Michael, It's not clear what your role is at Adobe. However, going solely on the density of corporate buzzwords in your posts, my guess is that you're in marketing, perhaps at a fairly senior level. Am I close?
Let me parse your post a bit... Michael Hu wrote: > Hi All, > Please feel free to email me on this topic directly. > > As a key player in various industries, in this case Technical > Communication and Instructional Design, my team at Adobe is interested > in hearing your opinions with regards to how we can drive industry > change. Okay, I've already got my Buzzword Bingo card filled, and we're just two sentences in. "My team at Adobe is interested in hearing your opinions." Fine. I have opinions, as you know already. "Drive industry change." Not fine. Some of us would like Adobe to stop driving so hard to change the industry and start concentrating more on serving the industry. > Adobe has the resources to create tools, new technology and > help drive adoption of open standards but we also have the ability drive > other non-product related changes to help our customers and industry. Let's cut through the verbal fog here. You make software. Software has feature sets and some other qualities (maintainability, extensibility, development cost, support costs, etc., etc.). What Adobe has proven time and again is that it listens to feature requests and finds a way to incorporate some of the sexy new ones into new software versions. But what has consistently been lacking (and Adobe is not the only company that acts this way, of course) is any commitment to fixing bugs that negatively affect user productivity. Yes, bugs are dull. And when one of you marketing guys is in the meeting where priorities are assigned, you're always there to say bug fixes automatically get a C priority and sexy new features automatically get an A priority, except for the hard ones that get a B. So nobody is ever assigned to bug fixes. > > The membership of any organization is just like a customer of any > product. It is the reason why we exist. We are here to serve the > customer/membership/shareholders. You're here to serve your shareholders. If you were here to server your customers, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Who do you think you're kidding? > > I am not promising that Adobe can drive change but we can always try and > I am willing to listen and help find a solution. What can Adobe to > help? Well, here's an example. Grab a loose programmer and a QA person and a tech support person. Throw them in a room. Lock the door. Let them come out when they've solved the Acrobat uninstall problem. I say they'll do it in under a week. You've already got a tech bulletin that a tech support person can use to walk a user unambiguously through a defined set of steps to uninstall a corrupt version of Acrobat. The procedure takes a couple of hours, but all of the steps are well-defined and a script could run them in minutes--maybe in seconds. So writing and testing the script should not be rocket science. But uninstalling Acrobat has been a nightmare at least since Acrobat 3. Fix that. Here's another example: When a customer provides a credible reason for being angry enough to call Adobe's main switchboard on his own nickel, find someone to take the call who has the authority to fix a problem. If Southwest Airlines can empower their employees to solve customer problems and thereby retain customers, surely Adobe can do the same. Hearing three levels of customer service people say that they are not authorized to solve a problem does not engender customer loyalty. > > I thought I'd share this with all of you. This isn't a bunch of > marketing fluff. These are actual Adobe Core Values that are part of > the company culture. May not seem that way to some folks outside of > Adobe but is really how we try to work everyday and is a large part of > our success. > Thanks for sharing, but let's cut to the important one: > > 2) Customer Focus > Deliver high-quality, high-value solutions > That is NOT customer focus. That is technology focus and shareholder value focus (high-value is a euphemism for high-price, after all). Customer focus starts with "How can I help you solve your problem," not "the customer is always wrong" and "if you want to solve the problem caused by our bug you'll have to pay us for the upgrade." Have a nice evening, Michael. Dick Margulis http://ampersandvirgule.blogspot.com/ PS: It's a little late for this, given that the product has gone away; but after I diagnosed the Bad Record Index bug in Pagemaker and told an Adobe product manager I ran into at Seybold Boston one year where to look to fix it (and he pulled out his notebook and wrote it down, by the way)--leading to its fix in 7.0, as far as I can detect--it would have been courteous for someone at Adobe to drop me an email saying thanks for the tip. ______________________________________________ Author Help files and create printed documentation with Doc-To-Help. 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