web 2.0,online collaboration,workflow collaboration

Sometimes I even amaze myself. Workflow Collaboration is the next new trend according to this survey. Quoted from Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst Young Survey

…global deals having to do with Web 2.0 and Social Media (Social Networking, Social Bookmarking), are up a whopping fourteen percent in the first half of 2007.

Another area of the United States thats seeing large investor interest is Southern California. There was US$59 million invested in 8 Web 2.0 /Social Media deals in Southern California.

According to the Dow Jones VentureOne and Ernst & Young LLP survey, Most of Web 2.0 / Social Media deals completed in the first half of 2007 focused on the so-called Enterprise 2.0 area-companies that use Web 2.0 technologies such as mashups and online collaboration to improve traditional business functions- while deals in China, Europe and Israel had a distinct consumer bent to them.

Get this, Southern California. Loving it. Online Collaboration to improve traditional business functions. Loving it. Right place, right timing.

Other notable trends the data showed include:

Despite seeing a flat first half, the U.S. still dominated the Web 2.0 market, accounting for 66% of all deals worldwide and 77% of venture financing.

The Bay Area was the busiest region in the U.S. with 25 deals accounting for US$91 million. New England, the New York metropolitan area and Southern California are on pace to set annual records for Web 2.0 deals and investments.

Life will be good in the next few years.

adobe robohelp,adobe captivate,adobe contribute,corporate authenticity,adobe 3q,microsoft silverlight,adobe flash player,h.264

Layoffs are good for stock prices… Couldn’t resist.

Quotes are from Adobe’s 3Q Profit Beats Predictions: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Adobe’s 3Q Profit Surges 117 Percent, Beating Expectations

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Adobe Systems Inc. third-quarter profit more than doubled, setting a record and beating Wall Street expectations as the company comes off its biggest-ever software launch.

Even analysts who’ve followed Adobe for years said third-quarter results were a pleasant surprise.

“This kind of high upside doesn’t happen too often with big-revenue companies,” said analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray & Co., who said much of the quarter’s success can be traced back to strong early sales of Creative Suite 3, which Adobe launched in April and includes updates to some of the company’s most popular programs, such as Photoshop and Illustrator.

“CS3 is a game-changing product,” Munster said.

CS3 is a killer method of tailoring Adobe’s flagship products to consumers, while bundling the less-compelling products in as a ‘fire for effect’ strategy to saturate the market.

If you’re not part of the bundled software, however, I get the feeling that your product is really left out in the cold to fend for itself. That would be the much-rumored ‘tiering’ method of product management.

Higher tier, higher profit products make the grade, and the lower tiers are… hanging on. It’s smart business to cut away the dead wood, which is what made the dysfunctional accounting for RoboHelp so compelling earlier this month.

Last month, Adobe introduced a beta update to its Flash Player 9, which includes support for the H.264 video standard used in Blu-ray and HD DVD high-definition DVDs and other satellite and cable TV set-top boxes. At the time, Adobe anticipated the final version of the update would be available in the fall.

This introduction was definitely strategic, placed right before the much-hyped Microsoft Silverlight release.

Walter Pritchard, an analyst at Cowen and Company LLC, said Adobe’s biggest challenge is staying ahead of competing products from Microsoft Corp. and of open-source software that rivals Adobe mainstays such as Flash.

We were talking about this last month, and even back in July examining where Captivate will be in a few years when Flash has more competition. As discussed, Silverlight is going to be very competitive, and even DivX has a killer HD format, according to the Wings and Beer update.

To maintain its stock price, Pritchard said, the company must maintain scorching growth rates as the product launch tapers off.

“After May 2008, they run into tougher comparisons,” Pritchard said. “The biggest challenge is then being able to continue this kind of momentum and not have investors think it has peaked.”

There’s going to be a lot of pressure on all divisions at Adobe to perform. This will be interesting to watch.

If stock prices start slipping, where are they going to make their cuts? I am predicting that it’s now or never for RoboHelp; if they don’t perform by mid-2008, resources could be pulled off for other products that make a higher profit.

Analysis - Lower Tiered Adobe Products

RoboHelp isn’t a wide market standard like Acrobat or MSFT Word however it does have a valued niche and market dominance. Even Adobe Contribute, what I’m writing this with, is bundled in the Web Premium and Web Standard bundles.

So the Help Authoring pie which has smaller pieces (not a growth market) has even smaller ones if RoboHelp’s developers aren’t compelling enough with their release to convince anyone to upgrade or… switch away from the competing products.

Will it make the grade? As long as people buy it. Will they buy it? If they already use it. But new markets are going to face a tough sell with the tech support focus MadCap’s taking. I remember having potential partners and clients doing pre-sales support calls just to see whether we knew what was up with the software or not.

RoboHelp right now is not convincing me that while Vivek and others insist they’re the market leader, they’re really not able to back that statement up. Some of the market intel on RH7 doesn’t show anything (revealed so far) forthcoming but features that the competition already has.

Well, at least what data I’m publishing right now. There are some tricks to RH7, we’ll see what makes the cut.

On the other hand…

eLearning focused products like Adobe Captivate have a great area to develop that is only growing in size. Schools from grade school on up are focusing on game-based learning, and Flash, even with competition, is formidable. Look at the adoption of Dance Dance Revolution in Physical Education, and more game-based learning a/k/a ‘Serious Games’ were a large focus at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco.

The past five years have been good to RoboDemo / Captivate, and it’s a wise decision to pair Contribute, an entry level Web 2.0 engine with the eLearning heavy Captivate. The Flash Player update will give Captivate some much needed content repurposing legs. And there are plenty of other smaller products that can enhance this eLearning to make it really shine.

technical support,technical writing,technical communication,madcap software,adobe robohelp,high tech awards

Future Customer Support Tactics

The trend seems clear that MadCap is going towards the Tech Support angle for their business model. It’s an interesting angle of attack for smaller companies to chip away at the market dominance of large public corporations by using a cost center to do so.

Quoted from MadCap Software Selected as Finalist in 14th Annual AeA High Tech Awards: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

…said Kevin Carroll, executive director, AeA San Diego Council. “Not only has MadCap built a top-flight engineering team to deliver ground-breaking advances in content authoring software; it also has bucked the outsourcing trend and instead established a local technical support team to provide the superior service that fosters customer adoption and loyalty."

The question is, will this create a better user experience, and therefore, a better product? MadCap’s CEO thinks so:

“We’ve made it our mission to deliver the ultimate customer experience through next-generation content solutions and a locally based, highly experienced support team that understands our users’ needs. It is a great honor to be recognized as a 2007 AeA High Tech Award finalist for our success in delivering on that goal,” said Anthony Olivier, MadCap CEO.

In my previous article, I’ve been posting about what feeds this situation. Well crafted communication cuts down on direct support calls, yet there are methods that creative technical support engineers can use to multipy their efforts.

Sarah said it best in her Information Age article, and I really could not improve on her concept in my quote of her:

I think it’s helpful to look at communication dimensions:

• Traditional technical writing is one-to-many. One person/team writes, many people consume it.
• Wikis are many-to-many. Many people write; many people use the information.
• Mailing lists are many-to-one. Many people respond to one persons’ question
• Technical support is one-to-one. One person calls; one person responds.

Technical support is the most expensive option; it’s also often the most relevant. Technical writing is more efficient (because the answer to the question is provided just once), but also less personal and therefore less relevant.

I think it could also be expressed as another hierarchy:

Technical Writing using Web 2.0

One to many, results returned allow focus on trouble spots.

Tech Support using Web 2.0 - one to many, many to many (peer)

This could be expressed as dedicated tech support within forums, independent tech projects seeking out troublespots, beta testing, etc.

It could also include a dynamic of the technical support reviewing the feedback from the Web 2.0 technical writing effort and problem solving ‘live’ updates to the documentation which are pushed out to the product.

Having docs updated live as a call reduction method for Tech Support as the product rolled out would be optimal. This was the concept of having both a server-based help file and ‘Airplane Help’ at eHelp during the X3 to X5 stage.

Tech Support moderated / monitored Peer Support

HATT, Adobe ACE users, MadCap Forums - many to many (peer).

I’m not sure what level of tech support involvement occurs with other companies outside of MadCap (I see them posting on the HATT regularly) but a lot of corporate policy forbids posting on user groups without specific necessity.

Here’s a Cluetrain real-world example of how positive this can be:

If you could hook up a meter to the forum and measure good will, the needle reading for Shuttle By United at take-off was way over on the negative side. Luggage was being lost (three times for one passenger). Passenger loading was chaotic. Customers were unhappy.

Then one United worker (one of those “owners” United’s ads talked about so much at the time) jumped in and simply started to help out. The response was remarkable. Here are a few examples:

“Good to see someone at United interested!” (etc etc etc 6 more example quotes)

This kind of conversation moved the meter all the way over to the positive side, just because one company guy took on the burden of talking with customers and trying to solve their problems. One guy.

Can providing better service actually win customers over?

It’s too early to tell, however the tactical advantage lies immediately with the larger company holding more resources; if they have an unlimited budget it would be a simple thing to just start pouring money into the technical support division.

That’s where the public part of the public corporation comes into conflict with the strategic part. If a product is not seen as core content to the public corporation, resources are scarce. The effect on the working managers themselves is to husband those resources carefully, showing the best bang for the buck and becoming risk averse to new technology adoption.

In a nutshell, public companies have an inherent talent for carving their costs with Technical Support being the most popular area to reduce through outsourcing. This leads to Cluetrain-predicted results, as burned users vent online and even go unanswered in the corporation’s own forums.

Theory - Risk averse behavior leads to less innovation

This could show its face in features - take a risk on new features which are complex, and you’ll have to support them if they don’t work out just right. Keeping things simple and maintaining a status quo gives resource managers a mark of safety; risk too much and you could lose your job if the strategy fails.