san diego,outsourcing,layoffs,la jolla,madcap flare,madcap feedback,madcap software,adobe robohelp,technical communication,technical writing,help authoring tools,hatt

MadCap Has Arrived: Blue Sky Ahead

This December 7th I had the opportunity to tour the new MadCap Software spaces located at 7777 Fay Avenue in downtown La Jolla.

Everybody loves La Jolla

With a great rock wall a few blocks down, my favorite secret snorkeling spot by the Cave House 3/4 of a mile away, and top surf within two miles all up and down the coast, most of the prior eHelp’ers I know are out taking advantage of the site location during their breaks or after work. Not to mention lunching at Sushi on the Rocks or fifty other four star spots.

Oh, and the La Jolla eye candy views and scenery is outstanding.

New Topic: Hey, check out the killer entry desk! Better even than at eHelp.

There’s an inside story on this furniture that’s pretty cool, but I’ll save that for another time.

Corporate Hat Trick: Happy employees, better furniture, bigger space

After getting a tour of the spaces I can honestly say that they have higher morale (if that were possible), plenty of room to grow, it didn’t break the bank, and great data connectivity. All are critical to a new company.

Moved yet actually saves money? Never play poker with Anthony O.

Rumor has it with everything acquired accounted for that the bottom line may actually have been affected POSITIVELY in this move. As I opined earlier, savvy timing by the big Three at MadCap might well have become their secret weapon.

Only Anthony (former eHelp CEO) Olivier could pull off making a dime into a quarter. I have to say I was impressed with his approach five years ago, the new office is a major coup.

That being said, it’s probably time for another San Diego Union-Tribune article on why that happened. I’m sure I couldn’t make it sound cool enough.

I was able to discuss a few things with some of the staff, both on the record and off the record.

PS: Don’t hold anything in my story against this guy, I don’t even know his name. He didn’t tell me anything. It’s just the only really decent pingpong table shot. Honest.

Well, here’s another pingpong shot of one of the Tech Support gurus. From outside the fishbowl glass. I didn’t ask him any questions either.

PS: Var, (MadCap’s Director of Technical Support) this pic was taken at lunchtime!

Adobe Lays Off Staff As MadCap Expands - Merry Christmas?!?

The big story of the day I visited MadCap I hadn’t heard until I arrived.

The San Diego Union-Tribune had just reported that Adobe was going to lay off an undetermined amount from their San Diego facility, obviously less than the last fifty employees.Talking with the MadCap staff about this new development was interesting.

Truly Bittersweet for the MadCap crew

Of course there was the professional rivalry and excitement about a competitor shedding employees, however to a person everyone I asked about it mentioned at one time or another that they were concerned about their friends who still worked there, and asked me if I knew if anyone we knew in common who was affected.

I was impressed about how they view their former eHelp’ers even as they compete with them. Everyone I spoke to was unanimous in expressing their concern for their friends and former colleagues so close to the holiday season having to now start looking for jobs.

Former eHelp’ers Scrooged

Raw Data from San Diego Union-Tribune, December 6 2007:

My thoughts:

That’s like… a reverse end of the year bonus? Of course I haven’t found out who was affected yet but ouch…

Dude, what heartless Grinch does that after an acclaimed 3rd quarter?!?

Writing’s on the wall when you have to attend midnight conference calls because the entire dev team for your product is based in Bangalore.

With gallows humor I jokingly predicted it back when the 3rd Quarter ADBE results were announced. From my analysis earlier this year:

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.

Well, I don’t know who was involved in this layoff cycle, but I do know that layoffs are great for the bottom line and Microsoft’s not releasing another Vista next year.

Even though they beat expectations by 21% a week after these layoffs, ADBE’s share price still fell. Had I been trading I would have sold the stock short and made money.

Maybe the SD office is the miner’s canary of the stock price at ADBE… Need more revenue just hatchet some more San Diegans.

This doesn’t mean that Adobe will lose money this upcoming quarter but they are tightening the belt for the next year. I’m not the only analyst (and certainly not a professional) who feels it’s going to be hard for ADBE.

So my opinion about selling ADBE short is starting to look verifiable. They can’t sustain those 3rd quarter results short of cutting back tremendously.

On the other side, cutting their RoboHelp brain trust and subject matter experts down to zero gives them little internal resources to fight off MadCap and other competitors. Maybe it is easy to be publishing software people will buy when you’re that big. Maybe innovation is really something that isn’t so critical, as long as you can copy the true innovators and out-market them.

Q: Where will Adobe’s innovation come from for their future RoboHelp / Tech Comm Suite product line?

Personally, I think this goes back to (my opinion) the unconcious Adobe strategy to offshore all assets. Eventually everyone not performing 80 hour workweeks will lose their jobs in San Diego in favor of India based talent.

Hopefully for those RoboHelp users still left, their product will continue well without a brain trust. It has for the last cycle. Not particularly impressed with the features in the RoboHelp Server 7, however it did get a mention in the podcast RJ did earlier this month.

I wish the old eHelp’ers at Adobe well, especially in not getting laid off just before Christmas.

Back to the MadCap visit

With all that said… prepare for the podcast series coming soon. Mike Hamilton gave me forty-five minutes of time and I’m still doing the editing.

Some of the podcast highlights, in no specific order:

MadCap vs Word: Is MadCap competing with Microsoft?

Blaze. Bigger than…?

MadCap’s User Community: What did you put into their food?

DITA.

Wikis in Corporations - (my viewpoint is well known).

Web 2.0 in Technical Communication.

History of 7777 Fay Avenue, the “new” (?) MadCap location.

Roadmap of what’s ahead.

More on workflow concepts & how they figure into product design.

How MadCap’s design process specifically supports their innovation (!!!)

And Mike H. puts on record MadCap’s goal of supporting Microsoft releases (such as Vista):

“Support the (Microsoft) product within thirty days of (its) release.”

“…if there’s a planned full version release it will be included in that release, otherwise existing users get a point release to support the new Microsoft version (…of Word, Vista, even Internet Explorer).”

Adobe can try to match that competitive advantage, but I doubt they will be able to withall the brains either getting canned or worrying about getting canned.

RJ Jacquez just keeps on rolling though. I’m going to start calling that guy Teflon; nothing sticks to him.

Good on ya, RJ. Glad your neck wasn’t on the block this time. According to my interview with Mike Hamilton, you and RoboHelp may have immunity from being voted off the island for quite some time.

I’m going to have to make a dinner bet with Mike about RoboHelp though. However, he’s the expert.

california,real estate

Luckily, this doesn’t impact the 21st Century Farm Project too much since we were appraised as a commercial property and only had a 5% appreciation value considered rather than the residential appreciation at 20% per year.

It does explain why Anthony Olivier may have printed his own currency when MadCap Software moved recently. It’s rumored that the savvy timing netted MadCap more than just a bigger space.

Quoted from California Real Estate Market Outlook Worse in 2008:

“We’re in a major slump here,” said Jas Deepak, a real estate agent with Help-U-Sell Affordable Homes. “It seems like it’s a freefall in this market.”

Deepak estimated that prices in the Fairfield area have fallen 10 to 15 percent from 2006, and last week only 10 homes were sold out of 1,300 on the market. Last October, about 30 homes were selling each week. Deepak is the agent for a nearly 1,500-square-foot ranch home on the desirable west side of Fairfield for $369,000. Four months ago, the property was listed for $415,000. If the price is reduced any more, it will be a “short sale” in which the seller must ask the lender to accept less money than what is owed.

adobe robohelp,corporate authenticity

I am not here to slam Adobe. I analyze based on raw data.

Adobe is doing the best they can with a product which was, according to the best information I could dig, killed by Macromedia.

After RoboHelp was resurrected, RJ Jacquez, former eHelper and former was brought back to chivvy it along into the hands of consumers. I was disappointed by what he and others had told me to expect with the RH6 release and therefore I started investigating what was up with their claims.

Then Adobe laid off its knowledge resources in mid-2007.

Then I couldn’t find any RoboHelp data in their SEC filings…

So that’s the raw data and the point where I started looking closely at the product and trying to determine whether it would exist in a few years or be killed off.

Update: In my soon to be released podcast, Mike Hamilton, VP of Product Management for MadCap Software disagrees with me, and expects RoboHelp to be in business for quite some time.

I speak and spoke disparagingly about RoboHelp because I feel that Adobe has not been completely honest about what occurred with RoboHelp and some blatant untruths or serious inaccuracies were discovered with their story this past year. MonkeyPi’s blog had some of the largest discoveries on it and I began posting there after reading what was being claimed and debated.

Initially when MadCap was created I was of the opinion ‘Congratulations guys, good luck’. After all, even if they had a better product or ended up having a better product, it’s sort of like when married friends of your split up: inevitably you end up choosing a side to hang out with.

Very hard to pick sides when it’s just business, therefore I didn’t. Hey, Adobe’s got products I use every day, and MadCap, well it was another competitor with a cool product, but when my clients asked me which one was going to be around in three years… I honestly didn’t know.

We are all entitled to our own opinion, however we are not all entitled to our own facts.

However things changed in the beginning of 2007. I felt Adobe was not truthful to their market.  After I started this blog in April 2007 I decided to start posting about what was going on with RoboHelp 6 from my own analysis of the available data.

It is still a point of contention that most of the facts that were raised, such as refuting the claim that RH6 was redesigned when those features were actually already documented as existing prior to the MACR layoff were never truly answered.

I’m all for being on the record with Adobe, as long as we’re looking at facts and not at hearsay. Since I could not find a way to keep them on the record when dealing with Investor relations (no email provided, just a phone number, and no internal Adobe employees wished to provide me with a contact) my analysis has stood on its own.

I believe strongly in Corporate Authenticity, in particular as described by the Cluetrain Manifesto. I try to provide raw data for my opinions, and base my opinions on how a company reacts to honest discussion and/or criticism.

It is my opinion that Marketing cannot get so carried away with the official story and spin that clear mistruths are labeled as fact. The market won’t tolerate it, and as Cluetrain says, the market has a voice through the internet, and is connected.

With all that said… prepare for the podcast series coming soon. Mike Hamilton gave me forty-five minutes of time, and I’m still doing the editing.

By the way, here’s a preview of the Mike Hamilton interview: Mike states in the interview that a reliable and third party polling over the past three cycles has shown Flare adoption the first year at virtually zero, the next at 16%, and the next at 25%. I’ve yet to verify those numbers, but that climb would show an aggressive chop of the HAT market by Flare.

Adobe is more than welcome to answer my questions should they desire. They’ve been posted on the HATT and I’ve blogged them previously.Those are the first ones I would tackle

I’m just averse to spin. Being in this space for so long, if I sense spin I get more direct than that Fox News guy Bill Oreilly.

equities analysis,technical communication,adobe robohelp,madcap flare,San Diego

My Analysis Background

My main exposure to corporate analysis is informal and only from about ten years experience - four years in investigating property crimes and white collar crime in the late 1990s in New Mexico as a private investigator, one year working for Linsco/Private Ledger, a San Diego company which is the largest stateside independent broker-dealer and does its own in-house equities analysis. This is where I started studying for the series 7 brokerage license and my first paper trading portfolio earned 67% over nine months in 1999.

The other five years comes from direct exposure to the Help Authoring Tool field, specifically in working for two years within eHelp Corporation, and also testing competitor’s products partly within that time and also after I left eHelp. I’ve also made technical communication part of my portfolio of skills that I use to make a living.

I also had the opportunity in 2005 to work on a project with The Diffusion Group (TDG) , a direct market analysis company located in the Dallas / Fort Worth area. While TDG specializes in consumer electronics I was fortunate enough to be able to observe how market analysis is completed.

Ever wonder where Marketing gets those nifty projections and numbers from in your company? Companies like TDG provide them with it. It’s a hot field and falls into the Bleeding Edge, right past the Leading Edge of adoptable technology. They are the future-tellers, and accuracy is their game.

Bleeding Edge: Defined

As my old Novatel Wireless boss said once, you know what the bleeding edge is? It’s where you get cut up for going past the leading edge. That boss was Brad Weinert, back in 1999 when he was just a Product Manager / Tech Support department head. He’s now the CEO of Novatel Wireless and one of the most honest men I’ve worked for.

During the timespan from 1999 until the present (nine years) I’ve also maintained close ties within Blue Sky Software (BSS) until it became eHelp, then after eHelp was purchased by Macromedia, within Macromedia and Adobe. Some stayed with Adobe, some left.

This is what I called, in one post, the ‘beer and wings’ connection.

Summing up, it takes a bit of investigation, some good human intelligence, and the ability to read SEC filings to do your job right in analysis. I’m fortunate enough to have all of these plus good sources within the Technical Communication space.

I’ve been shadowing MadCap’s tech support online to check out how well Web 2.0 focused Tech Support works.

First, part one of my MadCap Feedback Server review actually has some of the Web 2.0 implementation within their own company. See the parts about eating their own dog food and unexpectedly, a bit of humor with the Internet Explorer title bar named appropriately for the holidays matching the pumpkin orange web color change in the Knowledge Base.

Also, check out Richard Ferrell’s forums post on the HATT listing feature requests right out there in the open for Flare. This is extremely confident and transparent. Excellent use of Web 2.0 along with Cluetrain principles.

I can’t keep up. MadCap Vice President and Help Authoring Guru Mike Hamilton trumps Richard Ferrell’s Tech Support posts on the HATT forums with his index / search hack for WebHelp generated from Flare.

For those of you not on the HATT, basically it’s a freebie hack given away contradicting the normal marketing viewpoint of not giving anything away for free. Particularly if it may compete with your own product.

Here’s my incredulous post in reply:

Dude. Way to trick the webhelp ranking system!
If anyone is wondering about the highwater mark for corporate
transparency online from a software vendor, this is it. This is a
killer hack for their product that enhances the searchability…

…posted by one of the executive staff right as they launch their
Feedback Server which is supposed to do the same thing.

Talk about calling the shot right out of the ballpark. Mike, you must
be pretty confident about how much BETTER than the recommended hack the
Flare output search works with the Feedback Server enabled.

A true example of Corporate Authenticity and high marks for your usage
of Web 2.0. Obviously it’s very Cluetrain of you also…
http://charlesjeter.com/category/corporate-authenticity/

Thanks. I’ve been working on a Tech Support employment of Web 2.0
tools. This will go down on your permanent record.

Quoted from Key Pointe: Information Architect, Content Strategist, Vancouver BC » Flare and AuthorIt:

Onto Flare and AuthorIt… They’re both pretty much the same in terms of feature sets, but AuthorIt imports multiple projects into one help project much more seamlessly. AuthorIt is good, solid, all there, but with Flare I get a sense of excitement: it’s easier to use, the product is evolving, the company is excited, their response times are great. AuthorIt’s customer service is good, too, but not as good as Madcap’s.

…But what put me over the edge towards Flare was the possibilities of what else can be done with a product that is great already and is only 2 years old, and the customer service.

Update 04/24/2008: MadCap Software wins 2008 ASP Online awards. See Web 2.0 Tech Support: Part 4 for the link.

Related Articles:

• Does Tech Support Count? Can Good Service Sell in the 21st Century?
• Web 2.0 Tech Support: Part 4
• Web 2.0 Tech Support: Part 3
• Web 2.0 Tech Support Usage On HATT Re: flare evaluation
• MadCap Software’s New Digs | More Adobe Layoffs
• Adobe and MadCap’s Cold War: Who’s the Superpower Today?
• Another Satisfied Adobe Customer…
• Company blogging 101