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I'll buy you dinner at a nice place in San Francisco for Macworld if you do.
Once again, the lead evangelist for Acrobat, Lori DeFurio shows how you can be enthusiastic, motivated, a very nice person, and still not have a clue as to why the Mac universe hates Acrobat, even though we love PDF.
Every so often, the Acrobat teams goes through one of its "PDF GENERATED BY ANYTHING BUT ADOBE ACROBAT IS BAD!" spasms. I think most of the world is insightful enough to see that while there is some technical accuracy to this, the truth is, this is just Acrobat marketing spew designed to fearmonger you into buying Acrobat. The latest version is also Lori's latest post designed to show you how only Acrobat can give you real PDF. Lori's not the only one. Rick Boren, who specializes in Acrobat for the legal profession, has a similar post. Now, I'm not going to bother commenting on Lori's blog. There's a variety of reasons behind this, but honestly, it's mostly because I realized that the Acrobat Marketing team, of which both Lori and Rick are a part of, not only have a total lack of caring for Acrobat users on anything but Windows, but also fundamentally don't care about any business that isn't in their definition of Big Enterprise. Oh, I'm sure they might read this and get six kinds of indignant, but as people sometimes say "the proof is in the pudding" and the Acrobat pudding is sour indeed if you're a small business or on the Mac.
I did attempt to post a comment for Rick's post, pointing out how Acrobat is not a good solution for anyone not on Windows. I tried to point this out in a factual, reasonably non-confrontational way. Rick never published that comment. His right, but I can't say I'm surprised. The Acrobat team is not so good with dissent. The fact remains, Acrobat is non-existent on Linux, and on the Mac, its Office integration is still crippled. This lack of functional Office integration is still justified by statements so blatantly false that at this point, I can no longer be nice and say they're misleading. When Adobe says there's no way to improve Acrobat's integration with MS Office on the Mac beyond what it is today, they are lying. No, they are. I have proof that there are in fact, ways to get more information out of Office documents than Adobe claims. Were they to say "We can't do it in the only way we are ever going to try to do it", then they would not be lying. However, that would not allow them to put the blame on Microsoft. Acrobat marketing is not good at being honest with Mac users. Note Adobe's deafening silence on Acrobat support for Office 2008. Anyone care to start that dead pool?
However, yes Rick, there are lawyers who don't use Windows. If you use Linux, well, Adobe's response could be distilled down to "Get a real OS you hippy", and if you're on a Mac, it's "You're lucky you get what we allow you to have". Note: this is ONLY the Acrobat team. The CS team, i.e. Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, etc., have never had this particular "must only care about big enterprise" disease that affects the Acrobat team. From what little I can tell, this isn't even the attitude of the engineers on the Acrobat team. It's pretty much the Marketing team saying this, (and had I not been so sick at Macworld last January, the Acrobat mouthpiece spewing the standard falsehoods would have gotten a rude shock in the form of technical accuracy.) and since the Marketing team makes the decisions, well, the poor suckers who have to buy Acrobat for the Mac pay the same price as the Windows version, but get royally reamed on the feature set.
So let's see here. We should only use Acrobat, a product whose decision-making team has shown, consistently, since at least 2001 or so, that they regard the Mac market as a boil on its ass, instead of PDF making clones, most of which are made by companies, at least on the Mac, show that they care about our needs and appreciate us beyond the money we throw at them. Huh. Now, don't get me wrong, Acrobat is really a solid application, and the full PDF feature set is really damned useful and well designed. But every time I use Acrobat on the Mac, I feel like Pilot-Captain Blackthorne getting pissed on by the local samurai for being a bit too mouthy.
It's not like I haven't tried to talk about this with the Acrobat team. At the WWDC, I tried to set up a meeting with the Acrobat team and some of the Mac enterprise IT people attending that event so that both sides could sit down, and maybe the Acrobat team's decision makers could talk to people they don't think exist, and realize that yes, the Mac market is worth more effort than "as little as possible". Didn't happen. The Acrobat team couldn't be bothered to even show up at a local bar to just sit down and talk. We didn't want to string them up. We wanted to talk to them about how their installers completely fuck up deployment on managed Mac networks, how their first run requirements make setting up deployments of Acrobat and Reader for non-admin users really painful, etc. Yes, there would have been a lot of criticism, but you know what? Microsoft talks to MacEnterprise, Apple does too. But Adobe? Heh..no way dude. That's not everyone on the Acrobat team. There are a few individuals who do try to do the right thing, but as a group, again, the Acrobat team works very hard to make the Mac market think that they don't matter to the Acrobat team. When the protests from the Acrobat team happen, if they do, I will happily show them all the items that prove my point, and wait for yet another round of stony silence, which may be punctuated by angry muttering.
So while Acrobat is indeed a better way to generate proper PDF, so long as the Acrobat team does its level best to make the Mac OS market feel like some kind of boil on Acrobat's ass, they can just deal with the fact that we're not going to be real thrilled about laying out the price to do it the Acrobat way.
Here's one...maybe, just maybe, if the Acrobat team starts treating the Mac market like a group of valuable customers, maybe we'll start acting that way...
...but don't hold your breath.
Technorati Tags: Acrobat, Adobe, WTF?
Posted by John C. Welch at 15:12 | Permalink
Comments
Nice post, 100% agreed. Of course I'm sure its driving from a revenue perspective as creating PDFs on Windows is painful without Adobe where as the Mac its pretty not required unless your doing serious PDF creation as the built in works perfectly well.
Posted by: CJ | September 21, 2007 3:54 PM
Oh, it's definitely revenue - driven CJ. However, the problem is, that on the Mac, the Acrobat team does no marketing at all. They leave it up to the CS team, who has better things to market. I mean seriously, pushing Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Premiere, et al, you know, apps designed by people who like the Mac community has to be tons nicer than pushing a throwaway app done by a team whose decision-makers don't give a rat's ass about the platform, and have no problem spreading falsehoods to justify their refusal to invest a little time and money into making Acrobat a good Mac OS X application, and actually marketing the damned thing.
I do however fully expect them to announce the end of all Office integration for Acrobat on the Mac in 2008, and I'll further bet that the reason given is that "Microsoft removed the only possible way to do it". Because if they don't, and they say "Oh, we'll just use AppleScript" and they deliver a ton of improvements, then they have to answer why they weren't using AppleScript since at least Office 2004*. As we've seen, they are not so good at the honesty thing.
*prior to Office 2004, Word's AppleScript dictionary was pretty much broke, so that was not in fact a valid option at that time.
Posted by: John C. Welch | September 22, 2007 9:28 AM
All true. But the sad part is I'm not sure which is worse: Adobe's revenue issue or Microsoft's politics issue. Office 2008 for the Mac, while a welcome upgrade, it painting that politics line once again for what's included and what's on the cutting room floor.
Now granted, I take some response for that in knowing that some of the features that Microsoft's MacBU won't implement on the Mac side of things (MAPI in Entourage, VB Script, full PST support) are a direct result of absolutely crappy technologies that make no sense in a nice, pure modern OS. MAPI would be horrid to implement, VB Script contains 7+ other languages in it to make it work, PST's are not only out of date databases but a joke in modern OODs, but give Microsoft credit for stringing along the carrot for enterprises that actually standardize on these things and then 'require' them. Inovation happens the most on levels were the playing field is already defined (usually by open standards). When Microsoft and Adobe dictate the landscape, all bets are off.
Point of fact again today by Adobe: Photoshop Elements 6 is out for Windows, Mac will released in 2008. This is nothing more than 100% politics and BS. There are full feature Elements equivalants out there written by single developers that meet 80% of what Elements does. And Adobe is telling me that they still can't have a Univeral version of Elements out there 2+ years after Apple moved to Intel CPUs? Something stinks and its not my beloved Twinkies (well, they do stink but not as much :))
Posted by: CJ | September 24, 2007 4:33 PM
(To jd from adobe...your comment got deleted due to stupidity, not maliciousness. It's what happens when you get a little TOO enthusiastic about mass spam deletion without reloading the list to make sure you aren't deleting a comment you meant to publish)
No, I'm not pissed about conformance tests with the standards. What I'm pissed about is Adobe talking about Acrobat (the product) like it's some great cross-platform solution, and telling people "OMG, IF IT'S NOT ACROBAT, YOUR PDFs WILL BE TEH SUCK", when in fact, it's a rather crappy cross-platform solution. PDF is great, Acrobat is teh suck unless you run Windows. Acrobat Standard is Windows Only. Acrobat professional is crippled on Mac OS X compared to Windows, and it doesn't even exist on Linux or other Unixes. As stated before, the justification for Acrobat's office integration on the Mac being so lame is bullshit, pure and simple.
The server aspects of Acrobat, ie LiveCycle have no reason why they can't be certified on Mac OS X Server, considering that they rely on technology that ships standard with Mac OS X Server. But at least LC runs on Linux
Connect Enterprise server? Windows Only, hell you can't even use it with non-MS *databases*. You mean to try and tell me that ONLY SQL Server can handle the needs of Connect? Give me, and everyone else a break.
Acrobat 3D? Windows Only. Evidently only Direct X can properly handle the massive needs of 3D PDF.
Acrobat Pro (Non-crippled)? Windows only. Evidently XML and PDF can ONLY be created on Windows. Because according to the Acrobat marketing team, no one does serious programming or IT work on Macs, they're all just for pretty pitchers.
Of course, it's not like you can get into Acrobat on anything but Windows on the cheap. How'd that "screw marketing to macs, hey, no one on the Mac buys our stuff" circular logic work out for you?
It is not that I am against PDF standards. It is that I am against the fearmongering used to drive people to Acrobat when that product team so obviously despises anyone not in Big Enterprise on Windows.
If they'd just admit that they only want Acrobat on Windows, at least they'd be honest about the whole thing, because lord knows, their !Windows efforts are pretty damned pathetic. I'm actually amazed that there's a current version of Acrobat Reader for Linux.
Not that there's a good "Official Acrobat Way" to CREATE PDF on Linux. But hey, if they wanted to do "real" work, they'd use Windows, right?
Posted by: John C. Welch | September 30, 2007 1:43 PM
Now granted, I take some response for that in knowing that some of the features that Microsoft's MacBU won't implement on the Mac side of things (MAPI in Entourage, VB Script, full PST support) are a direct result of absolutely crappy technologies that make no sense in a nice, pure modern OS. MAPI would be horrid to implement, VB Script contains 7+ other languages in it to make it work, PST's are not only out of date databases but a joke in modern OODs
Thank you for being one of the 6 people on the Internet that actually understands this.
Yes, MAPI WAS implemented once on the Mac (Exchange/Outlook for Macintosh). This was an application that was ported to Mac using the same technology as Word 6.0 (and we all know how awesome THAT was), where the codebase didn't even stay in sync (so all the porting work they did to take Office 2001 to Office X? Sorry, no can use! Please start from scratch!), and that had very big issues (for instance, a fair chunk of Outlook 2001 was using ancient, crusty Schedule+ controls to handle Outlook calendaring... which would have needed to be completely rewritten for OS X, or they would have looked completely retarded- heck, they might not have even RAN on OS X).
The bottom line? People would have waited just as long for Outlook 2001++ as they did for Entourage 2004- and they wouldn't have had Palm sync, HTML support or lots of new features, either. It would have taken a couple years just to get the native port off the ground. You know how long it took Entourage to have an OS X native Carbon port? A couple of months. Long before Word/PPT/XL ever did. That's the advantage of not having an old, crusty, cross-platform codebase that munges Windows code so it will run on a Mac.
THAT, folks, is why Outlook died on the cutting room floor. The MacBU thought it would be easier to add functionality to a OS X native client than making a functional client OS X native- and it is hard to argue against them.
And oh yeah! Guess what! Outlook 2001 was written/compiled using...CodeWarrior. Ooops, guess they would have been screwed when Steve announced it was time to move to Intel and XCode, too. (Entourage really got shafted on this one, since they use PowerPlant... but you can't win them all, I guess.)
Posted by: eponymous coward | October 1, 2007 6:32 PM
Oh don't EVEN get me started on the idiots who think MAPI is some kind of magic fucking Exchange spell...GAH!
Posted by: John C. Welch | October 1, 2007 11:33 PM
Hi John, thanks for the word on why my followup never showed. I just ran into Lori and she said she had tried to comment here twice. Any word?
For my prior comment, I was mainly trying to distill the lengthy rant into a communicable and actionable request... something like confirming whether you find conformance testing of ISO Standards to be objectionable in general, or whether the key irritation was something Apple-specific, or something else.
jd/adobe
Posted by: John Dowdell | October 2, 2007 12:26 PM
john,
no, no, I have no issues with Adobe wanting people to do PDF the "right" way.
The problem is when they try to offer a solution based on marketing, and that solution is of limited, or no use to a rather large number of people, and the answer from Adobe to pointing out the deficiencies of that solution is either:
"Well, just use our Windows product" or "Here's some half-baked hack that will let you run our windows product on a Mac or in Linux, but we certainly shall never support it."
And the office macros thing is just stupid.
Posted by: John C. Welch | October 2, 2007 4:22 PM
This is definitely one of the HUGE differences between the MacBU and Adobe: MacBU lets people post negative things. You post a comment about Adobe's installers and it never gets seen by the general public.
Still haven't figured out how to properly deploy Reader 8. Pretty much gave up.
Posted by: Joe Swenson | October 17, 2007 2:50 PM
