So Chris,
If we extend your prehistoric analogy, Adobe has become like the semi-
stationary sauropod who's legs are so vast that it must stand in one
place and swings its great neck to reach the greenest morsels. The
reach of its head and mouth are limited to the extent and range of
motion afforded by that great appendage we call the corporate
marketing department. Any future it has is relative to how fast it can
move to get at shrubbery further along its path whereas long ago it
used to search out and hunt down niches of greenness, when it was
smaller and lithe. Now it is a huge behemoth, waiting for the
inevitability of destruction as hungry carnivores range about its feet
and soar above its head. And as with any large bodied and small
brained creature, the Adobesaurus takes an apparent random path in
search of new fodder, settling when a new and desirable shrub is found
but without displaying intelligent logic when passing up other shrubs
along the way.
Of course the issue for us not that the Adobesaurus has ceased to be
innovative, but rather that it has passed up on succulent morsels of
energy giving technologies in the mobile space, amongst others. That
and, as with the monstrous sauropod, it is increasingly unaware of its
surroundings, relying on its bulk to carry its momentum forward, its
ability to shed annoying and parasitic customer complaints through
slick external processes, and its armour plating of lawyers to ward of
threats, that is until some great cataclysm destroys the environment
that made its growth rate possible in the first place.
Alan
On 27/04/2010, at 12:07 AM, Chris Despopoulos wrote:
RE the good ole days when men were men and software was innovative.
What we're witnessing is a natural part of any innovative curve.
Back when FrameMaker first made waves, you could subscribe to three
different magazines that printed monthly articles about new and
interesting software. When's the last time you heard of new and
innovative software? I guess it was about 10 years ago when you
could subscribe to magazines just to read about new and innovative
cell phones (as a replacement to software zines). Even that has
dwindled to nearly nothing.
Read up on your biology -- Try Stephen J. Gould's writing on the
Cambrian explosion. The idea is that we make steps along a
meandering path of punctuated equilibrium. Some cataclysm radically
alters the environment. An explosion of innovative life forms
answers the new context. This is winnowed down through time by the
success of the best designs. Lather, rinse, and repeat. Lest you
raise alarms about "best", the success of Microsoft, or the word
"design", don't. You can only talk of design in this context in
retrospect, as a human construct overlaid on an inherently arbitrary
and chaotic (or at least hopelessly complex) process.
So it is with technology. The bicycle is an excellent example. It
began with an explosion of different designs, and finally settled on
the one we know and trust. There are occasional incremental
improvements, but nothing truly innovative. The bicycle has become
a commodity, where you can buy a 30-speed mountain bike for $95.00
at your local Wallmart. But try buying a 1-speed kid's bike these
days... It can't be done. Sure, there's the cachet market for hand-
made bikes and so on. But on a global scale, the technology has
stabilized into a commodity market.
So it is with computers. I just went through the exercise of trying
to get a laptop with portrait orientation. After all, I'm a tech
writer -- I use portrait pages. My old Inspiron 5150 has more than
1200 vertical resolution, and I can see a whole page on it. It
turns out that I have to get a full HD screen just to get close.
More machine than I need, and a significant increase in cost. And
if it wasn't for BlueRay and video games, such a display would be
completely unavailable -- the're all landscape wide screens topping
at 1280X800 or so. OTOH, the FIRST thing and MOST IMPORTANT thing
you see about any and every laptop configuration is the choice of
colors. But that's how it is with toasters, blenders, tooth
brushes, and computers.
And with desktop software. The next wave (you heard it here) is
servers and services. Currently, the software innovation I'm aware
of is in managing networks, whether managing an array of devices and
applications, streams of financial data, or encoding/decoding & QOS
for multimedia. Even if you just run it on a local host as various
servers and/or virtual machines, your software will soon all be
services swapping information via XML an/or other transports.
FrameMaker per se has a limited shelf life in this scenario.
Instead, technical documentation will be written in pieces scatterd
across the cloudscape, and glommed into a coherent thought at the
last possible moment. The race will be to the last possible
moment. Ultimately, that will be as the reader asks about his
current concern with his current (and fluid) configuration.
Are you surprised that companies are putting 20-year old software
out to pasture? FrameMaker still works, so go ahead and use it.
But think about this... What was the latest innovation they gave
us? A new GUI. Big whoop. Why don't they implement a WIKI-to-Book
round trip application? Why doesn't Adobe implement a document
server that steps ahead of Eclipse Help, that you can install on a
local host, a LAN, a WAN, an appliance machine, or to federate a
cloud of appliance docs? I can't answer that. But that's where
this is headed. Changing FrameMaker from a 10-speed to a 13-speed
doesn't cut it. Neither does an amplified choice of colors.
--
Alan T Litchfield
AlphaByte
PO Box 141, Auckland, 1140
New Zealand
http://www.alphabyte.co.nz
http://www.alphabyte.co.nz/beatrice
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