The Joy of Flex

Sleep deprived, exhausted, exhilarated, and still a little bit in shock from the whirlwind of the last three days. Yes, that’s definitely the right state in which to write about what it feels like to be joining Adobe.

The most important thing to say is how great the Adobe people are. I have had the opportunity this week to talk to Adobe executives, developers, testers, evangelists, and lots of other Adobeans whose roles I didn’t even get to find out. I’m impressed with the optimism they universally express about Adobe as a company and about Adobe products. Everyone seems to be genuinely excited about where the company is going and how Buzzword is going to help get it there. Everyone is scary smart, and I’m humbled and more than a little nervous about living up to the expectations that people inside the company and outside will have on me and on the Buzzword team once we join Adobe when the deal closes.

(And yes, I’m well aware that right now it’s all love and kisses and roses and champagne and the honeymoon will end soon enough and all the warts will appear and I won’t feel quite so blown away any more. But that’s for later.)

My conversations with Adobe folks this week have helped me see what some of the challenges facing us are going to be.

Continuing to innovate in the face of corporate priorities. We got where we are now in part by putting a good chunk of our time and energy into innovation, particularly in our user interface and functional design. Yes, we had to do the basics of word processing like bullets and numbered lists, tab stops, bold, italic, etc. But we were also able to spend a lot of time thinking about tiny details, like how to make a vertical scroll bar better. I knew then that that was an enormous luxury, and I feel it all the more strongly now. Don’t get me wrong: the corporate priorities like AIR (particularly offline) and PDF support are themselves going to be great opportunities for more innovation, and they’re going to be wicked fun to build. But what I see as the biggest challenge for us is to be creative about marshaling resources across Adobe to help us do the stuff we have to do while continuing to push our vision forward.

Keeping our sails to the wind. We have been releasing new versions of the product on approximately a six week cycle since the spring. Can we keep up the pace as we run the logistical gauntlet of moving our offices from Waltham to Newton? Not to mention dealing with the inevitable paperwork of joining a big company, learning a new commute, and getting to know a bunch of new coworkers? This stuff might sound small, but it adds up and it’s a good part of why changing jobs is stressful. As great as it is to be joining Adobe, this stuff is going to wear us down for a while.

Learning to live with friendly coopetition. When we join Adobe, will Buzzword’s text layout engine become the fifth totally separate layout engine codebase at Adobe? The sixth? The tenth? I can think of a lot of other layout engines Adobe has already got, mostly implemented in C++ I assume. There’s one in InDesign, there’s one in the Player, there’s one (or more?) in Acrobat, and there’s probably a bunch more I don’t know about. Ours is implemented in ActionScript 3, which is suited for our purposes. There’s another one coming in Flash Player 10 (“Astro”) which will do some things that ours might not do, like snaking columns, but which might not do other stuff that we already do today. I suppose in a perfect world you could imagine our layout engine simply going away, with everything we need on the layout front coming from the player, but I don’t expect it’ll play out that way. Even if it did, our layout engine is a relatively small (though critically important) part of what Buzzword does.

Living up to expectations. Some of the press has been trying to play the acquisition story as if Adobe is jumping into the ring to compete with Microsoft Word. (This Reuters article is a relatively neutral example — there are more strongly worded ones.) I don’t think either Virtual Ubiquity or Adobe is saying that we’re going up against Microsoft. The message we’re trying to get across is really more about Buzzword as a disruptive technology that we know is considerably less capable than the established ones. Right now we’re a back-hoe lifting five hundred pounds, not a steam shovel lifting a ton. We don’t have revision tracking, or mail merge, or offline support, or any of a dozen other major features that any mature word processor has. But when the press portrays us as a Word killer, it creates expectations that are downright silly. All the same, I better get back to work on that offline support tomorrow…

Do these challenges sound daunting? I’m not daunted. I’m incredibly excited. It was a wild ride getting here. Another wilder ride is coming.

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