Adobe manager hits out at loyal customers
Adobe may rue the day it encouraged its product managers to run online blogs from its own site. It seems that the latest musing of product manager John Nack have unleashed a torrent of articles across the net from angry Mac users, annoyed that the company strategy seems inconsistent and worse still John Nack takes direct aim at abusing the very people who pay his salary, Adobe customers.
The debate centres around a series of new software releases from Adobe and confusion for support for old and new Mac platforms. According to MacCentral -
“Soundbooth’s lack of support for PowerPC processors has raised the ire of some Mac users and pundits alike: Although Apple’s transition to Intel processor-based Macs is complete, the vast majority of Mac users still have PowerPC-based systems. Critics suggest that Adobe’s decision to make Soundbooth an Intel-only app is premature.”
Adobe have delayed a series of new releases citing different reasons, in his blog Nack goes on to say -
“Now, if you were Adobe and had started developing a new application at exactly the time when Apple told you, "This other chip architecture is dead to us," would you rather put your efforts into developing for that platform, or would you focus elsewhere?”
This is indeed ironic, Adobe have done just this with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a new public beta app that is available in so called Universal Binary – ie it works on Both PowerPC [PPC] and MacIntel.
At the same time Adobe have also said they will support both PC, MacIntel and PPC with the release some time next year of the popular Photoshop and other CS applications.
The issue seems to be that managers like Nack forget that the computer world is not full of customers who simply bend to the company’s will. And that turning on customers when they voice dissent is a bad tactic. At the same time Adobe needs to provide a simple, consistent and clear strategy or message for the roll-out of its products and stick to it. This may just be the case of a ‘loose cannon’ so Adobe probably needs to rein him in.
In a final rallying call on his blog Nack makes the following vitriolic comments about the faithful customers (so called zealots) “Maybe I should, but as a die-hard Mac user I feel like someone has to speak a little truth to the Mac community–or rather, to that vocal little group of zealots and forum trolls. So here’s my message for those folks: You’re hurting the Mac platform. You’re hurting the Mac community. You need to crush a little aluminum foil against those antennae of yours, because you’re hurting everyone concerned. You’re making it harder (and less appealing) for people of goodwill to make the effort to support the Mac.”
If attack were the best form of defense then certainly Nack has mastered this in one fell swoop. For any manager at such a highly visible and branded company as Adobe to be writing such stuff in a public forum is extraordinary to say the least.
Our advice to senior management at Adobe is to ‘pull’ the blog and make sure that managers are made to tow the company line, leave PR to the PR specialists, such public ramblings from inexperienced managers surely can only do damage to the company image in the long run.
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