A few weeks ago Adobe announced "Adobe Connect," which is simply a rebranded version of the recently acquired Macromedia Breeze application with Adobe Acrobat. Same capabilities as before, nothing really new except for the integration piece and now a different name. It looks like Adobe is doing the same thing Macromedia did when they acquired the Breeze technology from Presidia and the same thing Microsoft did with Placeware and Groove Networks. Simply rebranding the same product and positioning the "new" product as a new product. (Casey Ryan from Nollenberger Capital Partners states, "Macromedia has been acquired and we believe their collaboration offerings will be less competitive as a piece of a larger company.") More on Adobe Connect
Initially, the strategy to integrate Breeze with Acrobat to instantly start meetings from PDF's is interesting but how useful is this really? (The Important of Integration) PDF's are static documents that cannot be revised or changed. How useful would it be to start a Breeze meeting and not have the ability to make changes to a document? Imagine a Marketing Manager starting a Breeze meeting from a marketing collateral piece that has already been converted to PDF. The Marketing Manager simply wants to review the final version with the VP of Marketing before they go into print. They step into the meeting together and the VP of Marketing decides he/she wants to see what the text would look like in a different font. Granted the meeting was launched from a PDF but now what? Zero changes can be made from the static PDF file! How productive, collaborative or efficient is this? More on Adobe Connect
I am not sure how much value or benefit the Breeze/PDf integration will provide, most likely very little. It is a unique differentiator for Adobe but not a very compelling one since many competitors like WebEx or Live Meeting could easily create this integration capability over night. I could see Adobe/Macromedia taking this integration a step further and integrating Breeze with Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Photoshop which could prove to be more fruitful. More on Adobe Connect
A few interesting quotes from analysts:
Claire Schooley from Forrester Research has stated, "Breeze does not integrate with many applications and systems out-of-the-box. It integrates with other systems through an extensive set of API's." (The Forrester Wave: Web Conferencing, Q2 2006)
In TMR's "Synchronous Learning Report 2006, "For new users-even those with experience with other synchronous tools- Breeze is a challenge to learn."
ZDNet Review: "Macromedia, like its competitors, bundles telephone and email support with its service. The Macromedia Breeze five-user, $375/month plan, for instance, allows you just five tech-support incidents per month, which is a bit stingy, in our opinion."
According to Frost & Sullivan, Breeze has a 0.3% market share.
I have also included a downloadable Excel spreadsheet that details the "research" Adobe/Macromedia performed when comparing their technology to industry leader, WebEx. It was very interesting to see the number of erroneous claims and data points they mentioned.
Take a look at the spreadsheet for a more accurate comparison between technology capabilities, infrastructure, along with other criteria like training and support that was not mentioned. More on Adobe Connect
Download macromedia_false_claims.xls
Saturday, October 07, 2006
The "New" Adobe Connect?
