Unfortunately I’ve missed the Adobe Max keynote last night and I don’t have the time to watch the loop provided by Adobe. So I must rely on the filtered news I read on the news sites. What I’ve heard so far makes me laugh:

Adobe kills the CS as a product and makes it a service.

We’ve seen this coming. They offered the creative cloud service alongside their regular products. It was obvious that they would enforce their efforts into this direction. But to cease the sale of the CS as a standalone product is like brain surgery while the patient has a heart attack. This will not happen without some consequences.

1.
Adobes profits will increase from the moment on when the CS6 starts to disappear, because they force every professional to pay for their tools. We all know that there are a lot of illegal copies circulating among smaller businesses, schools and private users. That’s why Adobe is the industries standard, not because they are delivering interconnected software.

2.
Adobes user base will shrink. If they really charge their users for the software there will be a lot of users who can’t afford the $50 per month. These users, may they be small businesses or private people, will look for alternatives.

3.
The market pressure will decrease. IMO the market is structured like a pyramid. At the top you have the few agencies with the money and the bottom you have a lot of freelancers who work as graphic designers, writers, illustrators, web-designers etc.. The Jacks of all trades, masters of none. I assume that these people do not have the resources to pay a yearly subscription.

4.
I expect that Adobe will offer schools and students special conditions for their services. This may be all right for some organizations but for most design students it is hard to pay for a Mac and for the software at the same time. The illegal copies students use are the warranty for Adobe to have a user base tomorrow.

5.
If students don’t use Adobes software they will use other software. This will lead to a greater variety in the market. Maybe there is a competitor at Adobes doorstep and they haven’t noticed it yet?

6.
Mentioning a competitor: Corel is still there and they have good software. They are associated with private users or semi professional usage but as far as I know their products can easily do the same job as Adobes. Maybe their software is not as comfortable as Adobes CS but it is definitely not as bad as most professionals think.

7.
CS6 will be the Windows XP of Adobe.

8.
Adobe will suffer from this on the long term. The concept of a subscription based model seems like a perspective for the future. On the short term they will suffer from the existing CS products. On the mid term, say about 2-5 years, they will make a lot of cash, but then a new generation of designers will appear. These designers will know other tools and alternatives.

9.
There will be a crack and everything will remain the same.

10.
Adobe will die, sooner or later. I’m not talking about the consequences of their new business model. I’m talking about their innovation potential. If you look at the publishing frequency and how much software Adobe is publishing you can see that this company does not have the slightest clue about where the market is going. They don’t have a long term perspective for their products. They don’t know what the next paradigm will be. They don’t even know how to use their market power to craft the next paradigm. Adobe is exhausted and driven by shareholders. The only reason why they are still here is because they are a monopolist. After they bought Macromedia there remains no other company who could offer something similar. I’m just waiting for the one competitor who has the potential to change this mono culture.

Oh, mentioning Macromedia: they kill Fireworks. After they have killed Freehand they finally kill Fireworks. I can’t say how pissed I am. The next thing they will kill is the Flash IDE. I have observed that a lot of the good features of the Flash IDE were included in Illustrator. Following their argumentation that Fireworks became dispensable because its features were included in other products it is obvious that the Flash IDE will be the next candidate.

April, 27th was World Graphic Design Day. I celebrated it with the release of a little bookmarklet I’ve named “Mit Ohne.”. The english transcription would be something like “with without”.

You can find the bookmarklet here:
http://lrrm.de/mitohne

Just drag the “Mit Ohne.” link to your favorites bar, visit a website, press the bookmarklet and see what happens. This is how the internet looks like without CSS stylesheets. Scary, isn’t it. This is how our web would look like without the constant work of designers.

So, why did I made this? To be honest: it wasn’t only my idea.

Some graphic designer friends and I met a couple of months ago to talk about the current situation of graphic design, the design business and politics. We were disappointed how the things developed and how bad the branch was organized. There were a lot of opinions about our problems ranging from social welfare to strikes.

To shorten this: we found out that we were to busy to do something and decided to leave the things like they are. The pressure wasn’t high enough. I know that we were not the only group who’s discussing these problems but there is a fundamental lack of engagement. Not because we don’t want to do anything but because there is no point were we could apply our leaver.

What my friend Aniko and I talked about was a strike. How a strike in the creative branch could be organized and how it would impact the public. Graphic Design is everywhere but it becomes visible not before something goes wrong. Our idea was to remove graphic design from the public and see how the people react. Obviously this was just a nice idea and it will never happen. Graphic Design is powerless because it is a meta discipline. We are not producing anything. We are neither the printers who produce print products nor are we the programmers who produce the software we use. If we would like to remove some of our work we simply couldn’t because we are not responsible for the media itself. Not to mention that the market structure wouldn’t allow a broad range strike without ruining a lot of smaller businesses.

The only thing I could do was to release this bookmarklet. Initially we had the idea to blacken everything except the fotos. The typefaces are some sort of graphic design too. I didn’t managed it to write the necessary Javascript code. The removal of the CSSs remained the only thing that worked. Sorry, maybe next year.

The concept has some major flaws but it is important to start somewhere. Of course there won’t be any resonance outside of the designer crowd because the user needs to drag and drop this bookmarklet, trigger it and remove it afterwards. Unlikely that someone without interest in design would do so.

Nonetheless I’m happy to say that the bookmarklet got some resonance in the major german design blogs.
http://page-online.de mentioned the bookmarklet in the newsticker
http://designerinaction.de wrote a blog post about it.

Thanks to everyone!

I can’t imagine a life without Facebook. It’s there in the morning, midday and evening, and I know its not only me. It’s an incredible mighty web application with such a broad range of use cases that everyone gets the most out of it. In this online world where change is the only constancy Facebook seemed to be a solid rock that would stay for a while at least.

Then Blake Ross, the director of product at Facebook, quit his job because Todd, a friend of an analysts son, stated that Facebook isn’t cool anymore.

I’m leaving because a Forbes writer asked his son’s best friend Todd if Facebook was still cool and the friend said no, and plus none of HIS friends think so either, even Leila who used to love it, and this journalism made me reconsider the long-term viability of the company.

– Source TechCrunch

I was in a state beyond being shocked after I read this. I laughed and refused to understand what I’ve read. Todd must have been wrong. Facebook has the critical mass and there is no way to get around it. It’s not of interested whether it is cool or not. There are no alternatives. Facebook is absolute. Period.

But Todds statement set the seed of doubt into my unconsciousness.

I’m using Facebook for business. After many blogs died I went where the news were shared. Now Facebook delivers me a constant stream of what I want to know, what is helpful for my work and of what helps me to have a fingertip at the pulse of the time. I’m not using it for chats, sharing pictures, games, sending messages or stay in touch with school friends (or at least I’m pretending it).

The way I’m using it is not what I would call cool at all, but was it that what Todd had in mind?

For the younger generation using Facebook feels like work. Teachers, parents and other authorities are present on Facebook. Younger users need to manage their contacts wisely if they don’t want to share the latest party pictures with everyone.

If you’re not depended on a wide range of information a smaller feature set can be enough for you. A service that isn’t covering everything but the things what a user really needs might get more attention than one could think. Instagram has become popular for charing pictures. Pinterest, the useless information dump it sometimes is, has become the third largest social network behind Twitter and ahead of Google+. Not that it would be comparable with Facebook or Twitter but its raise shows that there’s still movement in the market. There are alternatives to Facebook although they are not overarching services as Facebook.

Another argument against Facebook is its way to present information. Facebook gives you a filtered (aka censored) newsfeed. Twitter gives you everything and Pinterest presents you a catalog curated by the users you follow. Using Pinterest feels like it was built to share the enormous amount of information we are perceiving everyday.

This comparison lead me to the question what Facebook is?

First of all Facebook is not social media. It is not even media at all. It’s a program, a platform provided by Mark Zuckerberg. Creating an account on a platform doesn’t make the platform social. My bank isn’t social although they gave me access to an online banking account. What makes it social is the way we use it. Communication is social but sharing your status update will not make Facebook a medium. Compared with other media Facebook doesn’t provide the necessary structures. It is a medium nonetheless because we make it one.

Facebook always faced the point of criticism that it filters the free web. It stands like a wall of glass between the surfer and the wilderness of the internet. The surfer might have a bit of control of what he reads by liking things but how many status updates he really sees in his feed is up to them. Worse, it has become a data pool that prevents individuals and companies from creating their own web pages. Instead they are sharing their information directly on Facebook.

This is not as bad as it sounds. It is nothing else than the classic media like TV and Newspapers are doing every day. They are standing between their consumers and a complex world, filtering the information for them and getting payed for it. The bad part is that you’re not paying for Facebook. Nothing in life comes for free and if you’re not paying for a service it might be that you are the product.

We are elevating Facebook to the state of a medium by defining what kind of information we want to have. The more precise information about your interest you’re providing the more it becomes your major medium and the less you can’t abstain it. It’s a bit like quicksand: the more you move the faster you’ll drown.

The question is: why am I doing this? Why do I give Facebook so many information my interests?
I want to be on the safe side. I want to be sure that I don’t miss anything important. If another platform can ensure this to their users they will probably be a Facebook killer. At the moment Twitter, Pinterest and G+ are the services that are most likely to get this done. But they are still no alternative because they are not covering as many use cases as Facebook does or they haven’t reached the critical mass yet.

Maybe it’s just me and I’m writing this from the perspective of a news junky. If I would be a bit more relaxed I could wait until a news gets so important that it will find me. At the moment the weight of Todds statement is not to much if you keep in mind that he’s not a heavy user, not depended on a wide range and deep going information base. On the other hand his statement indicates that there might be a shift in the use of social networks. Maybe the time of the big players is over and there will be several networks for different interests. Planning is guessing, I don’t know it. I won’t quit FB yet.