Will "answers" be obvious?

>Dov Isaacs - 3:26pm Mar 4, 09 PST (#21 of 70) Adobe Principal Scientist - PDF Publishing Workflow

>Adobe Technical Support is not supposed to refer callers to the User-to-User forum to fix or workaround bugs. User-to-User forum referral should only be for "how do I do" type questions where the caller indicates that they don't want to pay for the Technical Support call or if the "how do I do" question is beyond the scope of what Technical Support either knows or could look up in any of their "how to" scripts.

sorry to go off topic, hi mr. isaacs, i don't know if you're interested, but here's another example of a customer being told by customer support to get help from the forum rather than helping them themselves.

lena jang, "Adobe CS2 - installing issues - On Windows Vista" #8, 24 Mar 2009 4:11 pm

> So why are they wasting our time and theirs if they don't want the input from the people who actually CONTRIBUTE the most to the Forums.

Well, I suspect they were hoping for one or two comments from each user, not hundreds that claim the same thing, over and over again, as if volume will trump quality in answers. (That is not to say that any of the over-repeated comments are low in quality.)

> I don't think that a sentence ending in "perhaps?" can be called an accusation of any kind!

So John, are you still beating your wife, perhaps?

I'm not sure that it does lessen the impact of a slur.

> and those that labour in the back rooms may not be getting an entirely truthful or complete picture from their superiors who labour in the corner offices either.

that goes without saying... seems the higher up the ladder you go in a large corporation, the further detached from reality. maybe it has to do with everything looking all sun-shiny once your office is above the smog everyone else toils in...

(bitter? me? nah. ;) )

>we don't get all the info on what happens in the back rooms out here...

and those that labour in the back rooms may not be getting an entirely truthful or complete picture from their superiors who labour in the corner offices either.

>based on relatively unbiased facts.

and management "prodding"... :)

>I'm sure that if it could have been worked out, they would have found a way.

well yea, that's what i was saying. mgmt doesn't care about customers. they care about bottom line 30/70 at best.

but i don't for a second believe webx couldn't do it. maybe they got cocky and priced themselves out of a large account, or maybe like i said, someone had a "dog in the hunt" for jive. like chris said elsewhere, we don't get all the info on what happens in the back rooms out here...

I can appreciate your point, Dave. I sit with buyers for a company that manufactures medical electronic equipment, and I see how they have to fend off all manner of people that want to get their foot in the door. But my belief is that Adobe staff looked all the software packages available and made a reasonable decision based on relatively unbiased facts. The ongoing relationship with WebX was far more of a vested interest since the folks there became friends with John and staff over the years. That one is a big loss in a personal way to a lot of people. I'm sure that if it could have been worked out, they would have found a way.

I don't think that a sentence ending in "perhaps?" can be called an accusation of any kind! Certainly not wild.

>Does anyone here really think Adobe is going to change their plans based on comments from... how many, a hundred people out of over a half million?

So why are they wasting our time and theirs if they don't want the input from the people who actually CONTRIBUTE the most to the Forums.

Fly-by Posters probably don't care either way and there is no indication that they will fly-by again in the future regardless of how the Forums are configured.

Quite a lot of that multitude are probably not very valuable Adobe Customers because they never upgrade their software; and probably never BOUGHT it legally in the first place!

>Because someone at Adobe has a personal vested interest in Jive perhaps?

we've got something similar going on at my place. might not be a vested interest, might just be that someone from the outside came in and they used it before so that's what they're going to do now. actually we have EXACTLY the same thing going on where i work. they have a usable if aging product and rather than fix it, which would be much cheaper and much more robust, a suit from outside comes in and wants to start from the ground up with something they used elsewhere. guess what's going to take longer and cost more to implement correctly? and even then they'll lose half or more of the capabilities they have now.

the users are going to freak out and that "suit" will move on to another job, probably with a raise, while we're left to rebuild the scorched earth from the ashes. adobe is NOT alone in having too many business managers with grandiose, over-optimistic ideas. personally, i blame visicalc for inventing the spreadsheet. ;)

>Where the heck did that kind of wild speculation come from?

per my antecdote above, it's not so far fetched to those of us who work daily in corporate america.

>not one of use is required for Adobe's forums to operate

truth.

Does anyone here really think Adobe is going to change their plans based on comments from... how many, a hundred people out of over a half million?

Wasn't the number of forum members posted in another message... at something like 600 thousand?

Whatever we may think about our own importance to forum operations, not one of use is required for Adobe's forums to operate

If someone doesn't like the new forum and leaves... there will be someone else who will step forward to answer questions

Yes, some knowledge may be lost... but there is always someone else with knowledge to share

I hope the preview software is put on line soon, so we can all have something real to see instead of this constant speculation