1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:05,000 So here we are at Adobe Max. James and I are both here and I thought I'd take advantage to actually get some video with James. 2 00:00:05,000 --> 00:00:11,000 So, related to Adobe Max, one of the things you've been writing about a lot recently is sort of, to put it in my own phrasing, 3 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:13,000 making portals prettier and more usable. 4 00:00:13,000 --> 00:00:14,000 Sure. 5 00:00:14,000 --> 00:00:21,000 And, like, when did you start, did this start with the analyst thing, the Adobe analyst thing, where Deloitte was showing how they were making SAP better? 6 00:00:21,000 --> 00:00:29,000 No, not really. I mean, I think I've been thinking about this for a while, when I first started to have any dealings actually at all with Adobe. 7 00:00:29,000 --> 00:00:35,000 I mean, you know, at least from an enterprise perspective, they came out of this creative suite kind of world. 8 00:00:35,000 --> 00:00:40,000 And when I first started hearing about Flex, it seemed like there were some interesting things you could do with that 9 00:00:40,000 --> 00:00:46,000 that were not necessarily what you would expect, that were going to add some value to enterprise apps. 10 00:00:46,000 --> 00:00:52,000 And particularly, I think it was Adobe Max in Vegas two and a half years ago, there was a great presentation by T-Mobile 11 00:00:52,000 --> 00:00:57,000 that really set me thinking about the opportunity to rethink user experience. 12 00:00:57,000 --> 00:00:59,000 Oh, yeah, that was the internal training app. 13 00:00:59,000 --> 00:01:00,000 Exactly. 14 00:01:00,000 --> 00:01:01,000 At the Venetian. 15 00:01:01,000 --> 00:01:02,000 Yes. 16 00:01:02,000 --> 00:01:03,000 Right, right, right. 17 00:01:03,000 --> 00:01:04,000 And, you know, they had done a bunch of interesting stuff. 18 00:01:04,000 --> 00:01:08,000 Some of it, you know, that I think Adobe still hasn't thought about how to turn into product. 19 00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:15,000 But, you know, as much as anything else, enterprises tend to focus all their user experience stuff facing out. 20 00:01:15,000 --> 00:01:18,000 And I do think there's a great advantage to facing a little bit of that end. 21 00:01:18,000 --> 00:01:20,000 So I guess what I'm talking about is sex. 22 00:01:20,000 --> 00:01:28,000 Yeah, you know, that's something I'm always skeptical that you can actually sell usability and things that look good to enterprises, like you're saying. 23 00:01:28,000 --> 00:01:37,000 But I've actually been noticing over the past year or so that there is a little bit more enterprises kind of, not taking it for granted, but what's the word? 24 00:01:37,000 --> 00:01:39,000 They're sort of like knowing that that would be a good thing to do. 25 00:01:39,000 --> 00:01:41,000 Well, look, I mean, here's an example. 26 00:01:41,000 --> 00:01:44,000 Bill Scott, who is now at Netflix. 27 00:01:44,000 --> 00:01:47,000 He spent a little bit of time at Yahoo. 28 00:01:47,000 --> 00:01:52,000 And before that, he was at Sabre, the airlines folks. 29 00:01:52,000 --> 00:01:59,000 And it's kind of weird to think that Sabre had any user experience thinking at all, I mean, CLIs and whatnot. 30 00:01:59,000 --> 00:02:05,000 But he has a great blogger, and I'm really hoping I remember this right, but I think his blog is called Looks Good Works Well. 31 00:02:05,000 --> 00:02:06,000 Right. 32 00:02:06,000 --> 00:02:07,000 And, you know, that's really what we're talking about. 33 00:02:07,000 --> 00:02:08,000 It's not about flash. 34 00:02:08,000 --> 00:02:09,000 It's not about pretty. 35 00:02:09,000 --> 00:02:17,000 But, you know, with apologies to Arthur C. Clarke, I mean, you know, any user interface sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from sex. 36 00:02:17,000 --> 00:02:23,000 I mean, I think that the iPhone has really changed how people think about user experience. 37 00:02:23,000 --> 00:02:25,000 I thought it was indistinguishable from magic. 38 00:02:25,000 --> 00:02:26,000 Yeah, well, I like to change it. 39 00:02:26,000 --> 00:02:27,000 I see. 40 00:02:27,000 --> 00:02:28,000 Yeah. 41 00:02:28,000 --> 00:02:29,000 Seriously. 42 00:02:29,000 --> 00:02:30,000 Come on, the iPhone. 43 00:02:30,000 --> 00:02:31,000 Mmm. 44 00:02:31,000 --> 00:02:32,000 Yeah, yeah. 45 00:02:32,000 --> 00:02:33,000 That's true. 46 00:02:33,000 --> 00:02:34,000 Come on, I'm going to zoom in on that. 47 00:02:34,000 --> 00:02:38,000 I mean, it's, yeah, magic, sex, those are the same thing. 48 00:02:38,000 --> 00:02:40,000 That's what I've been led to believe. 49 00:02:40,000 --> 00:02:41,000 Absolutely. 50 00:02:41,000 --> 00:02:43,000 But I've been lucky enough to have that. 51 00:02:43,000 --> 00:02:53,000 So, you know, as much as anything else, just really thinking about what is, yeah, what works well and not Flash for its own sake. 52 00:02:53,000 --> 00:02:58,000 And, you know, I think that pretty clearly Flash got a bad reputation in many respects. 53 00:02:58,000 --> 00:03:00,000 For being games or something like that. 54 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:01,000 Or for being the skip intro. 55 00:03:01,000 --> 00:03:03,000 For just being, yeah, skip intro. 56 00:03:03,000 --> 00:03:07,000 Skip intro, anti-pattern, where it's like, why on earth have they done this? 57 00:03:07,000 --> 00:03:09,000 This is not adding any value. 58 00:03:09,000 --> 00:03:14,000 But I think now people are realizing that you can use that same technology in a very useful kind of way. 59 00:03:14,000 --> 00:03:17,000 And I just think that's an interesting thing that, you know, all the fuss. 60 00:03:17,000 --> 00:03:25,000 And, you know, as I just said, the iPhone is, you know, is now the reality in which we all live or something. 61 00:03:25,000 --> 00:03:35,000 But, you know, the fact that this morning everybody was waiting to hear that you could, you know, build apps, use the Flash tools and deploy to... 62 00:03:35,000 --> 00:03:37,000 Right, at the Adobe Max keynote. 63 00:03:37,000 --> 00:03:38,000 At Adobe Max keynote. 64 00:03:38,000 --> 00:03:45,000 We found out today that there would be support for, you know, well, in fact, it's not support for Flash on the iPhone, but it would be basically compiling. 65 00:03:45,000 --> 00:03:47,000 You wouldn't need to use Objective-C. 66 00:03:47,000 --> 00:03:53,000 So, develop using Flash tools, compile, run on the Apple iPhone. 67 00:03:53,000 --> 00:04:00,000 But to me, you know, I'm not sure that is what's most interesting or sexy about what you can do with Adobe technology. 68 00:04:00,000 --> 00:04:03,000 I mean, call me a sort of an enterprise apologist. 69 00:04:03,000 --> 00:04:07,000 But, you know, we just spent half an hour doing some video with FedEx. 70 00:04:07,000 --> 00:04:11,000 And frankly, I thought that was, you know, a really cool app. 71 00:04:11,000 --> 00:04:13,000 Way cooler than some bullshit game on the App Store. 72 00:04:13,000 --> 00:04:14,000 Who gives a fuck about that? 73 00:04:14,000 --> 00:04:15,000 That's right. 74 00:04:15,000 --> 00:04:19,000 You know, we had, you know, tracking of trucks with the ability to... 75 00:04:19,000 --> 00:04:21,000 So, this is FedEx Custom Critical. 76 00:04:21,000 --> 00:04:27,000 They are the people that deliver, you know, drugs that need to stay up to the temperatures. 77 00:04:27,000 --> 00:04:29,000 Stuff that the Department of Defense is moving around. 78 00:04:29,000 --> 00:04:31,000 Ferraris, they have an exclusive deal. 79 00:04:31,000 --> 00:04:40,000 And, you know, those guys, the ability to set thresholds across a truck with sensors, using a rules engine. 80 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:43,000 They're mixing together different mapping modes. 81 00:04:43,000 --> 00:04:46,000 You know, they've got all of the policy control. 82 00:04:46,000 --> 00:04:48,000 They've got really useful visualization. 83 00:04:48,000 --> 00:04:53,000 And I thought there was a really great moment in the interview that you did with the guy, where you're looking at him... 84 00:04:53,000 --> 00:05:07,000 And we don't tend to think of, you know, as someone like you with a system management background, you know, we tend to think about event suppression not so much in the agent sense, but in the technology sense. 85 00:05:07,000 --> 00:05:08,000 Right. 86 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:14,000 So, his view of visualization was visualization is a technology that enables you to suppress events that you don't need to know about. 87 00:05:14,000 --> 00:05:15,000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 88 00:05:15,000 --> 00:05:20,000 And I think that, you know, as I say, that's kind of magic. 89 00:05:20,000 --> 00:05:22,000 And as I've said, magic is sex. 90 00:05:22,000 --> 00:05:27,000 So, I'm just a little bit bored with... 91 00:05:27,000 --> 00:05:28,000 Yeah, sure. 92 00:05:28,000 --> 00:05:29,000 I mean, Avatar is great. 93 00:05:29,000 --> 00:05:33,000 It's great to see all these, you know, cool things that you can do with technology. 94 00:05:33,000 --> 00:05:35,000 The video and movies and entertainment. 95 00:05:35,000 --> 00:05:43,000 So, yeah, you know, in the keynote this morning we had the guys from behind the Avatar movie come and present. 96 00:05:43,000 --> 00:05:52,000 And actually, to me, what was most interesting in that was definitely not what the boring guy said about the plot of the movie. 97 00:05:54,000 --> 00:05:57,000 It was what he said about the use of the creative sweet souls. 98 00:05:57,000 --> 00:05:59,000 It was pretty clear they were using almost like good enough. 99 00:05:59,000 --> 00:06:00,000 It's kind of weird. 100 00:06:00,000 --> 00:06:01,000 You don't think of creative... 101 00:06:01,000 --> 00:06:02,000 You think of that as high gloss. 102 00:06:02,000 --> 00:06:06,000 But, you know, when you're making a movie like Avatar, it's like these are the good enough tools that we use as part of. 103 00:06:06,000 --> 00:06:08,000 Yeah, they were using like Premiere and Lightroom and things like that. 104 00:06:08,000 --> 00:06:11,000 Yeah, and, you know, Adobe Connect for a bit of integration when the artist was on site. 105 00:06:11,000 --> 00:06:12,000 Oh, yeah, yeah. 106 00:06:12,000 --> 00:06:13,000 That was right. 107 00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:18,000 So, it was actually they were using the entire tool set, not for the high gloss, but for getting things done. 108 00:06:18,000 --> 00:06:20,000 And I think that's what's important about Adobe technology. 109 00:06:20,000 --> 00:06:25,000 You know, if it's not about getting stuff done, then it doesn't have any value. 110 00:06:25,000 --> 00:06:28,000 And so I think, you know, I've been thinking a lot about user experience. 111 00:06:28,000 --> 00:06:35,000 I think there's every chance that we'll run an event in London looking at some of the stuff next year. 112 00:06:35,000 --> 00:06:40,000 And really, I think there are some new skills that organizations need to learn. 113 00:06:40,000 --> 00:06:43,000 But the key thing is turning some of this external focus. 114 00:06:43,000 --> 00:06:45,000 I mean, people talk about the consumerization of IT. 115 00:06:45,000 --> 00:06:50,000 That's right, we do need to turn it inwards and start looking about improved user experience. 116 00:06:50,000 --> 00:06:52,000 And what does that actually mean from a business perspective? 117 00:06:52,000 --> 00:06:55,000 You know, is there genuinely a productivity advantage to fewer clicks? 118 00:06:55,000 --> 00:06:57,000 Well, there certainly can be. 119 00:06:57,000 --> 00:07:00,000 And, you know, look, my favorite example is probably expenses. 120 00:07:00,000 --> 00:07:01,000 Now, obviously, expenses is hideous. 121 00:07:01,000 --> 00:07:04,000 Everyone hates expenses, whether you have a good expenses system or not. 122 00:07:04,000 --> 00:07:17,000 But, you know, as somebody that talks to a lot of people in tech, I've got to say, it is unbelievable how horrific the standard, you know, Oracle and SAP solutions are in this thing. 123 00:07:17,000 --> 00:07:18,000 And how do I know? 124 00:07:18,000 --> 00:07:23,000 Because all of the people that I work with at major tech vendors use them, and they all constantly bitch about them. 125 00:07:23,000 --> 00:07:28,000 I always figure expense applications are terrible by design so that no one wants to use them so they don't file their expenses. 126 00:07:28,000 --> 00:07:30,000 Well, I think that there may be some truth to that. 127 00:07:30,000 --> 00:07:40,000 But, you know, from a genuinely tracking, you know, what your ongoing financial expense is, you do need to get people to update this stuff. 128 00:07:40,000 --> 00:07:46,000 So I just think that, you know, I think we need a little bit more science. 129 00:07:46,000 --> 00:07:51,000 And it's kind of interesting to see Adobe buying Omniture for the consumer-facing stuff. 130 00:07:51,000 --> 00:07:54,000 I could see that having some value behind the enterprise firewall. 131 00:07:54,000 --> 00:07:59,000 But I think the key thing for me is that, yes, this Adobe stuff has value. 132 00:07:59,000 --> 00:08:00,000 Yes, something that's sexy. 133 00:08:00,000 --> 00:08:02,000 And something that's very much about the enterprise. 134 00:08:02,000 --> 00:08:07,000 And I think, you know, it probably needs more than two minutes in a max keynote. 135 00:08:07,000 --> 00:08:13,000 I do think that Adobe needs an enterprise event, something that your common or garden enterprise developer can say to his boss, 136 00:08:13,000 --> 00:08:20,000 I'm going to the Adobe show, and the Adobe show, and the boss says, great, instead of going, what, you want to find out how to make cooler photographs? 137 00:08:20,000 --> 00:08:28,000 Yeah, they need a conference you can go to that basically helps you take all of the work you've been doing on the back end 138 00:08:28,000 --> 00:08:31,000 and then understand how you put a front end on top of it. 139 00:08:31,000 --> 00:08:36,000 And, you know, basically how you make your software usable and how that gets quantified in a business enterprise sense. 140 00:08:36,000 --> 00:08:43,000 Because it's not always immediately, you have to have a fair amount of imagination to go from consumer-based things into enterprise things 141 00:08:43,000 --> 00:08:49,000 and see how that would actually help you out to have, like the FedEx people, like have something that's very visual and very usable. 142 00:08:49,000 --> 00:08:52,000 And actually, it helps expedite business as it were. 143 00:08:52,000 --> 00:08:55,000 Well, we want, I mean, employee activities should be about flow. 144 00:08:55,000 --> 00:09:01,000 I mean, whether it's someone in the call center, you know, whether it's somebody that's out fixing things in the field, whatever it is, 145 00:09:01,000 --> 00:09:08,000 the more you can do to enable your employees to have flow, the happier they're going to be working, the more productive they're going to be, 146 00:09:08,000 --> 00:09:10,000 you're going to have better employee alignment and whatnot. 147 00:09:10,000 --> 00:09:16,000 And that's the thing is just, you know, too often we try and treat our employees cogs in the wheel. 148 00:09:16,000 --> 00:09:19,000 But, I mean, your blog is called People Over Process for a reason. 149 00:09:19,000 --> 00:09:24,000 That, you know, even within processes, you do need to be thinking about people and flow and productivity. 150 00:09:24,000 --> 00:09:28,000 And, you know, I think that's the, to me, kind of the promise of the Adobe tools. 151 00:09:28,000 --> 00:09:33,000 And I'd like to see them actually, I guess, nail down that narrative a little bit more effectively. 152 00:09:33,000 --> 00:09:35,000 Yeah? Well, we'll have to see what they have to say next year. 153 00:09:35,000 --> 00:09:36,000 Absolutely. 154 00:09:36,000 --> 00:09:38,000 Maybe there'll be a whole other enterprise thing. 155 00:09:38,000 --> 00:09:39,000 Maybe.