The world of work undergoing huge changes

Snap, I just did a post about Adobes offering as well.

Totally agree that work is undergoing big changes. For some it’s bigger than others. The more offerings like this from Adobe that come out the more it will change. Adobe have done a very nice job with a very slick product.

i hope they have solved the problem of speed and usability on the avaerge pc and not the latest quadcore monsters.

Acrobat pro is a very cranky program which would need a step change in improvement to stand a chance agains Office

i hope they have solved the problem of speed and usability on the avaerge pc and not the latest quadcore monsters.

Acrobat pro is a very cranky program which would need a step change in improvement to stand a chance agains Office

Adobe is stepping up to the plate. I hope they can hit a homerun!

My big problem with networking is having to update several (okay, all of them) networking services. How many of these services can you keep up with when the information is redundant? Ultimately, I hope the market comes down to 3 or 4 different networking providers OR find a way to link accounts at Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. Or everyone I know is going to have to migrate to one networking system (damn it!).

Sorry to go off-topic. It’s just taking a lot of my time to stay “connected” with all of these competing services.

My big problem with networking is having to update several (okay, all of them) networking services. How many of these services can you keep up with when the information is redundant? Ultimately, I hope the market comes down to 3 or 4 different networking providers OR find a way to link accounts at Twitter, LinkedIn, Pownce, Facebook, FriendFeed, etc. Or everyone I know is going to have to migrate to one networking system (damn it!).

Sorry to go off-topic. It’s just taking a lot of my time to stay “connected” with all of these competing services.

Not another “Office is dead” post, groan. Stop channeling Steve Gillbore. And you are living in a dream world…geesh, visit the great fly-over rest-of-the-country, sometime.

Word Processor that costs hundreds of dollars and isn’t collaborative.

The FILES are “collaborative”…including PDFs, but most things still get PRINTED, gasp, the scourge, the horror.

presentation program that can’t deal with photos from Flickr

People give Powerpoints, Project charts and other such handouts all day, that don’t link to anything. What’s Flickr’s marketshare even compared to something like Photobucket? Oh right, minuscule. This one’s really out of deep deep Valleyish left-field.

They won’t handle a sales database that doesn’t run in the Web browser.

Oh letsee, complex ‘big iron’ queries handled via markup, and you are mistaking “displayed” for “run”. And a good deal of Fortune 1000 info is already “online” per se, remote sessions via Secure ID. Guess if a small biz or indy contractor you could just Salesforce, but you are sacrificing a good deal.

Real-time web services

Maybe a few suckers, latch onto the latest social-networking crazes, but it’s usually the network-marketing scum, you’d be best to stay away from anyways. Anyone that has a sales “relationship” via Web 2.0 tools, is a fool. Web 2.0 hasn’t made decent coin for pretty much anyone, investors are starting to catch on, the fall-out will start soon enough.

And for every Blackberry and iPhone, there are hundreds to thousands of regular “boring” phones, and I see Palm and Windows Mobile phones far far more than Blackberries or iPhones. The straight PDA is a dying breed however. The ‘smartphone’ has allowed many to ditch the laptops, if anything its gone less technology, and more voice. Just the cell-provider nationwide footprints have allowed people the ability to be national.

Specific to Adobe, they really will need a serious change-over to compete with the likes of Office, quite the clunker of a program, plus it’s sorta pointless anyways, the market has long since decided that Microsoft Office is the standard, insuring the “collaborative” nature. Just like it’s sorta pointless for Microsoft to take on Flash or to do a PDF copycat, the market wins out, and once won, it’s really hard to budge, takes miracles, really.

@Christopher

That was refreshing to read, you make some very good points.

And yet like most sites nowadays, you don’t link to the actual adobe site, just to buddies or your own stuff, you have to actually go to techmeme to find their announcement, unless you just want to go on what all these other slackjaws opinions are on it.

So, I better get them on the show, hunh?

yeah, but do it on their system

yeah, but do it on their system

I have seen huge resistance to use Google Docs from all but the most tech experimental people. It will be extremely difficult to get mom off MS word.

Christopher Coulter: I really appreciate reading your comments on Scoble’s posts.

I loved Christopher Coulter comments. Pretty much spot on with my thinking.

It’s also been a new record for the “Killer” headline to emerge. It took ZDNet this time to win the “Adobe Office Killer” headline, there’s always one in the crowd and good ol ZDNet came through (I won the bet).

-
Scott Barnes
Product Manager
Microsoft.

lets hope adobe brings us something good as always and cheers to all

webreview.co.cc / webreview Inc,

I wonder if Adobe will have a serious impact on this transition. I use Google Docs because it’s easy. I’m on Google all of the time for my e-mail, RSS feeds, etc. I only visit Adobe’s site when I have to download something. I can just click a link in my Gmail to open a file in Google Docs.

Chris & Friends: What kinds of companies do you work for, where most things are still printed? That’s economically and environmentally incompetent, and for the most part, useless. You still hand out PowerPoint presos? That’s what email is for. I would agree that much more collaboration is done today emailing MS Office files back and forth–at my company too–than using real collaborative tools, but as Scoble has been saying a lot lately, he’s talking to early adopters. I look forward to the day when we can leverage some of these tools in the real business world (where security is a BIG deal). But I agree with an earlier poster or two–with 50 billion options out there, no company is going to bet on a single player today, except for maybe MS. And that’s unfortunate, because I would love to see the world move into its post-MS love-hate affair. I am excited to try Adobe’s new tools though. It would be great to see them enter the office/collaboration space. Adobe is one company that might make a formidable challenger to MS, in the business world where they already have a foot in the door, unlike most of the start ups.

Christopher Coulter’s comment is exhibit A in “Dinosaur Thinking”. Take a good look, that’s how to make sure your career dead-ends and you become obsolete. He’ll be doing the equivalent of flipping burgers in a few years, wondering what happened.

Yeah, the old fogies (“old” regardless of age) aren’t going to get this stuff. But software that works over the ‘Net (and is still, hopefully, useful even when disconnected, though that should become increasingly uncommon), that’s how the smart people work NOW.

Non-technical people use what their technical relatives set up for them. They didn’t do a careful analysis of MS Word vs. competitors or simpler tools, they used what a nephew set up once, and will change when the nephew reformats their computer or switches them to Mac. If they’re given networked tools, at least they don’t have to make regular backups and won’t be sending 3MB photos and documents through email, just links.

It’s the dinosaurs, people who had a hard time learning “computers” the first time and are by damn not going to learn anything new, who’ll drag their heels until they’re replaced. 20 years ago, when jobs lasted more than a couple years, that would’ve been a problem, a real drag on the economy. Now, they’re just going to be replaced with current technical people.

You want the power of social networking? My last 3 jobs have come from LinkedIn, and I’m constantly getting new offers from it. The traditional job search is obsolete. You ARE your network of previous jobs, and that’s now visible.

I haven’t had time to play with Acrobat yet, but Google Apps is the common “desktop”/file store/application suite for everyone at the last couple jobs, and for several other projects I’m doing.

The login/marketing site is a good way to tie all these components back to the Acrobat brand. All of the on-demand document collaboration tools point to a broken method: track changes and email don’t provide an optimal solution for fast document collaboration.

hi, or ask me how I came up here.
I tried by “disqus” on google not know why you came.
Oh I saw something that interested me, I’m curious too, do a blog and I am moving and seeing what that has to blogger news, tools, clear laem to read the text also, however, I wanted to know how you do it pra friend add the feed to the blog?

Sorry, I’m Brazilian and an online translator to translate Portuguese to English.

I thought it was cool the way it was in flash, pretty easy to use, and it made a kind of room where you could share what’s on your desktop and in theory, edit pictures/documents with other people. But, then I got stuck, and all my desktop stuff made this huge hall of mirrors. I then kept somehow reaching for the arrow keys and looking for an avatar to move around because it was looking spatial.

I still think Second Life is a better way to do this sort of thing although of course documents don’t work as well in there.

Counterpoint…

Will a Doctorate Chemist become “obsolete” just because he’s not an IT expert? Will the Heart Surgeon, too busy to install his own software, become this dinosaur? Will the Structural Engineer return to the Mesozoic just because he does his blueprints on paper, offline at that? Will a Metallurgist, find himself looking for a new job, just because he’s not a Network Engineer? Will a Dentist, return to the Stone Age, because he keeps his files on paper, and does his advertising/networking by local word-of-mouth? Will a CEO, deftly commanding a company of 150,000, be canned, just because he’s not “technical” enough? Will the Kindergarten teacher find her (or himself) on the unemployment line, because they aren’t up on all the latest software? No, it’s all a commodity, farmed out, IT becomes mere support, hardly core, the technical is easily delegated away.

Software that meets the needs of said person/company is all that matters, being “online” is just a distribution method, not a revolution. It’s been nearly 20 years of ‘network is the computer’ hype, hope springs eternal, but read Bob Seidensticker’s book, for a reality check.

Non-technical people use what their COMPANIES set up for them, and what everyone else around them is using and what comes pre-installed from the OEMs, the usual “technical dweeb” would rather set-up WordPerfect, OpenOffice or something similar, never “evil” Microsoft.

Face to face, person to person, phone to phone, friend to friend, alumni to alumni, always beats Linked-In networking spam, everyone on that site is out for something. Sure the job search process has evolved, gone half electronic, but rather than replace, a mere enhancement, resumes still work in most fields.

hmmmm.. Most of the annoying cell phone users I see on airplanes crack open their phone to tell mom/dad/spouse they’ve landed. Which makes me wonder how these people managed to travel before they had cell phones. Nothing is THAT important that you can’t wait until you get off the plane. You type of people are annoying. What makes them think we want to hear their calls?