Scobleizer: Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?
james
· 3 years ago
Robert,
It is the middle of the night in the US (its 09:50am in the UK) and it is a Sunday too. So I can't blame anyone right now if there not exactly getting up out of bed to blog about it.
To me it is not that exciting merely because I refuse to buy or need the pro version of acrobat because it costs too much when I can use a free program and print to pdf.
It is great if your a big user of acrobat pro and need or want those features but I can't see millions of people in the blogosphere getting excited about it if they don't use pro.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
James: oh, come on, you know all the geeks are up late, even on a Sunday evening. :-)
james
· 3 years ago
You got me there robert. ;)
Phillip Molly Malone
· 3 years ago
Robert, Adobe is hardly a Web 2.0 startup and that is generally what Mike Arrington writes about.
On another question, why do you care about about Adobe and I wonder how you get an early look at this product?
Molly: you must have missed the video interview I did. I was on the Acrobat 1.0 beta team back in 1994. So, I have a longstanding relationship with Adobe and the Acrobat team.
Again. If I take money from any company to cover them, my efforts will be in the "Corporate" bar on the home page of PodTech.net.
But, I just did add a disclaimer to make it clear that PodTech has a business relationship with Adobe.
Or, put it another way. When I start my show up on Tuesday you'll see the CEO of JotSpot. We don't have a business relationship with them. You'll also see the CEO of Sun Microsystems. We don't have a business relationship with them. You'll also see Printing for Less. We don't have a business relationship with them. You'll also see an employee of Zooomr. We don't have a business relationship with them. And that's just the start.
How do you explain that?
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Phillip: >>Robert, Adobe is hardly a Web 2.0 startup and that is generally what Mike Arrington writes about.
Mike writes about a bunch of things. He's covered Microsoft and Google and Yahoo stuff in depth. They aren't "Web 2.0 startups."
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Phillip: Oh, and I'm wondering, why would Adobe pay a blogger to come by with a videocamera anyway? Why wouldn't they just do that for free, especially if Mike Arrington or Om Malik would be willing to cover it? (They both have more traffic than I do).
Michael Kenward
· 3 years ago
Good questions. A long time user of Acrobat, the idea of another version fills me with gloom. And not just because Adobe's pricing regime for upgrades makes Microsoft look like a charity.
Each new version of Acrobat seems to make it harder to use, and to understand. (Just investigate how to add form fields to an existing PDF file in Acrobat 7.)
The last version created a new file format that may well have lots of advantages, but these are never apparent. In the process, this broke some third party packages, such as PaperPort, which slavishly took up the new format without offering an option to stick with the old format.
Looking at the many many Acrobat files I receive, it is obvious that the people who created them have no idea of the things that you can do with Acrobat.
For example, I was looking at a software manual this weekend and found that it contains no bookmarks. It has a contents page with no clickable links to get you to the appropriate sections. And who on earth would write an index without making it "live"?
My view on the silence that you have detected is that only a tiny percentage of Acrobat users are knowledgeable. The rest don't care, and don't even realise that they are missing something.
The best place to sort out problems is probably the forum that runs on the back of the Adobe support pages. This also flies as a newsgroup. But I guess that is just too "old technology" to have caught your attention.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Michael: forums are great places to have conversations but not good places to get things into Google's search engine. Plus, they are too hard to dig through the noise to find the important stuff. That's why I hang out on Digg and TechMeme and Slashdot a lot more than I hang out in forums.
Vijay
· 3 years ago
Robert, we do a lot of work with Adobe especially on InDesign etc... my only problem is they have a roundabout way of explaining things especially their server products (Flex, Breeze etc)... maybe thats becuase they come from Macromedia ...
Oh ya.. they are expensive as well..
Dan G
· 3 years ago
Forums have search engines. IME, forums are invariably the best place to go for seriously techy help. I've never quite understood why forums don't get the attention blogs etc do.
RE why no-one is getting excited about Acrobat 8. Because for 99.9% of people PDF is just a read-only document format which looks like printed pages. For them, v8 does nothing v4 didn't (which was, iirc, the last version to really innovate - it introduced search), except load a lot more slowly. So a new version just isn't interesting.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Dan: >Forums have search engines.
Normal people only know one search engine: Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Remember our goal is to get non-geeks involved in our world.
>So a new version just isn’t interesting.
I don't agree with your reasoning and CERTAINLY don't for anyone who claims to keep up on the latest on the Web. Now, if all the blogs wrote a one line review and said "it isn't interesting" then I'd agree with you. But you can't have it both ways. You can't say you write about all the latest stuff and then you don't when you think it isn't cool.
Brian Stephens
· 3 years ago
"Where’s the bloggers on new Acrobat?"
Two words... College Football.
Robert Scoble
· 3 years ago
Tech bloggers don't do football. Heheh. And certainly not at 3:43 a.m.
Daniel
· 3 years ago
It's Adobe... not Apple!
Phillip Molly Malone
· 3 years ago
Hi Robert, Just to get it straight, I don't think they are paying you to do these reports but it just takes all the questions away when you disclose.
If you want a great example of disclosure, have a look at Darrren Rowse (www.problogger.net). If there is even a question of a relationship he will mention it.
You are probably right that I over do it, it definitely is a hobby horse of mine. Bloggers are always asking to be thought of in the same breather or better then MSM Journalists. If this is the case, I believe disclosure is a very important. What would we be saying if some one from the New York times was asking why weren't other journalist covering a story that invloved a company they had a relationship with?
JMTC (might only be worth one or less) Molly
Mihir Gandhi
· 3 years ago
#16 said everything in 4 words that I could have said in a page :)
Robert Porter
· 3 years ago
My guess is that most folks are like me, underwhelmed, I have not used the Adobe reader in several years, I use Foxit Reader myself.
The Adobe reader has been buggy, bloated and very slow to start since version 5. Each new version, I try it, then happily uninstall it and go back to my alternative readers that load quickly and don't crash every third time.
So Adobe announcing a new reader is just not "news" as far as I, and most of those I know, feel.
Sam Abuelsamid
· 3 years ago
Since version 5 acrobat has just become way to heavy, bloated and slow. The reader takes forever to start, and most of the time doesn't shut down properly, instead staying around consuming memory. I know use PdfCreator to produce pdf files, that is when I'm not using OpenOffice which does it directly. For reading pdf's I use foxit reader. Both programs are much smaller, faster and free. Adios Adobe!
Alex Hutton
· 3 years ago
Robert,
I thought you had Macs? That is to say I'm surprised as most OS X users I know would rather pull out their toenails with plyers than use Acrobat Reader again. It's bloated, slow, and on OS X becoming less and less necessary.
See posts 12 and 19 and combine.
John C. Welch
· 3 years ago
Oh hell Robert I can tell you why.
1) Adobe's Acrobat marketing sucks if you're not in the print world. Totally blows. Every company I've worked at since 1997 is amazed at what you can do with Acrobat, and asks me "How come Adobe doesn't tell us this better". Well, if you do all the work, that is, go to Adobe's site, go to Adobe's on line meetings, go to etc. Then you find out. But other than that? Yeah, good luck. All you get is "NEW ACROBAT! PDF IS COOL!"
2) If you need to use Acrobat the Application in a cross platform shop, get some Windows boxes or WTS/Citrix licenses. The Mac version gets only the minimal set of new features.
Two reasons: 1) the last figures I heard was that 90% of sales for Acrobat were on Windows. Of course, when you consider that their Mac marketing is even *worse* than their Windows marketing consisting of "Hey, pay a couple hundred bucks to creat PDF! Run a bad plugin that physically modifies your Web Browser and only runs in Safari! Get a confusing dialogue that is so non-functional, you have to go into the Acrobat application and hack up internal XML files to get it to stop modifying Safari and your Office bundle! " then their craptacular Mac sales make sense.
2) The Mac is not a vital platform for Acrobat. For the rest of CS, yes. But the Acrobat team? Hell no. The Office plugins for Acrobat can't even match the InDesign import, and have not improved since they first came out on the platform beyond printing to file in the latest PDF standard.
If you're in a mixed platform shop, upgrading Acrobat is going to do nothing beyond pissing off your users. A great example of just how little thought the Adobe Acrobat team gives to its Mac users: With Acrobat 7, they finally came out with a PDF plugin for Mac OS X. However, it only worked with Safari. No Firefox. Even worse, it physically modified the Safari application bundle, by adding a "Frameworks" folder with a bunch of aliases to the Acrobat internal bundle. However, prior to 7.0.5, it made that frameworks folder world - writable. I'm very gratified they fixed it, as this was a very BAD THING, (and even terribly flattered that they gave me the credit for pointing this out. Wow...thanks guys.), and a mistake that a first year CompSci student would have caught. There's so much of Acrobat that just really wants to be Windows.
You know, it's like they looked at the Word 6/Office 4.x debacle on the Mac and said, "Oh we can do it the same way, only it will work for us".
Oh, and at one point, I handed Adobe...Rick Armstrong in fact, a list of IT managers and approximately 40,000 overnight purchases that would have been made *solely* on the strength of updating the Mac office Macros to even close feature parity with the Windows versions. Now, admittedly, 40,000 licenses isn't a lot by any stretch, but for 72 hours of work, it wasn't bad, and pretty indicative that there was interest. (The shocking thing to me was how FEW Mac IT people realized what Acrobat could do. I did a LOT of explaining. I may have sold a few copies of Acrobat Win too, i'm not sure.)
I think he discovered just how persistent I can be when I don't even get a *confirmation* email back saying "Hey, thanks, I got that data, that I kind of asked you for". I'm sure he remembers it differently, and would use a very different term than "persistent". I like Rick, he struck me as a good guy, but not so good on the communcations thing.
The point is, Adobe is doing a *terrible* job of selling Acrobat to the world at large, and the huge cross platform disparity, when compared to the rest of CS isn't helping, nor is the Acrobat team's response to Mac users, which is usually a VERY polite take on "Sucks to be you, no we aren't improving things".
So given bad marketing and attitude, why are you suprised at the lack of Acrobat news?
Parthasarathi
· 3 years ago
Scoble,
Kindly correct the link for GigaOM in your second paragraph of the post. The link is misleading.
"Particularly on sites that pride themselves on covering everything that moves on the Web like TechCrunch or GigaOM"
edddy
· 3 years ago
Please read the first page of the announcement How many times do you read "communicate and collaborate with confidence"?
WTF?? Communicate?? Cool? Collaborate?? Cool?
Are we in 1999?
xpbert
· 3 years ago
A new version of Acrobat just isn't sexy enough to get attention. For most people, PDF isn't something they pay any attention to. It's a document type they read with software they probably have installed anyway, even if it's a generation or three behind. We have clients who have written custom plugins that require Adobe Acrobat/Reader 4, 5, or if we're lucky 6. Acrobat 7? Now 8? That's just a pain for most people in my opinion. How do we standardize on a deployable version under those circumstances? Adobe hasn't done much to convince the big enterprises to upgrade for a long time.
Chris
· 3 years ago
I wish Acrobat Reader was boring. I wish it didn't take so long to start up. I wish it didn't tell me about the new whizzbang video player it has if only I'd upgrade. I wish I didn't have to upgrade, 'cause I wish Acrobat Reader didn't even have a video player in it. In fact, I kinda wish it was just a simple portable document format, one that people could use to get consistent _looking_ documents across multiple platforms. That would be nice.
I also wish the search was better. I can never see enough context around the search results and I hate that every time I hit Control+F, I have to delete the last term I typed in.
This is why people don't care. Adobe has some serious work to do before convincing me that I should care about a new Acrobat.
Tim Bray
· 3 years ago
Acrobat, for the last two or three versions, has been a slow, painful, awkward piece of software. Those of us living on Mac or Linux haven't used it for years. Why would a new version be interesting?
I can remember, a new rev of acrobat came out during the Bubble days. When the program starts up, there's a long slow irritating delay while it loads all its plugins. I remember seeing, in this new release, "Loading WebBuy". Which I think encapsulates the problem. I smell PHBs upstream.
David Dalka
· 3 years ago
Great, what if I'm not a fan of Acrobat and I'd almost always prefer the data in another format?
askars
· 3 years ago
I don't even care about the news as I've stopped using Adobe Acrobat Reader and have instead started using Foxit Reader which is pretty light-weight and loads faster than the Acrobat Reader.
> "PDF", which is the file format produced by Acrobat, > is found 2.5 billion times on the Web
Acrobat is not the only program that produces PDF.
Has PDF format changed or has Acrobat such important change that deserves more public attention?
> Despite having something like 500+ million players loaded > on computers near you
Maybe a new version of the PLAYER (or the PDF format) is worth mentioning everywere, but there aren't 500+ million Acrobat Pro installations.
Regards.
John C. Welch
· 3 years ago
There's a ton of stuff you can do with Acrobat beyond PDF generation, not that what it can do in that area sucks by a long shot.
Good luck getting Adobe to talk about it on a wide scale though. I never thought I'd say this, but even Microsoft has better marketing than the Acrobat team.
daddydoodaa
· 3 years ago
Just because I understand, doesn't mean I care.
It seems to do much more than I need for it to do. I imagine Acrobat 9 will come out in 18 months and will offer even more than that...
No thanks, Adobe.
Erik Herz
· 3 years ago
The integration with Breeze is pretty cool. When will MS have the same "click to collaborate" from Office to LiveMeeting?
Also I wonder if the PDF Package feature can be used to protect other file formats. I see that a MS Project file was in his package. What if a WindowsMedia file was in there?
Brian Kuhn
· 3 years ago
Robert,
Ever since the whole Adobe/Microsoft Office 2007 incident concerning the PDF format, I have dumped all things Adobe. Abode is dead to me. I doubt this has anything to do with the silence, but I know a number of people who have also said goodbye to Adobe due to that incident.
Steven J. Ackerman
· 3 years ago
Why would anybody be interested in the latest malware from Adobe ?
Since about version 5 this software has become bloated, slow and the cause of frequent crashes on all of my machines... but why not ? After all, the reader is free and you get what you pay for...
Joe Clark
· 3 years ago
Michel Kenward, “the last version” did not “create a new file format.” Acrobat and PDF versions are two different things. The current PDF version is 1.6 and there is no obligation whatsoever to use that version if you don’t want to or don’t need its features. Just as you can continue producing HTML 4.01 Transitional documents even though XHTML 1.1 exists, you can keep on using PDF 1.4 or earlier.
I suppose I’m biased in saying this because I volunteer on the PDF/Universal Access committee, but an imaginable reason to upgrade to Acrobat 8 is the easier creation of accessible PDFs. (The committee is working on the Portable Document Format, not Acrobat.) As Adobe offered me a beta-test only of the Windows version and I have seen no information whatsoever on accessibility improvements, I certainly concede this reason is hypothetical at the moment.
Nick Davis
· 3 years ago
Why is there no buzz? Because Adobe has proven for the last 7 versions that a new release is not buzzworthy. Just tell me, breifly, the major imprevements in each of the last 3 versions..........
I'm still waiting.
So you can now make fillable forms easier! Wow, a feature that should have been in V2 without havin to spend thousands on a PDF developer library.
The only differences I've seen in recent versions (from the reader side that it -- I use PDFs extensively for prepress), is that Adobe keeps adding other programs to the download bundle.
Consider that an upgrade I can do without.
Jason Hartley
· 3 years ago
I agree with Michael. I'm sure Acrobat 8 has some great new features however, the average user of Adobe Acrobat bought the product because they want to print to a PDF and don't know or care about 95% of what Acrobat can do. If it was possible to print to PDF directly from an application or easily find freeware to print to PDF, 95% of the Acrobat users probably wouldn't buy it at all. Adobe must realize this as well, as implied by the law suit they filed against Microsft to stop the integration of a PDF writer in Office 2007. While PDF is a great format, if it's not simplier for the average business person to use those Acrobat features, the new version will not bring much of an impact.
If Adobe really wanted to make news, they should release a $14.99 or $24.99 PDF writer with basic functions that would appeal to more business users and wouldn't require a purchase req to spend $150 or so to print PDF's. They could then market this product to the entire companies instead of a speacialty users. How many license has WinZip sold by using a low cost corprate licesng model and solving a simple need of the majority of business users?
Tom Maddox
· 3 years ago
Ah, a new version of Acrobat ... and an upgrade for only $150! Which supplants the v. 6 and 7 upgrades I've done to v. 5., each of which cost roughly the same. Oh, joy!
And I really can't wait to go through the upgrade process step by bloody step, 5-to-6-to-7-to-8, one assumes, continuing a ridiculous process. I think the multiple reboots are my favorite part. It's a great way to upgrade a program, especially if you hate your users.
All for a few new "features" and an increase in size and decrease in speed and increase in computer horsepower required to run the thing effectively.
And of course the documentation will continue to suck because, as a former high-up at Adobe explained to me, the Adobe Press products--which supposedly do provide decent documentation--are a big moneymaker, so there's negative incentive to document anything.
And I have no doubt that Acrobat will continue to crash my computer more often than every other program on the machine combined.
Robert, no offense to you and whatever friends you hae at Adobe, but those of us who've actually paid for, used, and upgraded these programs are really sick of Adobe's whole act with regard to Acrobat.
Joe Clark
· 3 years ago
Duff Johnson, PDF/UA chair, covers Acro 8 and saving files in the bare Reader application.
Francis
· 3 years ago
The reader (on any platform) is bloated, slow and full of bells and whistles that the vast majority of users *don't want*. The writer, whether the normal or the Pro version, on the Mac is an appalling piece of software. I actively persuade people away from Acrobat reader as there are far better, more lightweight, efficient PDF readers out there that people could be using.
In short: "meh"
Duff Johnson
· 3 years ago
You may be interested to know that there are, in fact, a number of bloggers talking about Acrobat 8.0. See: http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs
Adobe made public the Acrobat 8 forthcoming revision and lifted the NDA at 12:00AM EST on Sepetember 18. At precisely 12:01AM on September 18 several blogs were posted at http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs.
ted
Russ Henry
· 3 years ago
Yes the new bat is cool. Can they allow the full (paid for) version to allow you to automatically pull out all of the stuff you don't select out of the PDF? How about an auto credits tag so we can make it easier for the DOCS to publish Biblio's?
That function would be great for researchers and analysts who don’t want to re-read / highlight focus zones in massive dissertations and technical journals. What do you think? Just a thought, thinking outcloud. #; ) I'll get back in the box now... sorry.
macbeach
· 3 years ago
#22 saved me a lot of venting. *whew* But I still have more...
So I'll just add that in the distant past I was a fan of Windows. In the less distant past I was a fan of all things Apple, and in the less distant netherworld of unreleased betas I was a fan of Adobe too.
At some point the future of all of these companies was in doubt and they worked hard to survive. But then, to a greater or lesser extent they all achieved the ability to draw residuals on their past successes. The iPod has remade Apple. So much so that I wonder if they even want to be in the computer business any more. MS still makes tons off of Windows and Office, but predictions of the eventual decline on those revenue streams are almost universal. Adobe, long a one-trick pony, after MS pulled the font rug out from under them, Acrobat made a lot more sense as a “perpetual” revenue generator and they dis a great job of promulgating the format to just about everywhere from Linux, Apple's OS and even to Palm pilots and such. Small companies could of course survive for decades on these income streams, but these aren't' small companies, so they have to find ways to get larger streams to flow out of these existing products. This is almost never good for existing users, who are in many cases completely happy with what they have. All they need is for that existing capability to keep up with OS upgrades (most of which they don't need either but are forced into). And so the march of “improved” technology goes on.
I was a beta tester for an Adobe product called Atmosphere back in, oh, 2000 or so (maybe earlier). Way back then they already had a system that would allow you to set up a 3D chat room on any ordinary web page, complete with customizable avatars, sound, etc. Not quite the full experience of Second Life, but for what content creation involved (a few hours of tinkering) quite impressive. Someone skilled in the tool could produce a 3D landscape that was breathtaking and approached a photo-realism that I haven't seen anywhere else. the only problem was that the code was buggy as heck. After two years of delays it seemed to have gotten worse rather than better. they changed the scope from being a separate program with a plug-in for web work to only a plug-in and no separate viewer. The plug-in only worked with IE, and many of the beta testers (like me) had already switched to Mozilla. FINALLY they announced the production product, as if they had given up on fixing the bugs. Ahhh, but they had promised all beta testera a copy of the production product. I got mine. Shortly thereafter the product was unceremoniously discontinued, and the production team made to vanish. The next version of Acrobat had some sort of 3D capabilities built-in, which I've never seen operate as I had already begun my migration away from Windows and I suspect that's the only place it will work (if it does work).
Call it bloat, or featuritis, the unfortunate requirement of being a publicly traded company impels these companies to abandon common sense and make former things of beauty into eyesores while they scurry to discover something new. A poor user has to hope against hope that these new endeavors such as Xbox and iPod will be such runaway sucesses that the companies will leave the old stuff alone, but that doesn't seem to be the normal course of events does it?
Sickening.
PS: Unless I'm missing something, your pointer to the Acrobat video points to a page that requires you to have Flash version 8 (not available for Linux yet), nevertheless less, it automatically directs me to a product update page which doesn't exist, although the script doing this never discloses that fact and instead just waits for something to happen that isn't going to happen. Finally I discover that the actual video, on Podtech, is in a Quicktime format that I could have even played on my Linux machine. I cringe that they pay people to put this stuff together. It's probably just as well for Adobe that I don't spend much time blogging about them.
engtech
· 3 years ago
I'm in the FoxIt camp as well.
Acrobat Reader is a bloated piece of dung I gave up on a long time ago. I don't want a PDF reader that tries to install toolbars, crashes my browser, and takes up 30+ MB of ram to read a 250kb file.
John Dodds
· 3 years ago
This is called Stockholm syndrome!!
nogg3r5
· 3 years ago
its all about Foxit. Adobe reader takes to long to do anything...Download, Install, boot etc..
Robin Capper
· 3 years ago
I've posted a link to your videos (see post link on this comment) but to be honest didn't see much to excite about 8 as a CAD user other than the ability to merge files which is nice.
When they added 3d PDF generated quite a bit of "blog'tivity" in the CAD world but this one doesn't seem to offer much for the sort of uses I have for PDF.
Michael Kenward
· 3 years ago
Comment by Joe Clark
"Michel (sic) Kenward, “the last version” did not “create a new file format.” Acrobat and PDF versions are two different things"
Forgive me, but Acrobat 7 was the first version to give us PDF1.6, prompting lots of people to climb on the bandwagon and write software that offered no backward compatibility.
Why is that compatibility important, because people still running on old version of Reader have problems with the new format.
PDF and Acrobat are not the same thing. But someone should tell Adobe that.
My overview was posted Sunday at http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com , although it took a different slant, because of WorldCAD Access's interest in 3D: "Adobe Adds 2nd 3D Format to Acrobat"
Dominic Jones
· 3 years ago
Adobe lost sight of why most people use the product.
Acrobat is mostly used by people who are too lazy to use HTML to publish content online. I said mostly, ok?
Now why would these both to do anything else with the software? They won't and Adobe can't make them.
Just a waste of R&D if you ask me.
ralphg
· 3 years ago
Another reason for the initial lack of coverage: their PR people told me the press embargo ended Monday.
I initially set my blog item to live Monday at 8am, but Sunday afternoon I happened to notice the Adobe press release was already posted to Yahoo Business, so I changed my blog item to "Publish Now."
As well, Adobe PR never did send the promised PPT file and other details. No excuse, but Adobe has taken on a new PR firm (Edelman?) and maybe the staff isn't up to speed yet.
neath
· 3 years ago
Acrobat, well, the good thing is that you can search them but for the most part they are huge slow clunky things to be avoided. I am not a tech person but possibly speaking for the gabillions of "readers" out there, quite simply, Acrobat sucks!
The only way I could get excited about it would be if I hit online pdf pages that don't try to crash my browser then I might eventually think, "it's about time they fixed that up"
Dull, and more of a piss off that they have probably "improved" it without making surfing one iota more easy.
Robert Adobe like to do nasty things to foriegn programmers under the dcma.
I don't like Adobe and nor will I continue not use there tools just in case - who cares.
Zaine Ridling
· 3 years ago
Marc Orchant nails it — it's not the features that sell software, it's the benefits. With apps like FinePrint's pdf Factory Pro or as Marc mentioned, the $99 ScanSoft PDF Converter Pro from Nuance, there's really no reason to patronize Adobe anymore. I've registered and used every (Pro) version since 3.0, and 7 was the best, however, nowadays I mainly use it to create printable versions of Word docs, period. And for that, I'll never need Adobe. Besides, it seems like Adobe is just upgrading to make another billion, not to really improve PDF.
They have long been the forerunners of bloatware, refusing to scale back Adobe Reader, which quickly lost its free market to Foxit Reader. In this day, people don't tolerate this crap from megacorps anymore.
Brian Sullivan
· 3 years ago
I am struggling to find what most of the "new" features in Acrobat have to do with PDF format or anything that is traditionally thought of as Acrobat.
It seems like a cheap trick to me -- essentially they seem to have taken what used to be called Breeze(which if I remember correctly was also a collection of stuff rebranded as Breeze that had nothing to do with the original Breeze) and renamed it Acrobat 8 Connect in order to capitalize on the Acrobat "brand". I guess it worked though -- it got you to provide free promotion (or sort of --as your disclaimer indicates they do pay indirectly don't they?). Most of the other new features seem like more of the same -- incremental improvements to standard Acrobat.
I guess this is par for the course for Adobe - marketing and product development by sleight of hand. Of course Microsoft tends to do the same -- look at the list of "new" products that have names chosen from Live, Office, Windows that have nothing to do with Windows, Office and an are in no way Live.
All negativism aside though it looks like "Acrobat" Connect could actually be useful - if it didn't cost an arm and leg to use (as it apparently does).
Michael Kenward
· 3 years ago
I see from the proposed pricing that Adobe continues to rip off the planet.
Like too many North American software houses, Adobe wants me to give them £1 to match the $1 required of American customers.
I have news for Adobe, the dollar is sick. (Maybe all the money they owe to foreigners.) I can buy around $1.8 for £1.
And given that upgrades start at a high enough price as it is, there is little incentive to buy into their escalator.
Robert, Acrobat is simply not cool. It's basically just a pain that we have to put up with. It's slow to start up and seems to use a rather large amount of memory for what it actually does. Searching a PDF often fails. There are about four different ways to convert a document to PDF, and literally half the time, some ways don't work. Conversion back to Word is pathetic. And it doesn't shut down properly. Paying hundreds for such a product is just a joke. You should use your respected position to raise these problems with Adobe, not complain that people aren't talking about it much.
Derek K. Miller
· 3 years ago
I'm hesitant to approach the new Acrobat 8 because the installation experience for the Acrobat 7 Reader (reader!) is so unpleasant it's scaring me away. It's nearly as bad an experience as Joel Spolsky's phone, in fact.
Andy King
· 3 years ago
Robert,
We reviewed the new Acrobat 8 Pro (pre-release) at
We review Adobe's new Acrobat 8 Professional (pre-release) for performance against PDF Enhancer 3.1. The new Acrobat features faster operations, smaller PDFs, a new interface, and the ability to combine different types of files into one PDF.
- andy
Slasher
· 3 years ago
The "slow to launch" comments tell me that these folks never even tried Acrobat 7 (which brought the launch times down to something reasonable).
driveby
· 3 years ago
It was considered a bad thing when microsoft tried to cram all things into one application- or OS. Now Adobe wants to do the same. Why does Breeze have to be crammed into the Acrobat product?
I think it is interesting that microsoft is moving away from pdf to embrace XPS.
Jim Willeke
· 1 year ago
Nuance "PDF Converter Pro" however offers no free support. You must pay for every support incident even if the product will not run.
I have Vista and on launch, it says program has stopped working and crashes.
All Comments
It is the middle of the night in the US (its 09:50am in the UK) and it is a Sunday too. So I can't blame anyone right now if there not exactly getting up out of bed to blog about it.
To me it is not that exciting merely because I refuse to buy or need the pro version of acrobat because it costs too much when I can use a free program and print to pdf.
It is great if your a big user of acrobat pro and need or want those features but I can't see millions of people in the blogosphere getting excited about it if they don't use pro.
On another question, why do you care about about Adobe and I wonder how you get an early look at this product?
I just can't work it out!!!!! ;-)
Molly
Again. If I take money from any company to cover them, my efforts will be in the "Corporate" bar on the home page of PodTech.net.
But, I just did add a disclaimer to make it clear that PodTech has a business relationship with Adobe.
Or, put it another way. When I start my show up on Tuesday you'll see the CEO of JotSpot. We don't have a business relationship with them. You'll also see the CEO of Sun Microsystems. We don't have a business relationship with them. You'll also see Printing for Less. We don't have a business relationship with them. You'll also see an employee of Zooomr. We don't have a business relationship with them. And that's just the start.
How do you explain that?
Mike writes about a bunch of things. He's covered Microsoft and Google and Yahoo stuff in depth. They aren't "Web 2.0 startups."
Each new version of Acrobat seems to make it harder to use, and to understand. (Just investigate how to add form fields to an existing PDF file in Acrobat 7.)
The last version created a new file format that may well have lots of advantages, but these are never apparent. In the process, this broke some third party packages, such as PaperPort, which slavishly took up the new format without offering an option to stick with the old format.
Looking at the many many Acrobat files I receive, it is obvious that the people who created them have no idea of the things that you can do with Acrobat.
For example, I was looking at a software manual this weekend and found that it contains no bookmarks. It has a contents page with no clickable links to get you to the appropriate sections. And who on earth would write an index without making it "live"?
My view on the silence that you have detected is that only a tiny percentage of Acrobat users are knowledgeable. The rest don't care, and don't even realise that they are missing something.
The best place to sort out problems is probably the forum that runs on the back of the Adobe support pages. This also flies as a newsgroup. But I guess that is just too "old technology" to have caught your attention.
Oh ya.. they are expensive as well..
RE why no-one is getting excited about Acrobat 8. Because for 99.9% of people PDF is just a read-only document format which looks like printed pages. For them, v8 does nothing v4 didn't (which was, iirc, the last version to really innovate - it introduced search), except load a lot more slowly. So a new version just isn't interesting.
Normal people only know one search engine: Google, Yahoo, or MSN. Remember our goal is to get non-geeks involved in our world.
>So a new version just isn’t interesting.
I don't agree with your reasoning and CERTAINLY don't for anyone who claims to keep up on the latest on the Web. Now, if all the blogs wrote a one line review and said "it isn't interesting" then I'd agree with you. But you can't have it both ways. You can't say you write about all the latest stuff and then you don't when you think it isn't cool.
Two words... College Football.
Just to get it straight, I don't think they are paying you to do these reports but it just takes all the questions away when you disclose.
If you want a great example of disclosure, have a look at Darrren Rowse (www.problogger.net). If there is even a question of a relationship he will mention it.
You are probably right that I over do it, it definitely is a hobby horse of mine. Bloggers are always asking to be thought of in the same breather or better then MSM Journalists. If this is the case, I believe disclosure is a very important. What would we be saying if some one from the New York times was asking why weren't other journalist covering a story that invloved a company they had a relationship with?
JMTC (might only be worth one or less)
Molly
The Adobe reader has been buggy, bloated and very slow to start since version 5. Each new version, I try it, then happily uninstall it and go back to my alternative readers that load quickly and don't crash every third time.
So Adobe announcing a new reader is just not "news" as far as I, and most of those I know, feel.
I thought you had Macs? That is to say I'm surprised as most OS X users I know would rather pull out their toenails with plyers than use Acrobat Reader again. It's bloated, slow, and on OS X becoming less and less necessary.
See posts 12 and 19 and combine.
1) Adobe's Acrobat marketing sucks if you're not in the print world. Totally blows. Every company I've worked at since 1997 is amazed at what you can do with Acrobat, and asks me "How come Adobe doesn't tell us this better". Well, if you do all the work, that is, go to Adobe's site, go to Adobe's on line meetings, go to etc. Then you find out. But other than that? Yeah, good luck. All you get is "NEW ACROBAT! PDF IS COOL!"
2) If you need to use Acrobat the Application in a cross platform shop, get some Windows boxes or WTS/Citrix licenses. The Mac version gets only the minimal set of new features.
Two reasons: 1) the last figures I heard was that 90% of sales for Acrobat were on Windows. Of course, when you consider that their Mac marketing is even *worse* than their Windows marketing consisting of "Hey, pay a couple hundred bucks to creat PDF! Run a bad plugin that physically modifies your Web Browser and only runs in Safari! Get a confusing dialogue that is so non-functional, you have to go into the Acrobat application and hack up internal XML files to get it to stop modifying Safari and your Office bundle! " then their craptacular Mac sales make sense.
2) The Mac is not a vital platform for Acrobat. For the rest of CS, yes. But the Acrobat team? Hell no. The Office plugins for Acrobat can't even match the InDesign import, and have not improved since they first came out on the platform beyond printing to file in the latest PDF standard.
If you're in a mixed platform shop, upgrading Acrobat is going to do nothing beyond pissing off your users. A great example of just how little thought the Adobe Acrobat team gives to its Mac users: With Acrobat 7, they finally came out with a PDF plugin for Mac OS X. However, it only worked with Safari. No Firefox. Even worse, it physically modified the Safari application bundle, by adding a "Frameworks" folder with a bunch of aliases to the Acrobat internal bundle. However, prior to 7.0.5, it made that frameworks folder world - writable. I'm very gratified they fixed it, as this was a very BAD THING, (and even terribly flattered that they gave me the credit for pointing this out. Wow...thanks guys.), and a mistake that a first year CompSci student would have caught. There's so much of Acrobat that just really wants to be Windows.
You know, it's like they looked at the Word 6/Office 4.x debacle on the Mac and said, "Oh we can do it the same way, only it will work for us".
Oh, and at one point, I handed Adobe...Rick Armstrong in fact, a list of IT managers and approximately 40,000 overnight purchases that would have been made *solely* on the strength of updating the Mac office Macros to even close feature parity with the Windows versions. Now, admittedly, 40,000 licenses isn't a lot by any stretch, but for 72 hours of work, it wasn't bad, and pretty indicative that there was interest. (The shocking thing to me was how FEW Mac IT people realized what Acrobat could do. I did a LOT of explaining. I may have sold a few copies of Acrobat Win too, i'm not sure.)
I think he discovered just how persistent I can be when I don't even get a *confirmation* email back saying "Hey, thanks, I got that data, that I kind of asked you for". I'm sure he remembers it differently, and would use a very different term than "persistent". I like Rick, he struck me as a good guy, but not so good on the communcations thing.
The point is, Adobe is doing a *terrible* job of selling Acrobat to the world at large, and the huge cross platform disparity, when compared to the rest of CS isn't helping, nor is the Acrobat team's response to Mac users, which is usually a VERY polite take on "Sucks to be you, no we aren't improving things".
So given bad marketing and attitude, why are you suprised at the lack of Acrobat news?
Kindly correct the link for GigaOM in your second paragraph of the post. The link is misleading.
"Particularly on sites that pride themselves on covering everything that moves on the Web like TechCrunch or GigaOM"
How many times do you read "communicate and collaborate with confidence"?
WTF?? Communicate?? Cool?
Collaborate?? Cool?
Are we in 1999?
I also wish the search was better. I can never see enough context around the search results and I hate that every time I hit Control+F, I have to delete the last term I typed in.
This is why people don't care. Adobe has some serious work to do before convincing me that I should care about a new Acrobat.
I can remember, a new rev of acrobat came out during the Bubble days. When the program starts up, there's a long slow irritating delay while it loads all its plugins. I remember seeing, in this new release, "Loading WebBuy". Which I think encapsulates the problem. I smell PHBs upstream.
> is found 2.5 billion times on the Web
Acrobat is not the only program that produces PDF.
Has PDF format changed or has Acrobat such important change that deserves more public attention?
> Despite having something like 500+ million players loaded
> on computers near you
Maybe a new version of the PLAYER (or the PDF format) is worth mentioning everywere, but there aren't 500+ million Acrobat Pro installations.
Regards.
Good luck getting Adobe to talk about it on a wide scale though. I never thought I'd say this, but even Microsoft has better marketing than the Acrobat team.
It seems to do much more than I need for it to do. I imagine Acrobat 9 will come out in 18 months and will offer even more than that...
No thanks, Adobe.
Also I wonder if the PDF Package feature can be used to protect other file formats. I see that a MS Project file was in his package. What if a WindowsMedia file was in there?
Ever since the whole Adobe/Microsoft Office 2007 incident concerning the PDF format, I have dumped all things Adobe. Abode is dead to me. I doubt this has anything to do with the silence, but I know a number of people who have also said goodbye to Adobe due to that incident.
Since about version 5 this software has become bloated, slow and the cause of frequent crashes on all of my machines... but why not ? After all, the reader is free and you get what you pay for...
I suppose I’m biased in saying this because I volunteer on the PDF/Universal Access committee, but an imaginable reason to upgrade to Acrobat 8 is the easier creation of accessible PDFs. (The committee is working on the Portable Document Format, not Acrobat.) As Adobe offered me a beta-test only of the Windows version and I have seen no information whatsoever on accessibility improvements, I certainly concede this reason is hypothetical at the moment.
I'm still waiting.
So you can now make fillable forms easier! Wow, a feature that should have been in V2 without havin to spend thousands on a PDF developer library.
The only differences I've seen in recent versions (from the reader side that it -- I use PDFs extensively for prepress), is that Adobe keeps adding other programs to the download bundle.
Consider that an upgrade I can do without.
If Adobe really wanted to make news, they should release a $14.99 or $24.99 PDF writer with basic functions that would appeal to more business users and wouldn't require a purchase req to spend $150 or so to print PDF's. They could then market this product to the entire companies instead of a speacialty users. How many license has WinZip sold by using a low cost corprate licesng model and solving a simple need of the majority of business users?
And I really can't wait to go through the upgrade process step by bloody step, 5-to-6-to-7-to-8, one assumes, continuing a ridiculous process. I think the multiple reboots are my favorite part. It's a great way to upgrade a program, especially if you hate your users.
All for a few new "features" and an increase in size and decrease in speed and increase in computer horsepower required to run the thing effectively.
And of course the documentation will continue to suck because, as a former high-up at Adobe explained to me, the Adobe Press products--which supposedly do provide decent documentation--are a big moneymaker, so there's negative incentive to document anything.
And I have no doubt that Acrobat will continue to crash my computer more often than every other program on the machine combined.
Robert, no offense to you and whatever friends you hae at Adobe, but those of us who've actually paid for, used, and upgraded these programs are really sick of Adobe's whole act with regard to Acrobat.
In short: "meh"
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/
Adobe made public the Acrobat 8 forthcoming revision and lifted the NDA at 12:00AM EST on Sepetember 18. At precisely 12:01AM on September 18 several blogs were posted at http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs.
ted
How about an auto credits tag so we can make it easier for the DOCS to publish Biblio's?
That function would be great for researchers and analysts who don’t want to re-read / highlight focus zones in massive dissertations and technical journals. What do you think? Just a thought, thinking outcloud. #; ) I'll get back in the box now... sorry.
So I'll just add that in the distant past I was a fan of Windows. In the less distant past I was a fan of all things Apple, and in the less distant netherworld of unreleased betas I was a fan of Adobe too.
At some point the future of all of these companies was in doubt and they worked hard to survive. But then, to a greater or lesser extent they all achieved the ability to draw residuals on their past successes. The iPod has remade Apple. So much so that I wonder if they even want to be in the computer business any more. MS still makes tons off of Windows and Office, but predictions of the eventual decline on those revenue streams are almost universal. Adobe, long a one-trick pony, after MS pulled the font rug out from under them, Acrobat made a lot more sense as a “perpetual” revenue generator and they dis a great job of promulgating the format to just about everywhere from Linux, Apple's OS and even to Palm pilots and such. Small companies could of course survive for decades on these income streams, but these aren't' small companies, so they have to find ways to get larger streams to flow out of these existing products. This is almost never good for existing users, who are in many cases completely happy with what they have. All they need is for that existing capability to keep up with OS upgrades (most of which they don't need either but are forced into). And so the march of “improved” technology goes on.
I was a beta tester for an Adobe product called Atmosphere back in, oh, 2000 or so (maybe earlier). Way back then they already had a system that would allow you to set up a 3D chat room on any ordinary web page, complete with customizable avatars, sound, etc. Not quite the full experience of Second Life, but for what content creation involved (a few hours of tinkering) quite impressive. Someone skilled in the tool could produce a 3D landscape that was breathtaking and approached a photo-realism that I haven't seen anywhere else. the only problem was that the code was buggy as heck. After two years of delays it seemed to have gotten worse rather than better. they changed the scope from being a separate program with a plug-in for web work to only a plug-in and no separate viewer. The plug-in only worked with IE, and many of the beta testers (like me) had already switched to Mozilla. FINALLY they announced the production product, as if they had given up on fixing the bugs. Ahhh, but they had promised all beta testera a copy of the production product. I got mine. Shortly thereafter the product was unceremoniously discontinued, and the production team made to vanish. The next version of Acrobat had some sort of 3D capabilities built-in, which I've never seen operate as I had already begun my migration away from Windows and I suspect that's the only place it will work (if it does work).
Call it bloat, or featuritis, the unfortunate requirement of being a publicly traded company impels these companies to abandon common sense and make former things of beauty into eyesores while they scurry to discover something new. A poor user has to hope against hope that these new endeavors such as Xbox and iPod will be such runaway sucesses that the companies will leave the old stuff alone, but that doesn't seem to be the normal course of events does it?
Sickening.
PS: Unless I'm missing something, your pointer to the Acrobat video points to a page that requires you to have Flash version 8 (not available for Linux yet), nevertheless less, it automatically directs me to a product update page which doesn't exist, although the script doing this never discloses that fact and instead just waits for something to happen that isn't going to happen. Finally I discover that the actual video, on Podtech, is in a Quicktime format that I could have even played on my Linux machine. I cringe that they pay people to put this stuff together. It's probably just as well for Adobe that I don't spend much time blogging about them.
Acrobat Reader is a bloated piece of dung I gave up on a long time ago. I don't want a PDF reader that tries to install toolbars, crashes my browser, and takes up 30+ MB of ram to read a 250kb file.
When they added 3d PDF generated quite a bit of "blog'tivity" in the CAD world but this one doesn't seem to offer much for the sort of uses I have for PDF.
"Michel (sic) Kenward, “the last version” did not “create a new file format.” Acrobat and PDF versions are two different things"
Forgive me, but Acrobat 7 was the first version to give us PDF1.6, prompting lots of people to climb on the bandwagon and write software that offered no backward compatibility.
Why is that compatibility important, because people still running on old version of Reader have problems with the new format.
PDF and Acrobat are not the same thing. But someone should tell Adobe that.
But back to Robert's first message:
http://acrobatusers.com/blogs/
Acrobat is mostly used by people who are too lazy to use HTML to publish content online. I said mostly, ok?
Now why would these both to do anything else with the software? They won't and Adobe can't make them.
Just a waste of R&D if you ask me.
I initially set my blog item to live Monday at 8am, but Sunday afternoon I happened to notice the Adobe press release was already posted to Yahoo Business, so I changed my blog item to "Publish Now."
As well, Adobe PR never did send the promised PPT file and other details. No excuse, but Adobe has taken on a new PR firm (Edelman?) and maybe the staff isn't up to speed yet.
The only way I could get excited about it would be if I hit online pdf pages that don't try to crash my browser then I might eventually think, "it's about time they fixed that up"
Dull, and more of a piss off that they have probably "improved" it without making surfing one iota more easy.
Neath
and here: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/09/adobe-presen...
I don't like Adobe and nor will I continue not use there tools just in case - who cares.
They have long been the forerunners of bloatware, refusing to scale back Adobe Reader, which quickly lost its free market to Foxit Reader. In this day, people don't tolerate this crap from megacorps anymore.
It seems like a cheap trick to me -- essentially they seem to have taken what used to be called Breeze(which if I remember correctly was also a collection of stuff rebranded as Breeze that had nothing to do with the original Breeze) and renamed it Acrobat 8 Connect in order to capitalize on the Acrobat "brand". I guess it worked though -- it got you to provide free promotion (or sort of --as your disclaimer indicates they do pay indirectly don't they?). Most of the other new features seem like more of the same -- incremental improvements to standard Acrobat.
I guess this is par for the course for Adobe - marketing and product development by sleight of hand. Of course Microsoft tends to do the same -- look at the list of "new" products that have names chosen from Live, Office, Windows that have nothing to do with Windows, Office and an are in no way Live.
All negativism aside though it looks like "Acrobat" Connect could actually be useful - if it didn't cost an arm and leg to use (as it apparently does).
Like too many North American software houses, Adobe wants me to give them £1 to match the $1 required of American customers.
I have news for Adobe, the dollar is sick. (Maybe all the money they owe to foreigners.) I can buy around $1.8 for £1.
And given that upgrades start at a high enough price as it is, there is little incentive to buy into their escalator.
http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2006/09/more_gre...
We reviewed the new Acrobat 8 Pro (pre-release) at
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/tweak/...
We review Adobe's new Acrobat 8 Professional (pre-release) for performance against PDF Enhancer 3.1. The new Acrobat features faster operations, smaller PDFs, a new interface, and the ability to combine different types of files into one PDF.
- andy
I think it is interesting that microsoft is moving away from pdf to embrace XPS.
I have Vista and on launch, it says program has stopped working and crashes.
Customer service is equally unaccommodating.