Musings of a Marketing Maven

A few weeks ago a col­league rec­om­mended I try Adobe’s new web con­fer­enc­ing ser­vice, Adobe Acro­bat Con­nect. The pric­ing and value propo­si­tion looked pretty inter­est­ing for a con­sult­ing busi­ness like mine, so I thought I’d give it a try.

I signed up for Adobe’s 15-day free trial and did some inter­nal tests mix­ing pre­sen­ter and guest roles on a vari­ety of Win­dows PCs and Macs.

At first blush the UI seemed pretty straight­for­ward, but the soft­ware crashed on more than one occa­sion. Per­for­mance seemed pretty good, based on my expe­ri­ence con­nect­ing via Com­cast cable.

Based on the num­ber of crashes (even in my lim­ited tests), I con­cluded the ser­vice was too buggy to try with a client; how­ever, my father needed remote tech sup­port this week­end so I decided to exper­i­ment with him to see if Acro­bat Connect’s desk­top shar­ing would work in a sim­ple one-on-one situation.

He’s pretty tech­ni­cally savvy but even so, he found the UI to be too con­fus­ing. He was unable to make the ser­vice work when he was in the pre­sen­ter role, “broad­cast­ing” his Mac desk­top. As a result he con­sis­tently drove bugs (an infi­nite set of nested win­dows, each with a suc­ces­sively smaller view of his desk­top).  He also com­plained that the ser­vice is too slow when con­nect­ing via DSL.

We wasted about an hour try­ing to make Acro­bat Con­nect work, and never really suc­ceeded in doing so. Based on this expe­ri­ence, I am def­i­nitely not going to use this ser­vice with clients. Thank­fully Adobe’s 15-day trial enabled me to reach this con­clu­sion before hav­ing to com­mit to a sub­scrip­tion ser­vice. I also avoided the risk of a poten­tially embar­rass­ing expe­ri­ence with clients.

It’s too bad, because Adobe’s value propo­si­tion seems attrac­tive for smaller con­sult­ing firms.

Print PDF