Preran, thank you for posting your response to the myriad of comments being thrown into this and many other discussions. Whilst we appreciate that you have been a web designer with a small business, you are comfortably sitting in an ivory tower, being currently employed by Adobe. You are therefore not feeling the enormous financial and operational weight that this decision has put on active service providers, Muse merchants and other business people who rely on this product to run their businesses or service their clients (their livelihood), but one day too, should Adobe lose enough clients through decisions like this that they have to downsize, you might understand what we are all experiencing right now. I have below summised the tone of the responses of this thread in relation to your postās topics so that you can tell the management of Adobe just why they need to rectify this situation immediately, as I for one would rather Adobe be able to repair relations with it's customers than lose them.
The Audience
The FAQ and your vanilla responses do not address the usersā concerns - this decision is a bad decision and one that Adobe might not feel the effects of for years to come, but they will feel it. Whilst many other products over a 30+ year history have previously received this treatment and their loss would have been felt by those using them, I donāt think they would be felt as badly as those losing Muse as it will undoubtedly also be felt by the clients and the clients of clients. There is an exponential effect here that could be likened to an avalanche ā¦ once a section of snow moves, it encourages the neighbouring snow to move ā¦ and we know how that turns out.
Adobe has not considered that it has just ticked off a large community of (Muse) Web Developers, each with a voice ā¦ all developing websites for themselves and other people (say on average 4 per Muser) who all get affected by this decision ā¦ and suppose all those websites put a notification on their website today stating the facts surrounding why their website might not function in a yearās time. Each website has a newsletter that also goes out to their 10,000 or more strong database ā¦ that tells their constituents this same news ā¦ then all of a sudden, the feelings that are currently contained in this forum reach an undetermined number of people (current or potential customers of Adobe). Adobe is in marketing too - they know that emotion drives sales, so why do they not recognise that with their decisions, they run the risk that emotion can damage sales also?
Alternate Options
Designers may not be coders ā¦ but coders by nature are not always able to design, so they go hand in hand and Muse brought them closer together. Please do not insult our intelligence by trying to placate us with feeble options that donāt meet our needs - we choose the products that meet our needs which was why we chose Adobe Muse. As for Spark - why develop another platform rather than developing an existing system that can give the users the best of both? Sounds to me like there was no logical decision making when they dropped one baby for another. Mind you, we have all been part of the āvillageā that was raising that baby and we have not even been consulted about how the babies could be nurtured as one. A Weebly or Wix type solution is not what we as web designers want as it doesnāt meet our needs, but if components of that was mixed with the power of Muse, it could be an awesome, unstoppable product. Developing just another autowebsite product is not a smart way to do business or be at the leading edge - it is just sweeping up the breadcrumbs (opening the gate after the horse has bolted, so to speak). They need to also do proper and focused market research to determine new products and upgrades, not just rely on "trends" alone - they have a huge focus group here in their customer base that they haven't utilised and this is why they will not satisfy us with their alternatives.
Sentiment
As for sharing the sentiment with the team, you need to tell them it is not sentiment that will drive users away from using Adobe. Adobe might come to realise that they made a fundamental mistake with their model by packaging all the creative apps into one subscription. People under that subscription were more likely to take up using the other products because they are paying for them already, but now, more likely to move away when their overall needs are not met because one tool was taken away. When you remove a product (particularly one of this magnitude), you run more risk of upsetting your customer and losing them forever. A businessā brand is at stake with every decision and announcement it makes to the world ā¦ and this decision has been broadcast to the world already. With this type of backlash already from users who have been with Adobe from inception, they should be rethinking this decision and implementing some damage control rather than being dismissive of their customersā pain.
Additional training and cost to move to another software or solution
Does Adobe realise just how many websites around the globe will need to be migrated and business owners trained in the new solution? The loss as an on flow of this decision and the cost to the business community is worth more than Adobe could ever compensate for. These businesses have already invested a tonne of money either to train themselves and their staff to use the product ā¦ or as a client, to get a web presence built. To announce to businesses that the work they have been doing/paying for over the past two years will now have to be redone is just not how an upstanding organisation should play the game. Everyone is now under pressure to find ways to do this ā¦ and it will be a long handed undertaking, so a year (max) to get it done is no comfort ā¦ particularly as operating software and web architecture is constantly changing day by day, so our sites could be broken tomorrow or in a month from now when the landscape of the internet changes.
Purchase and discount
This should have been titled āPurchase, discount, refund, cessation of subscription, loss of long time users, lack of future referralsā ... have Adobe really considered the on flow of this decision?
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