Are You Tired of Adobe Whining about the iPad?

It all started with an update to the Apple Software Developer Kit that said developers could only use Apple's tools to build apps for the iPhone and the iPad. While this stirred up a number of blog posts from the developer community, the biggest victim of this was Adobe and their planned release of a tool to port Flash applications to a variety of mobile platforms -- write once in Flash and publish to the iPhone, Android, and potentially others. This product was now DOA.

What followed was a bunch of back and forth between Apple and the community centered around Steve Jobs basically saying, "Flash sucks." Jobs even went so far as to publish an open letter explaining in detail why Flash would not be supported on the iPhone or the iPad. And again, there was some more back and forth within the community.

Adobe has now come out with an ad basically saying, "We Love Apple." While that might fill you with an overwhelming sense of "who cares," over on Techcrunch, MG Siegler put together a nice little commentary on what Adobe should do instead of this ad campaign. A simple synopsis of his advice to Adobe, "make a better product."

The Myth of the Special Relationship Between Apple and Adobe
Siegler also includes a link to this great blog post, Sorry, Adobe, you screwed yourself. This post revisits the history of Adobe's lack of support for the Apple platform. If you're sitting around with some grand notions of 'the special relationship' between Apple and Adobe, then this post is for you. It's a great refresher on how Adobe has virtually abandoned the Apple platform over the past fifteen years.

This post really connected with me. Over the years, I've grumbled about Adobe's products to anyone that would listen. While I've been forced to use the software as an industry professional, the last Adobe product I actually had good things to say about was Photoshop 3.0. Since that time, I've watched Adobe act like Microsoft, cranking out product after product focused on what Adobe wanted to make, not improvements to the functionality that I depend upon. As processors got better and better, Adobe managed to find ways to take the basic functions of their software and make them run slower and slower. Illustrator and Photoshop basically do the same things that they did back in 1995, but it takes the software five times longer to launch. Worse than that, they used their substantial resources to buy up competitors, take crappy software like Pagemaker, repackage it as InDesign, and cram it down our throats. When I use InDesign, there isn't an hour that goes by that I don't curse the product and everyone that made it.

In the end, that's why I agree with Steve Jobs and MG Siegler. If Adobe wants to be on my iPhone, they need to make a good product. Being the industry standard doesn't protect you from changes in technology or exempt you from animosity in your user base -- remember Syquest? As it stands, when I find decent alternatives to Adobe products, I use those tools instead. Admittedly, I'm just one member of the user community, but I'm sure that there are others that feel the same way.

What's more, as an effort to generate word of mouth buzz and inspire their user base to push for some sort of inclusion / exemption from Apple, this approach is more astroturf than grass roots. Maybe the team at Adobe should take a closer look at how much lawn they actually have.

What Do You Mean There's No Phone Number?

In the online world, you'll find many businesses that don't publish contact information. Instead, they route any customer service and support issues through a fixed path of web-based submission forms, online chat, or simply a support email address. Sales and orders are handled entirely through their web application.

From a business standpoint, this enables them to streamline their staffing requirements. By managing the pipeline of incoming issues, these businesses attempt to eliminate or eliminate their customer-facing staff. It seems like a perfect system if the transaction works correctly, but when things don't work right, not providing a human-customer interface has the potential be really bad. Here's an example:

Lulu.com: We Don't Publish Direct Contact Information
If you're not familiar with the site, Lulu.com offers a web interface that enables you to publish your own book and print just one copy (or more). Basically, you can upload a book (following their templates) and self-publish your book in a variety of sizes. Leveraging digital output, Lulu.com can print books at about half the price you can get it done most other places. You can find lots of publishing options on the site, including an entire ecosystem devoted to helping you publish. What you won't find on Lulu.com is direct contact information -- no sales contacts, no support contacts, and no phone numbers. You're only options for contacting Lulu are a web-based contact form and web-based chat with a customer service person.

If you've ever spent any extended time at Kinkos, you probably have an understanding of Lulu might not want to talk to people:

Reason Possibility #1: A significant percentage of people trying to print things are idiots that have no idea what they are doing and why it won't work. They need help making their giant Word graphic print as 1000 business cards, they need to get Mr. Biggle's face to be on Page 30, not page 31, and the greatest American novel needs to be printed, but they can only pay in traveler's checks. (full disclosure: these examples are not intended to represent specific individuals. If you feel like one of these examples might be you, I swear it wasn't. Oh, and please try to avoid being in front of me in line at the store. Thanks)

So if you're Lulu.com, a certain amount of customer service screening and filtering makes sense. But what happens when you know what you're doing, you follow the transaction process correctly, and the end result isn't what you expected. In my case, I set up a book for print, ordered it, paid for expedited handling, watched as it tracked through their online order tracking process and then I received... a nicely printed Lulu.com box that contained an entirely different, completely unrelated book.

Here's a list of things that I didn't receive: 

• a packing list, order confirmation, or any other documentation that might normally indicate what the people who were shipping thought was happening inside the box
• a customer support phone number, an email address, or other method of communicating directly with Lulu to resolve the issue

Sitting in front of my computer, I was finally able to to contact their customer service using their online chat interface. At that point, their customer service insisted that I email him photos of the incorrect product in order to prove that I had, in fact, received the wrong product. Once I sent those to him, he then referred the issue to their customer support department. Two days later, their customer support department contacted my by email. My options?

We can place either a reorder or refund for the defective book...

So, after paying for expedited shipping on my original order and waiting two days for a response, their customer service group wanted to know if I want to reorder.

Is Poor Customer Service Your Business Strategy?
About a decade ago, Iomega found themselves in a class action lawsuit over their poor customer service practices surrounding issues with their Zip drives. The lawsuit essentially forced Iomega to provide better customer support. So another possible explanation for not providing contact info?

Reason Possibility #2: You know that your standard business processes are going to produce a substantial percentage of dissatisfied customers and by making it more difficult for them to resolve their issues, a significant percentage will simply give up in frustration.

This is similar to many of the online models that add a recurring monthly charge to your credit card, then make it difficult to cancel or unsubscribe. To me, businesses that use approaches like this suffer from being one or two steps above a scam. And that's exactly why I find this strategy of limited customer support communication channels to be such a risky path for a business to take: at what point do you move from a "limited overhead customer relationship" to a caveat emptor business selling herbal supplements for weight loss or erectile dysfunction where the threshold for quality is "not proven to cause harm"?

In the end, Lulu.com refunded the charge to my credit card and I printed the books through a local vendor -- they are not a scam. If I were to guess, I suspect that their distributed production model needs some additional transaction system oversight. In the case of my transaction, it appears that even if I had been able to speak with a human, he couldn't have told me anything about what went wrong with my transaction. However, a live person might have been sensitive my tone or my frustration and provided a more aggressive remedy.

The Take-Away
When you are in charge of a customer-facing process, whether you are designing it, managing it, or restructuring it, never underestimate the cost of not offering a human interface to your process. While email support and online chat may seem like a reasonable strategy, these tools are not equivalent to providing a direct interface with a person -- of course, that presumes that you are interested in building your brand and positive Word of Mouth.

To MBA or Not to MBA, Is That The Question

There's an interesting thread running over on Techcrunch at the moment. The post, Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in the Startup World? by Vivek Wadhwa, dives into that time-honored debate that you may have had with yourself. Between the article and the comments, it's an interesting read, totally worth checking out.

The iPad Controversy - Too Much Hot Air

With the roll-out of Apple's iPad on Saturday, my radio and the stuff that I read have all been overflowing with a bunch of stories that revolve around a single theme: Apple's iPad is possibly the greatest threat to the universe, the space-time continuum, and all that is holy that we have ever seen.

Most of the stories start with something like, "with long lines and strong sales, lots of people are excited about the iPad, but not everyone thinks it's great." This is usually followed by their tech-expert commentator that wants to highlight how the iPad is a closed system. "It's not like a PC," the tech expert says, "Apple controls everything that you can put on it. What happens if other companies do the same thing?"

Of course, you can understand his complaint as you read this post and marvel over it's incredible flash graphics from the open platform of your Nintendo DS. You were probably thinking about that just the other day while finishing up your taxes in Turbotax for Xbox360. Or maybe you can't be bothered as you hammer out guitar riffs on your Kindle guitar chord application. And if you think that content control is all about tiny tech devices, perhaps that's because you remember the last time that you marveled in the spectacle of naked bodies writhing in iMax porn.

The funny thing about all of this is that people forget how it was before the iPhone. I remember when Verizon wanted to charge me $1 per image that I downloaded from my camera phone, and the only way to get photos out of it was to upload to Verizon then download. Of course, the hardware wasn't limited like that -- it was firmware designed to meet Verizon's specs. I have colleagues with Blackberry's that have the internal GPS chip essentially disabled in firmware courtesy of the carrier specifications.

Anyway, the purpose of the story isn't really about the looming danger to the fabric of the universe, it's for yet another media outlet to find a vehicle for publishing a story about something that everyone is talking about. Here's mine.

Marketing Green Technology - PR Gets Caught In The Religious War Over Climate Change

A funny thing happened on the way to my Solar Power industry news release. On the plus side, a number of sources picked up the release and I got a lot of coverage. On the minus side, some of the initial buzz was centered around hysteria spurred by the "there-is-no-such-thing-as-global-warming" constituency.

Background:
Here in Silicon Valley, we understand that manufacturing photovoltaic material, the stuff that makes solar power cells work, is a technology market. It's basically the same process used to make silicon wafers for those integrated circuits that drive all of your favorite electronic devices -- but making a sandwich with cheese instead of meat. In recent years, this has been THE growth market in the semiconductor industry, pushing the industry for material efficiency improvements, increased capacity, and lower cost.

So, imagine our surprise at the emergence of an anti-innovation constituency. Simply put, there are people out there who have adopted an ideological dogma that there is no such thing as global warming or climate change. For these people, the idea of spending money on solar power is a slippery slope to admitting that some of their fundamental beliefs are wrong. While that might not seem like a big deal, many of the polarizing aspects of our modern society seem to drive people to an ideological need to cling to some of these tiny concepts like they are essential to identity and existence -- instead of cogito ergo sum, it's I don't believe in global warming, therefore I am.

Here in the technology space, you see this kind of behavior play out sometimes in challenges to innovation. Think about those meetings that you've been in where that one guy grabs onto one tiny snippet of data and uses it as justification to tear down an entire development framework.

Here's an example of how that might play out
Back in the 1990's, there was a consortium formed to help drive flat panel LCD research here in the valley with the objective of keeping the US competitive in the design and manufacture of LCD panels. Imagine conversations with our technology opponent back then:

opp: Why do we need to invest in LCD panels, my current CRT works perfectly.
pro: Well, LCD panels use less electricity than CRTs. They will reduce power consumption, lower your electricity bill, and help reduce global warming.
opp: There is no such thing as global warming. This is a waste of money. We should not invest in this.

Of course, that same guy probably has an LCD monitor on his desk now. If the purpose of innovation was "run-away desk clutter caused by overly large CRTs" or "strained backs caused by lifting heavy CRTs", he would probably argue against it with equal abandon. But the simple fact of the matter is that while all of these are benefits of innovation in LCD flat panels, none of these benefits were the driver for innovation.

Technology is Apolitical
Here's what these people miss -- technology is essentially apolitical. The same guy who doesn't want to believe in global warming probably doesn't think twice when he doesn't have to replace a battery in his calculator because it uses a photovoltaic cell for power. Photovoltaic cells didn't get designed into calculators because of some vast climate change conspiracy, they were designed in because way back when, some product marketing guy said, "if we add it to our product, consumers won't have to do anything with batteries -- engineering, can you do this?" They could. It sold. Now the design is ubiquitous.

At the same time, nobody sat around attempting to calculate a comprehensive global environmental cost comparison between manufacturing tiny batteries and solar cells -- nor ask the question, what if we could make biodegradable batteries out of the drippings from Costco rotisserie chicken ovens. We may wake up tomorrow and need to solve a problem like that.

This is how technology evolves. The photovoltaic manufacturing industry isn't ramping up because of some vast global warming conspiracy, it's ramping up because existing manufacturers are selling products at capacity and there is a market for more. They will make more hybrid cars for the same reason.

Addressing The PR Challenge
When faced with a PR challenge like this, the question that you always ask is what's the best way to handle it. Overall, what you don't want is the story to grow legs with your client as the focal point of a political controversy. At the same time, with many of the communication channels that play to the "controversy audiences", particularly those that communicate with a veneer of "news", they typically have more interest in whipping up excitement than in exploring factual aspects of the story.

So what's the best answer to deal with this type of issue? Depending on your audience and your situation, there are a number of ways to approach the situation and there probably isn't a single communications solution. My goal here isn't to provide a recipe, it's more about the thinking process. While you may be used to handling a mild-mannered PR program that just plays to the trades, you might run through a few exercises in your imagination exploring about how you might handle the situation if your apolitical technology suddenly became political.

Is the US Government Finally Getting It Right On Broadband Internet Access?

It was either yesterday or the day before when an article on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News caught my eye, Google dangles super-fast Internet; cities leap to compete for network. What struck me as funny about this article -- here in Silicon Valley, you might think that you are the only region in the country that is desperately seeking more bandwidth. Suddenly, you look around behind you and there are thousands of communities, millions of people who are just as desperate as you are.

If you look at it from the consumer side of the equation, the desire is for faster network speeds and more bandwidth is ubiquitous. The problem with broadband network access and bandwidth isn't a technology problem, it's a revenue problem. Specifically, it's a "why should we spend anything on expanding our capacity until we have maximized our return on our existing infrastructure investments" problem, and it's being managed by your friendly neighborhood network providers like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast. Imagine if your Internet access was limited by the local news paper -- and they tried to maximize the amount of money they made on both Internet and paper sales. Or imagine if your Internet access was limited by the record companies attempting to maintain and maximize revenues on CD and DVD sales (oh wait...).

So, when I came across this article this morning from the New York Times, Effort to Widen U.S. Internet Access Sets Up Battle, I felt compelled to say a couple of silent words of thanks and write this post. Don't get me wrong, while I'm optimistic, I'm not expecting success. Over the past decade and a half, the push to see a universal high-speed network infrastructure has been matched by the glacial resistance of the Bells. Perhaps with this initiative, there is finally some light at the end of the fiber.

More News in Battles Over Internet Marketing Scams

Techcrunch has another post news from the social network gaming scams this evening. It sounds like there's been a class action lawsuit filed against a number of the game companies who provide the infrastructure for the scammers. The ScamVille Lawsuit: Facebook, MySpace, Zynga And More Face Possible Class Action Suit gives you the story and some interesting related links.

After two weeks, you might think that this story would have run it's course, but I think we're just getting started.