[Martin Schaefer]

Hi folks,

what I want to tell you today is the story of an Adobe User Group and how it came to an end. Hope this is of interest and helps to change things at Adobe. This is an open letter that has also been sent to folks at Adobe.

Adobe Director (fka Macromedia Director) has a 24 years history starting as Macromind VideoWorks. This product has been the foundation of Macromedia's success and growth in the 90ies. I'm not sure if you are aware that this product has been alive 5 years before e.g. Photoshop was born and 10 years before Flash was started as FutureSplash!

I've been using Director for 15 years with huge success. The concept behind Director was great and at least in theory still is. But it has suffered a long time of total neglect although it didn't deserve this ignorance from its manufacturer. The culprit? Certainly not the product, but a guy called Rob Burgess, once the CEO of Macromedia, who obviously did not love his then #1 product.

Anyway, today we have Adobe and Adobe initially seemed to be willing to revive Director.
But to tell you the truth, they miserably failed. The Director team at Adobe is the most ignorant (and sorry to say so) incompetent bunch of software developers I've ever seen in my life. Communication is completely non-existant. Quality of product is unacceptable. Most new features introduced since Adobe took over are so badly designed and manufactured, that they simply can't be used in real-life projects.
The community has been complaining for a loooong time and it has been frustrating to deal with this ammount of ignorance, disinterest and unresponsiveness.

If anybody at Adobe is interested to know which are the major issues, I can easily go into more detail on request. I can't talk about NDA covered topics publicly. But here I want to focus on my User Group effort and how it came to the point where I lost the rest of confidence.

1. Did you know that Macromedia Director 8.5 was the #1 topic @ UCON 2001 (the predecessor of MAX)? Only 8 years ago! In 2007, there was a small and uninspired BoF session left at Max. In 2008 and 2009 there's no mention of Director at MAX at all.

2. Director had (and has) the potential to be more powerful and more successful than Adobe AIR. But for some reason the decision makers thought they had to re-invent the wheel instead of building on top of a proven platform that dominated the market for a decade at least. Combine Flash, PDF, video, audio, 3D and many other types of media was the strength of Director ... and please don't forget that it all works without the need for a pre-installed framework like with AIR.
I still have to understand why Adobe did this move.

3. The response time of the product team regarding major issues and flaws in the product is so slow or (even worse) non-existant that the product and the user base heavily suffer. Communication with and feedback from engineering, marketing, evangelism has virtually come to a halt.

4. Adobe has not managed to present their product in a way that shows the potential, that shows creativity, love, pride and technological skills. All we can see, read or hear makes us believe that Director is left to a bunch of gravediggers that hate their job and their clients.

Can you imagine how hard it is to run a user group under these circumstances?

There seems to be no way to improve the situation, at least no way for the formerly enthusiastic community. I can tell you that the Director community is completely pissed because of the situation that has never really improved during the Adobe era. And this is very sad for all!

Sorry for the novel, guys. But I had to express my frustration, anger and disbelief. Maybe Adobe takes this serious and as a kind of "last warning" before they completely loose a potentially great product and its remaining user base.

For me and the user group I'm running:
If I don't see major (positive) changes until the end of this year, I have to stop my commitment and focus on other things that have a brighter future.
Trust me, I'm not happy to write these lines. It has been a great ride and I had a lot of economic success over the last 15 years using Director. Things have just come to a point where dramatic change is inevitable. I'd certainly prefer a change at Adobe's treatment of Director and its user base. But I'm ready now to change my route if nothing happens quickly.

Cheers,
Martin

[Danny Kodicek]

I agree with most of your letter but I'd like to quibble with a few of your words. While it's undeniable that the two Adobe releases of Director have been fairly disastrous (although 11.5 is a huge improvement on 11), I think as outsiders we simply can't know enough to portray the entire engineering team as ignorant and incompetent. There's certainly plenty of both ignorance and incompetence in the process, but how much of it is down to poor quality of the engineering staff and how much is down to pressure from above is very hard to gauge from outside.

To me, the most fundamental issue in your whole complaint is the lack of willingness at Adobe to listen to their users, at all stages and in all areas, from development (glaring problems in the new audio and video engines weren't given due attention) to marketing (the pricing structure for Adobe software continues to be ludicrous) to technical support (Shockwave updates). From time to time there are hints that this is changing, but it always seems to revert to the norm. And many people in the engineering team have unfortunately taken this attitude too.

Obviously in the current climate it's hard for Adobe to pursue niche markets like Director, and it's forgivable for them to focus on the easier money. I'm willing to wait just a little longer before jumping ship altogether. The most frustrating thing is that when Adobe purchased Macromedia, it would have been easy and understandable for them to have flatly declared then that Director and Authorware would be discontinued, or folded into Flash development (as you say, it's very odd that they developed Air when they could simply have leveraged Director's already considerable strength as an application development tool). Instead they keep us hanging in the air with promises of 'just give us one more version'.

[Chunick]

Martin,

I'm not happy to hear that Director has sunk that far in your eyes. For myself, I'm quite pessimistic about Director and it's future right now, especially with the lack of communication in the last month or two.

My main concern with your announcement is the amount of time and effort that you and others, such as myself, have put into building a repository of information for the Director community. I would very much hate to see that disappear.

[Martin Schaefer]

Thanks for your replies so far.

Danny:
My words might be pretty harsh, I know. It represents pretty well what is going on inside me though.
All I can tell you is that I'm tired. Do you remember the pressure the community had to put on the Director engineering to get these unbelievable text issues in D11 at least partly fixed? Do you remember how long it took with a couple of issues still remaining?
Rest assured that while this effort (to convince Adobe of the importance) was done in public, it wasn't the only case in the last months and years. A human being can fight once and once more and even a third time but there will come the day when you run out of power. If you feel that you have to fight for something and put pressure on someone, this is not exactly the easiest and most desirable way to improve things. To bad when other ways have failed too.

If you are passionate about something and really want to get involved and help the best you can, then there's always a huge chance to get pissed by ignorance or these insane short and sluggish answers you get. Obviously this happened to me.


Josh:
Please trust me when I say, that the last thing I want to do is to hurt the community. When I decide to stop my commitment to Director and my involvement as an Adobe User Group manager, this doesn't mean I switch off and/or delete the existing web resources we all have built here. But I will stop my daily background housekeeping and will start thinking about some substancial changes on Directorforum with regards to new and future content. We'll see.

[fgreen]

For me and the user group I'm running:
If I don't see major (positive) changes until the end of this year, I have to stop my commitment and focus on other things that have a brighter future.

I also would hate to see this excellent forum dissappear.

and please don't forget that it all works without the need for a pre-installed framework like with AIR

It seems to me that Adobe is trying to follow or perhaps compete head to head with Microsoft, who has long had the framework-model for software created in visual studio (visual C Runtime Lib, VB Runtime and now .Net framework). I'm still not convinced this is the best thing for end users, but this seems to be the way things are going.

[Danny Kodicek]

Originally Posted by Martin Schaefer

My words might be pretty harsh, I know. It represents pretty well what is going on inside me though.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not in any way contradicting your harshness, I'm completely with you there. Adobe deserve all the harsh words we can throw at them on this issue. I'm just saying that the target of the harsh words should be Adobe as a whole, rather than the engineering team specifically - it's perfectly possible that many of them *are* incompetent (or perhaps just inexperienced), but from outside we can't really make those kinds of judgements. We've all been in situations where management decisions force us to release code we're not completely happy with. Ultimately, if the software is poor quality, that's the fault of management.

I know you're really expressing your frustration with some particular battles you've had with particular engineers, and I know where you're coming from - competent or incompetent, there's definitely some people out in Bangalore that have taken the Adobe ethos on board rather too happily

[Martin Schaefer]

Originally Posted by Danny Kodicek

... the Adobe ethos ...

Danny, I don't think there is an "Adobe ethos" I could generally complain about. At least not in terms of communication with the community. The communication issue is a very particular issue with the Director team.

If I look at other product teams at Adobe, there is much more openness and communication with the community. First and foremost I want to mention Photoshop's principal product manager John Nack and his blog and Twitter feed where he often discusses issues, explains, asks the community and even regularly answers the users' blog comments. But he's certainly not the only shining light in the "dark" of Adobe. There are many efforts to communicate (within the bounds of company policy, of course). Let me mention the fabulous Adobe Labs which pretty often serve as a pre-release showcase of technology. Or another often interesting resource from Adobe is their "Advanced Technology Labs" with PatchMatch being the example I link here. Richard Galvan doing a Flash CS5 sneak peak session at "Flash on the beach".

These are just very few examples and the list could easily be extended to several meters (feet/3.28, hehe) length. So again, I don't think this is a company-wide issue at Adobe.

[Ilya Lad]

I highly appreciate and grateful the effort of all you who run and contribute to this forum.
I would also hate to loose it.

"A human being can fight once and once more and even a third time but there will come the day when you run out of power." - May be we just have to allow ourselves some rest and relax for a while in such situations. After a while you may feel different. I just want to express my understanding of your feelings, Martin

"The most frustrating thing is that when Adobe purchased Macromedia, it would have been easy and understandable for them to have flatly declared then that Director and would be discontinued" . - Imagine that the had discontinued. No, I like the present situation better better the imaginary.

I think the scale of time to wait is at least Director 12, rather than the end of the year. But it is really a shame than Allen is silent in this situation.

[Ilya Lad]

Sorry for the lost and duplicated words and other typos - typing under the pressure.

[Robbo]

Hey gang,

I'm a long-time Director user & supporter, though generally quiet on the lists (but I've lurked on 'em all!). Just wanted to echo some of the sentiments here.

Interesting, I find, that you could read through Director forum content from just about any year over the past decade and breathe in that oh-so-familiar smell-of-death. How many times has the product been declared dead, and then critical news of a forthcoming update or release saved it? Is this situation 'same-old' or are we really at the end?

While internally we still work with MX 2004 to maintain some legacy stuff - we have not created anything *new* in Director for quite some time now (much to my personal dismay...since I was the primary developer on all of our stuff and now I'm playing catch-up to the Flash guy I hired). We may squeeze out a 3D game in 2010, but only because we have access to an existing game engine...I'm not sure I could really get behind the idea of creating something new from the ground up in Director at this point without *some* news from Adobe.

My big concern is that we have a major piece of technology that serves as one key component of our business. It's a game engine (not 3D). It was created in Director many moons ago - and updated for every single Director release. We're finally at a point where we need to lean on some AS3 functionality...and it's just not there. What to do? I've already rebuilt in Flash...so we are covered from a business angle...but man will it be sad to see such an investment slip away over delayed releases and silence from Adobe.

Like many of you (I suspect) I hope I get to keep using this tool - but Adobe is making it really tough for me to continue to promote and recommend Director / Shockwave (I should mention that I'm mostly Web focused). I know D12 is supposed to be in dev, so I do hold out a little hope, but until there is something a little more concrete on the table it may be time to shift the balance to favour other technologies. That said, I still count myself as a proud and invested Director developer - and while I will not go down with the ship, I will do a DeCaprian climb to the top of the stern and ride for a little while longer as the band plays on...

Best,

r o b