Adobe’s November 9th Case Study in Message Failure
November 10, 2011 in Technology
By now, of course, everyone knows of Adobe's announcement killing support for the Flash Player on mobile platforms. I hope to have time in the coming weeks to post some thoughts about what this all means for Flash Platform technology -- because, honestly, there's a lot to digest here.
But I did want to share some initial reactions with the manner in which these announcements were made, because in there I find some real cause for concern with Adobe as a company, and the style in which they are executing on strategy.
Sudden
Adobe made these rather drastic announcements without any warning or notice. Just last month, I, along with thousands of my industry peers, attended Adobe’s annual MAX conference here in Los Angeles, and there was not a word that this was coming. Indeed, they ran multiple sessions promoting the powers of their mobile Flash Player.
And, it’s worth noting that the drive for Flash on mobile is not new. Adobe (and Macromedia before it) has been publicizing advances in mobile Flash and FlashLite technology for over a decade. And now, in 2011, as soon Adobe finally achieves it,they abandon it -- without any notice. You can see how that would be seen as a very confusing move to many who have followed the technology for so long -- a move so significant that perhaps some advance notice and explanation would be in order.
So, why did Adobe obscure their intentions with mobile Flash until the last moment? What benefit did they see in the intentional side-swiping of their customers? More importantly, for how long has this strategy been in consideration? Is this a brand new idea that they cooked up in the last four weeks? Or has this been in the works for a few months? What’s the deal? Why the secrecy?
Ignoring Customers
This treatment of the announcement as a surprise did a massive disservice to Adobe’s customers (many of whom are also, effectively, evangelists), who have been given no time to prepare, to consider the implications, or how to communicate the issues to their clients and colleagues, or to seed the market with accurate information and expectations. In an arena already plagued by fear, uncertainty, doubt (and, let's be honest, irrational antagonism), Adobe’s handling of yesterday’s announcements amplified all three, and in so doing, Adobe discarded a tremendous deal of good will -- far more than I think that they realize.
Beyond the lack of respect this shows to its customers, this act illustrates Adobe’s continuing lack of appreciation of the power and value that its community brings to the table (especially the Adobe User Groups). And this time, the announcement was so significant, and included absolutely no leading indicators, I feel that many in the community will feel very betrayed and the effects will linger for a long while (in a way that was completely avoidable).
By ignoring their users, Adobe also did themselves a significant disservice, by forgoing the opportunity to gain any feedback from these loyal customers. Changes of the scope Adobe made yesterday are big -- really big -- and it only helps to get market feedback on the impact these changes will have amongst Adobe’s customers, so that decisions can be tweaked and messages can be massaged, to optimize outcomes.
Irresponsible Standard Bearing
And, finally, when a firm owns a technology that is treated like a standard, that firm has a responsibility not to act capriciously with it, but instead to reliably and responsibly set future expectations -- to treat it as a balance of private IP and a public good. If the owner of the technology is going to significantly alter defining aspects of it, there is an implicit responsibility to announce this in advance, giving people and markets time to prepare.
With their handling of the announcements on mobile Flash Player, Adobe has illustrated that it is not capable of responsibly executing the duties required when one leads a standard. And, for this reason, people and firms should now be exceedingly cautious when opting to include any Adobe technology inside of a browser. Perhaps you consider this an over-reaction, but Adobe has shown that it is willing to kill off support for entire platforms with no advance notice, whatsoever.
Style
If you’ll notice, I have not spent one word in this post commenting on the strategy that Adobe has unveiled (more on that later) -- right now, I’m focused on style (something for which Adobe used to be known) -- because the style in which Adobe made these announcements is, indeed, quite troubling, performing a great disservice to their shareholders, customers, and brand.
The entire experience leaves one with the image of a leadership acting chaotically and reactively, and a firm that quite possibly lacks the chops to execute on a coherent strategy -- much less, what that strategy is. Whatever Adobe wanted people talking about on Wednesday, I can guarantee it wasn’t the discussion that we saw erupt on blogs and Twitter. And all of that -- and I mean ALL of it -- was both predictable and avoidable.
And that is a case study in failure of message and leadership.
[...] Adobe’s November 9th Case Study in Message Failure [...]
Well said.
I hope that Adobe learns from this although I have little faith that they will. To me the “face of Adobe” is the evangelists. Guys and gals who know their shit and talk to us in our language. But in truth Adobe is a bunch of guys and gals in suits who have MBAs but not a clue as to how the industry and community function.
I don’t know — there’s too much unclear at Adobe right now. The my ‘kremlinology’ deciphering skills can not penetrate.
But this may have been such a bad screw-up, that they may get it. After all, this was all for Wall St, and I don’t see Wall St rewarding them.
BTW, I have an MBA, too. Ain’t nothing wrong with an MBA, per se. If it’s paired with accurate information and critical reasoning skills.
Wow. Harsh. Not that I necessarily disagree with any of your points, but harsh nonetheless. I’ve always taken some solace in the fact that working with Adobe sometimes feels like dancing in the middle of a herd of elephants. It’s not necessarily that the elephants have a problem with you, and they aren’t malicious elephants, it’s just easy to get stepped on if you aren’t very careful where you do your dancing.
The post was not intended to sound harsh — just factual. We’re talking about billions of dollars in shareholder wealth that is clearly being managed by a leadership team incapable of executing the basic marketing requirements of their firm. These people are paid a lot of money to know what they are doing — and I’m talking about holding them to the same standard of professional performance that my clients expect from me.
Adobe raised a sentence logo after Apple statement to ban Flash in iOS, The sentence was something like:
“We Love Freedom”
To indicate that let the developer choose the technology that they want.
Why these words were vaporized in a minute ?
It is really strange that after Adobe achieved the promising Stage3D technology which can change some negative points of Flash regarding cpu usage, performance & battery draining to kill the Flash Platform. Who can trust Adobe any more?
look what Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen said one and half year ago about the success of Flash as a multi devices design/develop tool which gets its success from consumers themselves because they want it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93NX9cpgJ4I
why all these words are vaporized now?
What I feel at the moment as a developer, that web and application development is no more possible using Adobe products and their scripting language.
Inside of the browser, I completely agree.
I will have to disagree, there is no alternative, HTML5 is a joke, seriously to anyone that worked with it its clear as day that you can’t do any serious development in it. And the future is not bright for games in HTML5 either, its too scattered and constrained and will continue to be that way as W3C standard.
There is Unity as well but wait it works same way flash is going to, it has desktop plugin and focuses on app development in mobile devices. Personally i think we need to wait and see, its not like we can use something different there is none out there.
They did the right thing but in a horrible way, its like being shown in news killing a man without the part where it was clear that the man was a mass murderer trying to kill someone. Far stretched analogy but thats how i see it
I just do not see that many clients approving Flash work moving forward, knowing that it won’t ever run at all on so many devices.
I agree that there is not yet a replacement — which means that, over the next couple of years, a lot of work that would have been done in Flash will not get done at all.
I do totally agree. Even finding skilled as3 developers will became more and more painful. The community will became weaker as clients are attracted by html5 hype even if it does not offer the same opportunities as flash. And young students are not interested in learning just-another-videogame-framework.
[...] a significant debate on a wide variety of related topics. I started sharing my reactions earlier, in a separate post on the manner in which these announcements were made public, because I feel that those comments represent an accurate summary of the managerial incompetence [...]
I worked at Adobe for two years before leaving almost a couple of years ago. I saw the writing on the wall with their Marketing team and the CEO, but even this kind of poor decision making surprises me. The problems are pretty deep. Perhaps they can get acquired where the good products can be kept alive and all the poor ones sold off or disbanded. And the poor management can be sent to their next thing.
[...] Blank wrote a great post called a Case Study in Message Failure. Fascinating reading and some excellent [...]
My opinion, Adobe should have develop their own internet browser not rely totally on other browsers. They could acquire a company which develop a one then make the suitable modifications to suit their product (mainly Flash) if they don’t want to build it from scratch. Then they could deliver the most optimized browser for Flash and the best compatible for different operating systems.
They didn’t learn from Apple, Apple acquired 2 or 3 companies now to develop their own google map alternative, just for example. Apple trying to make the whole package of software/services in their hands. Adobe spend a lot of money in acquiring companies but they didn’t make the whole package of web browsing experience in their hands.
What you can notice is adobe is not doing well in internet development, they acquired companies, but after a few years they discontinued their products, Adobe acquired GoLive Systems in 1999 , Also they acquired Adobe Developer ToolBox ADDT in about 2006,
http://www.dmxzone.com/go?16662
And the most expensive acquisition was from macromedia for 3.5 billions in 2005, now we see the heart of this expensive acquisition (Flash as a standard for cross platform not just a development tool like dreamweaver) all are dead.
Adobe Bites then Spits the internet technology.
I meant by “then make the suitable modifications to suit their product (mainly Flash)” is to make it NATIVE Flash Internet browser, not plugin.
Hey outthere,
sorry … but … is any one upcoming to the idea that it is a marketing action or something else?
Such a huge company didn`t make anything without knowing results of actions.
I believe there will be a master plan behind the announcement. In my eyes they will make more attractive web and cloud applications. Perhaps mobile will grow the next years, but in our technology age is always a option to start with a new or old technology into a growing internet ….
For more about then ten years JavaScript should be died and today there is no website without jQuery or Prototype.
It`s true that companies with focus on flash and mobile getting hard times. But that`s business risk.
Let us looking forward and don`t be to negative about the announcements.
Regards
Yup. A ‘master plan’. Gotta be it.
Tonight, Adobe, we shall take over the world. Muhuahuahuahua.
Well. Its kind of hard to even say. Ive been a Flash Developer for over 10 years and this to me just scares the shit out of me. It scares me for the simple reason: Adobe has no idea of what to do. Or even more scary, they do.
If they did, well why the hell would they kill something in such a public way as signal that “WE HAVE GIVEN UP ON FLASH”. Since HTML 5 and CSS3 can do many of the Flash motion stuff, adobe is basically saying: The future is not flash its HTML and CSS. We will still make money selling tools to do that, so we can just dump the flash platform so we can get on with it.
Oh Ya, You can still make Apps with AIR and have them on IOS and Android so do NOT worry about it. Heck there is a Lot of work the ex flash developers can do as they take major pay cuts to learn CSS3 – HTML5 – and JavaScript for the next few years. What you have spent many years working and promoting flash? Well don’t worry about anything. We at Adobe have everything covered for you. Trust us with your work life as we have a plan. We understand users and the industry and how are public actions effect them.
Trust us. We do have a message. Its just not the one you want to hear.
Last week’s announcements from Adobe were a slap in the face to all these companies who have been investing time and money on their products, and a step backward in the creativity and technical development. All of us (The developers) knew that Flash platform was slowly moving to something else, and HTML will be a readable environment to work with in some years. Now, with the market more misinformed and with no trust in Adobe decisions, it is harder to transmit this commitment to the clients and users. In a personal basis, Flash will still be a tool to use for the next years, but probably in personal projects only.
Starting to make more HTML5 content it’s a good alternative, knowing the capabilities of this technology and the penetration rate, and maybe push it further; but in this case, it is good that we do not require any Adobe tools to complete this task.