Reply To: Should we start an Adobe Customers pressure group?

My take is that Adobe has become the new Quark – arrogant and deaf to its customers.

All of their development goes into “sexy” tools that, as Euguene said, sound exciting to non-professionals. I was told, bluntly, by an Adobe product manager that they decide which features to include based primarily on how it will impact their stock price. Footnotes, kerning pairs, widow/orphan control, and other typographic features are never going to appeal to non-professionals or impact the stock price. If they won’t even recognize the value of such basic productivity tools as graphing tools, they’re not going to care about typography.

It appears to me that Adobe sees InDesign as a “been there, done that” product. They are bored with it, and now are more interested in trying to find ways to use it on a watch than for making useful improvements.

It’s sad to think that Adobe started out as a typography company. But now, they have as much in common with a type foundry as Amazon does with a bookstore. I would love to find some way to communicate this to them and try to get them to re-focus their priorities on the users, and let them know how many of us feel abandoned by them.