Re: Competing with Word

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 02:12 PM 3/16/99 +1100, Michael Richards wrote:
>> Hedley_S_Finger@allegiance.com.au wrote lots of stuff:

><snip snip snip>

>2) Deliberately not documenting the interesting bits of the user interface
so the
>the Graphics Arts Community (always at the time referred to in hushed capitals)
>could discover these and pass them around as esoteric guru-disciple fodder.
>
>These worked. Illustrator came earlier and so didn't need this cachet, these
>frisson-inducing hidden secrets.
>
>Many of the people with Adobe at the time are no longer there (I suspect).
>
>E'en now, you would be shocked how much is still in Photoshop that you never
>suspected was there! Trust me.
===================================================================
So, we can conclude from the above that Adobe's documentation strategy is
one or more of the following:

1. Lousy documentation is a feature that promotes the formation of secret
cabalas led by semi-literate gurus who pass on their knowledge to the
ever-growing flood of the uninitiated.

2. Thick books scare the semi-literate, hence thin books are always better,
no matter how much is left out.

3. It was a feeble effort by Adobe to explain away its lousy documentation,
creating an exodus of Adobe employees who couldn't stomach the idea of
propagating it. 
==================================================================
>And now, the good news (this is where Frame comes in, folks!):
>
>We old Photoshop hands remember the terrible time when Photoshop migrated to
>version 2.5. This, although numbered as if a minor upgrade, was actually a
>complete rewrite in C++ (or whatever) to allow for cross-platform
compatibility.
>It was a bug-ridden disaster of the first magnitude. The fixes came thick and
>fast and good old Photoshop is now pretty stable -- especially in comparison to
>one of the older versions.
>
>The Moral? Well, I surmise that Adobe have been mucking around with the Frame
>code, which is why we've all had to suffer. They may even have done a major
>rewrite a la Photoshop 2.5 (which as I remember didn't look much different from
>its immediate predecessor). But, Yeah, Verily, all will come right in version
>6.0.1.
==================================================================
On the one hand, it's comforting to know that Adobe is an equal-opportunity
code botcher-upper. But, on the other hand, suppose it's just an extension
of Adobe's documentation strategy. Namely:

Every once in a while, order your programmers to rewrite the code, which
inevitably results in a bug-ridden point release. This produces several
fortuitous (for Adobe) results:

1. Increased demand for the next major release.

2. Reduced expectations for the the next major release (i.e., people will be
happy if Adobe just gets the bugs out), reducing the pressure for needed new
features, and improvement of existing features.

3. It keeps the programmers occupied.
     ____________________
     | Nullius in Verba |
     ********************
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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