LiveCycle 22 Jul 2006 09:49 am
On the Brink of the Chasm
In one of his recent blog posts, Ryan Stewart plotted the number of sessions by product at the MAX event into a pie graph. Not surprisingly, LiveCycle received a very small slice of the pie compare to Flex and ColdFusion. Like many that are familiar with the product suite, I have always felt LiveCycle is not receiving the attention it deserves. This colorful graph just did a fanstastic job putting that in quantitative terms.
So why does Adobe deprive LiveCycle the attention is deserves? It is because LiveCycle hasn’t crossed the chasm yet. In the book “Crossing the Chasm”, G. A. Moore taught us that the nature of the hi-tech industry presents a large chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. For a solid product like LiveCycle, it is relatively easy to win over the early adopters. But for the product to become the next cash cow, it has to win over the early majority customers. So how do we cross the chasm between the early adopters and early majority? Well, first the product managers have to realize that grass-roots adoption matters even for enterprise prodcuts.
So here is my million dollar idea of the day: make LiveCycle avaialbe to the public. I’m not talking about giving out trial versions. Instead, we should take a page out of the Microsoft playbook – make the core products cheap/free and charge a premium for the advanced features. e.g. Microsoft gives away SharePoint Service for free and charges a ridiculous amount for the SharePoint Portal Server. If we could give away LiveCycle Forms, people would be able to build full blown form processing solutions without paying a penny for licensing. But if they want to take their solution to the next level, they would have to buy our LiveCycle Form Manager.
Adobe recently started giving away XPAAJ, which is step in the right direction. Hopefully, core products in the LiveCycle lineup such as the form server and the workflow engine could all be made free by the LiveCycle 8 release. I doubt any LiveCycle product manager would be reading my blog, but like I said, grass-roots matters. If our perspective customers start asking for it, our product managers would be happy to comply.
Need to bring your Flex project up to speed? Zee Yang is a freelance Flex developer with deep understanding of architecture and user experience. You can reach him at zee.yang@gmail.com.
on 23 Jul 2006 at 6:23 pm 1.Lime said …
I could not agree with you more. Lifecycle is so costly that no one can afford to impliment a solution. Adobe needs to find a way to capture the form preocessing world and make it the way to do business. I have heard so many use Microsoft and IBM and simply a web page over Lifecycle just because it is too costly and there are not enough skilled resources in the technology.
kudos x 2
on 24 Jul 2006 at 12:21 pm 2.John Dowdell said …
Hi, I agree with your enthusiasm for the LiveCycle server technologies. Parts are already moving over to a hosted service… Sean Corfield had some info last week about the “Protect PDF Online” hosted service. Not full, I know, but a good start…?
on 26 Jul 2006 at 2:36 pm 3.Matthias Zeller said …
Well I am a Product Manager at Adobe and I am reading your Blog, so your reach is further then you thought
I think just giving away software is not enough to cross the chasm and get enterprise adoption. Actually we are already executing a twist of your idea (giving away some functionality of the software). More about that in my Blog here: http://matthiaszeller.com/blog/2006/07/26/crossing-the-chasm-by-giving-away-software-for-free/
on 27 Jul 2006 at 6:31 am 4.marcus coghlan said …
Zee, I’m with your comment you left over at Matthias Zeller’s blog, “i think one of factors holding livecycle (and many enterprise products) back is the lack of specialists in the field.”
I’m a Flash/Flex (not flash flex) RIA developer who really wants to move into the ‘RIA as the front-end of your business processes’ field. I’m not overly interested in becoming a LiveCycle specialist, as such, but I certainly want to have a better handle on things than knowing how to invoke a web-service from Flex. It’d be great if my company would invest in the cash to set me up and then the time to let me figure it all out, but that just aint gonna happen so I’m left playing around the fringes trying to figure what I want to know out. I’d love to be able to get in there and build a few samples and see what can be done. I’m sure that the more the market is exposed sample implementations of what can be done with LiveCycle ( combined with a killer front-end ) the more interest/demand/involvement/innovation there will be forthcoming.
I’ve never seen a better way to cross a chasm than a good bridge. And I can’t remember seeing a bridge being built from only one side of the chasm.
Looking forward to your future posts. Cheers
on 05 May 2008 at 2:02 am 5.Flug said …
I think it´s too expensiver and there are other chaeper solutions.