Three entries in "Business"

Matt, Jason and I will be speaking at Smart/Models, a one-day AIGA/NY conference, on Saturday May 17th. In our presentation, Creativity and the Collective, we will be discussing the Athletics business model.

We will be joined by principals from four other unconventional organizations: Jason Fried from 37signals, Joe Duffy and Eric Block from Duffy & Partners, Sylvia Harris from Sylvia Harris, LLC, and Douglas Riccardi from Memo Productions.

For more details:
http://smartmodels.aigany.org

Many small, idiosyncratic organizations make an effort to remain shrouded in mystery in some myth-building effort. Large, publicly-held companies rarely do. But there is one major exception: Apple.

At Apple, nothing is revealed until the last moment possible. Then, once every six months, Steve Jobs strolls out on stage in front of a packed house and delivers a keynote speech revealing various new gadgets. Every time around the tech world is obsessed with what might happen, and then post-event, obsessed with discussions regarding whatever was actually revealed. It makes for fantastic punditry. (I do love that John Gruber.) All consumer electronics companies release new products, but Apple is the only one turning product launches into media events by refusing to discuss, or even hint at what lies ahead.

What I find staggering is how much effort Apple puts into secret-keeping. Apple products require massive numbers of humans — designers, software and hardware engineers, advertising partners, overseas manufacturing partners, documentation-writers, web designers, etc. So many humans and no one is leaking. iPhone, the most highly anticipated product of recent memory, didn’t leak. Clearly the entire company has been organized around this secret-keeping principle, and it’s an integral part of the Apple brand strategy.

I mention Apple because we are fascinated by specialness in brands, particularly the myth-building qualities. Apple’s secret-keeping is a perfect example.

Months ago we considered penning an article for the blog detailing the inner-workings of a functioning design collective, specifically the business model. After all, we are operating outside the bounds of a traditional corporate entity; it might be an interesting read. Ultimately, we decided, No, we don’t need to share such information, at least not on the blog. Once distilled down to words on a screen, it didn’t seem so interesting. If anyone really wanted to know, we figured they could get in touch and we could have a conversation.

Turns out this is exactly what happened. This past Thursday we were treated to lunch by our new friends Renda Morton, Andy Pressman and Holly Gressley. All three are talented designers and currently sharing studio space in Dumbo. They wanted to chat with us as they are considering forming a collective. They stopped by and we shared our thoughts on the subject.

The take-away here is less is more, and sometimes lunch.

If you’re doing commercial design work, you’re likely running Adobe software. If you don’t want to be left behind, you’re always upgrading to the latest gear. Even if you don’t care about new features, an entire industry is working against you: Apple keeps releasing machines and operating systems that ditch one thing for another (OS 9 for X, PowerPC for Intel), and the commercial design world is always graduating to whatever Adobe’s latest offering may be. It’s a never-ender.

The CS3 Experience

Last week I purchased Creative Suite 3 Production Premium. That’s a bunch of stuff. Being a model citizen is expensive: $1,841.00 with tax from Adobe.com.

During checkout I elected to download the massive 16GB package (the equivalent of ~24 CDs of data).

After completing transaction, I was ready to start downloading my 16 gigs immediately. Instead I received the following email confirmation:

You will receive an email within the next business day confirming the status of your order.

Really? One of the biggest software companies in the world can’t figure out how to automate my order? Fortunately, a human emailed me a few hours later providing me with my serial number and instructions for downloading. I navigated the complex Adobe html-flash-hybrid-web-world and started downloading.

Activation

Adobe introduced activation with CS2. Activation forces CS owners to verify the product’s serial number within 30 days. By verify, I mean Adobe collects identifying information about your computer (the physical computer, not you personally), which it sends, along with your Adobe serial number, to the Adobe activation database super-brain. With this data, the super-brain enforces the term’s of Adobe’s license agreement, which states that the product can only be installed on two machines.

Two machines – that’s it. If I want to install the software on another machine, I need to deactivate one of my other machines first.

Considering that it’s still not very difficult to acquire a cracked copy of CS3, Adobe’s strict enforcement of a strict software license is just sorta gross.

Trial software odyssey

A few months ago I had downloaded the Flash CS3 Trial to test it out. I was impressed, and it was definitely one of the reasons why I moved to CS3. The important point is that I still had the trial software installed on my machine.

While installing the full CS3 package, the installer detected that I already had Flash CS3 installed on the machine and informed me that, as a result, the installer would skip Flash. This seemed smart to me. I had already tweaked out the trial a bit, and I didn’t want to have to reconfig all my palettes and such.

The installation went smoothly, and after activating the software, I was back to work. I was pleased with Photoshop — much faster on my Intel-Mac than the non-universal CS1 I had been running.

Then I tried to open Flash…

Upon launching Flash, I was required to provide my serial number. Unfortunately, my serial number didn’t work. I discovered that my CS3 serial number is incompatible with the Flash CS3 Trial software. I googled around and confirmed that this was the case.

Next, I tried to uninstall the trial software using the uninstall tool provided with CS3. Amazingly, the uninstall tool was unable to uninstall the Flash CS3 Trial.

Getting frustrated, I started trashing anything Flash CS3 related — the application, preferences, anything I could find. Yet, over and over again the CS3 installer refused to install Flash because it kept detecting that it had been installed already.

I started Googling harder and began finding others with the same issue. Apparently, only the Flash CS3 Trial Uninstaller is capable of removing the trial software. I had to go back to the Adobe site and re-download the Flash CS3 Trial software (another 800 MB). I ran the trial’s installer to re-install the trial just so I could uninstall the trial. So ridiculous. This actually worked, and the CS3 installer finally gave me the green light to install Flash CS3 proper.

Unfortunately, I still couldn’t install Flash CS3. The installer would repeatedly stop responding while “repairing support files.” All I can figure is that something got corrupted with all the trial deletion/installation/uninstallation that was going on. Finally, I uninstalled CS3 in its entirety. Only then was I able to re-install everything, including Flash.

A massive waste of time.

Software is hard, DRM is harder

Globo-chem-level software is bound have issues — it’s spectacularly complicated. And all software is hard. From Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code:

Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts, and the greater our ambitions, the more spectacularly we seem to fail.

Yet, punishing experiences like mine are totally unnecessary, and when you’re paying big cash, unacceptable.

Most frustrating is that my trial-software-odyssey is likely due to the limitations of Adobe’s activation and serial-numbering system. If the software wasn’t rolled into a complex activation system, Adobe probably wouldn’t require different installations of the same software, or different types of serial numbers for blanket CS3 packages versus stand-alone products.

Adobe’s activation system is like other anti-piracy technologies — iTunes DRM, Microsoft’s Windows Genuine Advantage, etc. – in that it always finds a way to punish the paying consumers, while piracy always finds a way around it. I can’t recall a single anti-piracy scheme that actually made both vendor and customer happy. If software is hard, DRM is harder.

I’m happy to see DRM nonexistent at the new Amazon MP3 store, and slowly being phased out of iTunes. But, with regard to Adobe, there is minimal competition and minimal incentive for them to do anything differently. After Adobe’s 2005 acquisition of Macromedia, their only significant competitor is Apple with Final Cut and Aperture. If Adobe releases a junk installer, or chooses to enforce a strict software license through activation, few design professionals have the option of taking their business elsewhere.