to stay on top of their game. If only Adobe could think differently?

Why blow it all on just one event?

Last year, Adobe hosted no less than 3 MAX events. However, everything there was to announce was shown at MAX North America. The attendees at the Milan and Tokyo events only got to see repeats of the American event. Nothing new was announced or shown and anyone with the slightest interest had already seen the news from MAX North America on countless blogs.

It so happens to be that there's much more happening in the Flash community than just the MAX conference. In just 2008 alone:

• FITC put on large conferences in Toronto, Amsterdam and California
• FlashForward had an event in San Francisco
• The Actionscript Conference (TAC) was held in Singapore
• 360|Flex put up conferences in Atlanta, Milan and San Jose
• Flash on The Beach gathered more than a thousand designers and developers in Brighton
• Flash on Tap created a new kind of conference that mixed Flash and beer tasting
• The FlashForum conference hosted it's eighth event and was completely sold out
• The Australian WebDU conference kept going strong and so did the belgian MultiMania conference as well as FlashBelt
• Aral Balkan put on the online <HEAD> conference

There were also community conferences in Pittsburg, Oslo, Zurich, Antwerpen, London, Stuttgart, Milan, Bogota, Boston, Hamburg, Chicago, Ottawa and many other places as well as the more design focused conferences such as TOCA ME and OFFF that also offers a lot of interest to Flash users.

All of these conferences represent lost opportunities for Adobe. By spreading out news across various keynotes all over the world, they'd get a steady buzz of people blogging and writing about cool new things at Adobe. By doing this properly with supporting press releases, Adobe would get much wider exposure in technology publications and they'd also make the conferences more relevant and important to attend. If the new things were presented at different conferences keynotes across the world, it would also make the job of the evangelists much easier. After all, they must be tired of running the same presentations time and time again without anything new to show or say?

It's really not my place

Who am I to criticize? I'm just a mere developer that has noticed that cool things don't get the exposure they deserve. Let's forget about them blowing it all at once and look forward to the exciting announcements that'll come from Los Angeles, California this October, where Adobe will charge you $1695 a head to see all their latest stuff.

While we are waiting for that - why not check out two new Acrobat branded services? Tables (shared spreadsheets) and Presentations? That's right - there's another Labs site and it really solidifies the impression that Adobe will go full on against Google Docs and Microsoft's online office suites - and nobody told you. Or how about the Text Layout Framework or Adobe Stratus? I keep seeing blog posts from people discovering these, but they totally drowned when announced at MAX NA...

Credits: Adobe MAX picture by "prayanks". CC licensed.

 

 

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