Since then Adobe has overhauled the service, and it’s become quite useful when meeting with small groups for online demonstrations or collaboration. I particularly like the fact that no IT staff or technical wizards are required for this quality of web conferencing.

Highlights

Adobe has done a nice job with the user interface, especially things that influence people’s experience — as either meeting host or participant:

• the quality of what people see on-screen (visual fidelity) — see examples below
• the overall performance across the network (bandwidth management)
• the simplicity of what’s required to set up and run a meeting

While others may not care about Adobe’s attention to details like on-screen rendering, it matters to me. I find it distracting to look at webinars when every letter or character displayed on screen has fuzzy or ragged outlines.

When online meetings have to substitute for the richness of in-person interactions, subtle things like font or object rendering can make a difference in people’s quality perceptions. (See below for actual image comparisons.)

I haven’t tried the audio conferencing service that complements this offering. (My clients generally have their own conference bridges, which we use instead of Adobe’s.)

And yes, there’s a more fully featured “enterprise version” of this hosted service for businesses with much larger or more sophisticated web conferencing needs. The pricing model doesn’t work for a firm of my size, so I haven’t really tried Acrobat Connect Pro, the more sophisticated version.

Pricing

The subscription pricing for the basic level of service is quite fair: $39.95/month or $395 for an annual subscription.

The basic web conferencing service offers unlimited online meetings with up to 15 participants. There’s a pay-per-use option for those occasions when larger meetings are required.

A Simple Comparison

Here’s a quick test I did today. The first screenshot below shows a slide from a presentation I created with Apple’s Keynote, with the program operating in playback mode. (This is the best quality impression possible.) This image has been scaled down from the actual screenshot.

Caption: Screenshot of slide presented using Apple Keynote

The second image (below, also scaled down) shows what this presentation looks like when delivered as a web conference via Acrobat Connect (minus the service’s UI).

Caption: Screenshot of slide presented via Acrobat Connect web conferencing service, as viewed on a meeting attendee’s screen (minus the Acrobat Connect UI)

The host who delivered this test webinar used a different laptop, so that the on-screen viewing comparison took place on the same computer and monitor.

Clearly the image displayed via the web conference is physically smaller, given the need for screen real estate dedicated to Acrobat Connect’s user interface (chat panels, attendee lists, etc.). However, Adobe does offer some options for zooming and scaling so meeting participants can scale up the webinar’s contents to the size they prefer.

Well-designed slides or other imagery will look great when delivered via Acrobat Connect.

All in all, it’s now a pretty cool service.

And did I mention it supports both Mac and Windows users, both for meeting host and participant roles?

Perhaps it’s a characteristic of Boomer women — we’d rather interact with friends and family in the real world than spend all our time online. (I’ve heard this from many of my Boomer friends.)

This summer it was certainly true for me: when not working, I spent lots of time with old friends, new friends, and family. In Washington State, New England and Provence.

Not to mention the Toronto area, where new friends and current clients are located.

Just imagine: yoga in a gorgeous medieval hilltop village in southern France…

Yoga in Provence

I was lucky enough to experience my first-ever yoga retreat — in Provence, of all places — with some girlfriends from Apple. (We worked together at Apple 20 years ago, on the early Mac marketing team.) Five hours a day of yoga, for one week… I didn’t know what I was in for.

We were joined by their friends from a Bay Area yoga studio, their favorite Anusara yoga teacher, and some adventurous Europeans who found the web site promoting Jane’s yoga retreat in Provence.

Here we are, former Apple marketers, posed beneath a stone entrance to the medieval hilltop village of Vaison-La-Romaine in southern France. (Let’s not talk about the challenge of driving a cantankerous French SUV up the narrow hilltop streets or through portals originally designed for pedestrians, horses and small carts…)

My friend Jane organized the yoga retreat and our wonderful lodgings and group meals. (She’s also a gourmet cook and francophile, so she researched all the best places to eat, with something to please every budget.) Jane was the brave person who wrestled our SUV through this portal — without scraping any walls in the process.

Our yoga studio was a mile away, down the hill and along a river — quite a trek in the summer heat and intense sunshine of June in Provence. We made that trek twice a day, for a week.

It was June, so the lavender fields were in bloom. And it was incredibly hot the whole time we were there, with temperatures well into the 90s. The downside to staying in these charming, picturesque stone villages is that they don’t cool down at night…

Anusara Yoga — A Treat for Boomers

The particular style of yoga that was taught at our retreat was Anusara yoga. Anusara balances core values from the yoga spiritual traditions (such as openness and the light within) with a real focus on alignment principles.

It celebrates the heart, and welcomes people of all abilities. Even beginners like me. (Someday my asanas will be as graceful and powerful as the woman in this photo.)

One reason why Anusara is great for Boomer bodies is that its focus on alignment is potentially less dangerous than yoga variants that emphasize the flow between the poses. As our instructor pointed out, most of the injuries occur during transitions into and out of poses…

Now that I’m back in Seattle, I’ve signed up for some local Anusara classes, in hopes of finding and nurturing that balance within.

My job requires me to interview key stakeholders or subject matter experts on topics that are important to my client, but often unfamiliar to me before we launch into the conversation. Which makes relying on memory even more difficult when I lack the right mental model “to connect” and organize new concepts, jargon or names heard during an interview.

The reason I’m doing the interviews in the first place has some high-stakes objective for my client, so it’s important that both my listening and recall be nuanced and accurate.

So the question is, what’s a smart coping strategy when your consulting practice requires you to interview lots of people, “remember” the details of what they say, while remaining present in a conversational but guiding style? And then synthesize later from the compilation of conversations, while offering fresh insights from an objective but informed big-picture perspective?

For me the trick is to use a unobtrusive digital voice recorder — one that can record what I hear throughout a day’s sessions — and then upload the interviews to my PC or Mac that night.

Before I start recording, I ask permission of the interviewee and explain how and why I’ll use the recording. (We resolve issues of attribution, whether the boss will hear it, etc., etc.) Because the device is so inconspicuous, everyone forgets it’s working, so the conversation becomes very natural within moments.

My (Highly Simplified) Requirements

Technically speaking, I have a few simple requirements:

• Storage capacity, at whatever audio fidelity I routinely use, equal to at least 8 hours’ worth of interviews;
• USB connectivity so I can upload to a PC or Mac;
• Buttons large enough to hit without having to pay close attention to the device while in the middle of a conversation;
• An LCD display whose menu I can see and read;
• A durable case so the device can survive being banged around in my laptop carrying case or purse;
• Professional quality recording and a sensitive microphone;
• And native output in a format that works with both Windows and Mac OS X.

What Works for Me

I’ve happily used several digital recorders from Olympus, starting with the classic Olympus DM-20 (which is probably no longer on the market). The DM-20 is a wonderful balance of function, form and small size — although its user interface (on screen) leaves a lot to be desired. Olympus has improved their on-screen UI with later models.

I can’t recommend the DS-30 because it failed the button size and LCD test when I tried it. (It may be just fine for younger eyes and people with smaller fingers.)

My current workhorse recorder is the Olympus DS-50. It records in stereo with its built-in microphones, or in mono with most of the separate (and more sensitive mikes) that Olympus sells for other usage situations (such as times when you need a noise canceling mike).

And yes, these devices can function for music playback, but I’d prefer to use an iPod (or my iPhone) for music appreciation.

What’s on My Wish List

Much as I love the use of recordings to supplement memory, there are inconveniences related to playback for my usage situation:

• No Google-like search capability so you can easily find remarks you remember taking place halfway through the interview;
• No highly accurate and automated way to turn the recorded interview into a transcript compatible with MS Word or the like;
• No easy way to set bookmarks or pointers with comments that you can return to later.

I’m sure there are editing tools that would allow me to “cut and paste” snippets for playback from within PowerPoint or Keynote (assuming I had the speaker’s permission to do so). However, those tools are not installed on my computer at this point.

Caveats

It goes without saying that there are lots of legal and ethical considerations to explore before relying upon recordings for personal memory assists. If you adopt the practice of using digital voice recorders, be sure to explore the legal restrictions and be clear and open with your interviewees about what you’re doing and why…

The rules will be even more specific if you are recording people besides yourself for podcasts.

This can be risky. As one 8-time entrepreneur writes,

Since time immemorial a post mortem of a failed company usually includes, “I don’t understand what happened. We did everything that worked in our last startup.” The failure is not due to lack of energy, effort or passion. [Steven Gary Blank, founder of E.piphany]

Too many people get (or take) credit for past successes, when often they were just lucky with market timing. During the wild rush to scale up the company they were surfing the wave, too busy to pay attention to why their company or their product was so successful.

I often hear: “Can you recommend a super sales-and-marketing veteran (or team) who can jump-start our initial sales and guarantee early customer traction?” “Do you know any [local] biz dev people with a proven track record in our industry, and a great set of contacts?”

Or, “How many people should we hire for our founding sales and marketing team? What’s the right mix of on-board staff and part-time contractors?”

The Make-or-Break Questions for Start-ups

While these are important questions, the real bet-the-company drivers are:

• Who are our customers?
• What do they need that we are uniquely qualified to offer?
• Why will they buy our products? How important will our product be to them?
• How much are they willing to pay? (And can we make money offering this service at that price?)
• Given their preferences, what’s the right sales model? How, or through which channels, do they want to buy? What do they expect or need in the way of support — before, during, and after the sale?
• What’s the competitive environment going to look like when we’re ready to launch our product?

According to Steven Gary Blank, founder of E.piphany, “the difference between winning and losing startups is that winners understand why customers buy. Losers don’t.”

In an ugly but remarkably useful book Blank provides market-tested advice on a methodology for fast learning (and fast failing) on the key customer priorities that make or break a company. I highly recommend The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win to my start-up clients. (As well as to people in product management roles with go-to-market responsibilities in larger companies.)

The Business Imperative: Understand Your Customers

In his book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steven Gary Blank details what he calls the customer development process, a multi-stage program with key differences based on the stage of market the company is entering. (Read the book to see how the process unfolds.)

Blank warns that “Customer Development as a separate process from Product Development is a new concept. Not all executives understand it. Not all board members understand it.”

Based on my experience, I concur: this is not accepted yet as the smart way to do things. As a result most startups under-invest in customer development at the times when it can make the greatest difference in their future prospects.

According to Steven Blank, founders who want to increase their chances of success should run the customer development process in parallel with product development (rather than waiting until the product is in final testing before engaging in market probes).

Blank’s methodology identifies the key milestones where the two processes should interlink, so insights and deliverables from each can guide the other. Synchronizing the two processes minimizes the risk that each successive stage of development (or go-to-market) will be over-resourced, relative to market readiness or demonstrated customer interest in your value proposition.

Blank describes the typical end-game of a failed (or skipped) customer development process. Those of us in high tech have all seen it, and many have received pink slips at least once as a result….

The company misses its numbers for a couple of quarters, so the Board (or CEO) directs the VP of Marketing to execute a Hail Mary demand-gen campaign (or worse yet, a big brand building initiative). Inevitably, they fire the VP of Marketing when those efforts fail at getting demonstrable customer traction. Despite heroic grand-standing and emotional speeches to the sales team, the VP of Sales is terminated a few quarters later, after consistent failures to make the numbers. Soon followed by the CEO and other founders…

What’s Wrong with Stage Gate Development?

Many software/solution firms have embraced stage gate development as their official process for product development. While this probably makes sense for disciplined product development, it’s a risky way to bet the company, if you don’t have a parallel investment in customer development and market validation.

According to Blank (and confirmed by my experience), the stage gate process, as practiced, assumes that the market-sizing and customer-centered hypotheses made at the beginning of the development process are largely correct. After all, we love the product — why won’t our customers love it too?

All the go-to-market plans, the staff build-up, and selling and product launch activities proceed on the basis of those assumptions — the original business case which rationalized the product development investment in the first place. As development nears completion, the company scales up sales and customer support resources, hires (or outsources) the core marketing team, and commits to awareness building and lead gen tactics — often well in advance of revenues.

And then when those early forecasts prove overly optimistic, when customers fail to find the value proposition compelling, or the price they’re willing to pay is way out of whack with your cost structure, the house of cards collapses…

Waiting until the product is in the testing phase is too late to begin buyer research (that is, research into buyer pains, the buying process, how customers perceive your value proposition, what they’re willing/able to pay, etc.). Smart companies will validate their concepts and key customer assumptions as early as possible, while there’s still time to adjust to customer needs and priorities.

To find out how and when to engage with customers, to learn why (or how) they’d be interested in buying your product, pick up a copy of The Four Steps to the Epiphany.

A more expensive alternative is to engage a consulting firm that specializes in buyer persona research, and learn from them how to do this.

The third alternative is to skip all this research, believe you’re the next Steve Jobs, and bet the company on the brilliance of your market foresight…

We all know the seductive ease of creating a new presentation: setting up a dozen slides with titles, and then filling in the slides with endless bullet points.

It’s Too Easy to be Boring

The beauty of this approach is that you don’t have to remember the details of your message: if you can see the screen, you just read what’s on your slides. This practice is all-too common when the people who create and those who present the slide decks are different.

But it’s deadly for your audience when you add nothing fresh beyond what appears on the slides.

According to presentation gurus, this is absolutely the wrong approach for designing and delivering slide decks. Wrong, that is, if you care about getting your point across — and being remembered for what you say or believe.

I can just hear my husband’s rebuttal: in today’s hyper-busy business world, there’s no alternative to decks full of bullet-point slides. What else, after all, can you do when creating a presentation due later today while watching yet another yaddah-yaddah webinar or attending an all-hands audio conference?

My counter-argument: if presentations were more clear and memorable for people in the audience, perhaps we wouldn’t waste our time in so many unproductive meetings or webinars.

What People Do Better Than Machines

As presentation guru Garr Reynolds writes in Presentation Zen, 

Remember that we are living in a time when fundamental human talents are in great demand. Anyone — indeed any machine — can read a list of features or give a stream of facts to an audience. That’s not what we need or want. What we yearn for is to listen to an intelligent and evocative — perhaps at times even provocative — human being who teaches us, or inspires us, or who stimulates us with knowledge plus meaning, context, and emotion in a way that is memorable.

Although this point is often forgotten (especially in high-tech product marketing circles), Garr Reynolds reminds us that:

Presentations are not just about following a formula for transferring facts in your head [or the product manager's head -- ed. note] to the heads of those sitting before you by reciting a list of points on a slide. (If it were, why not send an email and cancel the presentation?) What people want is fundamentally more human. They want to hear “the story” of your facts.

In Presentation Zen Reynolds offers numerous examples of visually stunning and memorable slides, clearly designed by people with a visual eye and a knack for storytelling. He also lays out a set of principles for designing slides when you aspire to similar zen-like simplicity and memorability.

If you follow Reynolds’ principles (and license stock imagery from Getty, Corbis or iStockphoto.com), you too can produce more memorable slide decks.

This assumes you have a clear story to tell, have clarified what you want to say, and understand how best to get your points across to your audience.

Back in the Real World…

People who market high-tech products are among the least likely to practice the principles of “presentation zen.” Think about all those product managers — people who are paid to agonize over and fight for all the gory details of their products. After all their effort getting the product ready for the market, they want you to appreciate all those details too. Point by point, slide by slide. Stack diagram after stack diagram.

Sixty-seven slides later, what do you remember of the presentation? Can you remember anything the next day?

The Best of Both

If you lack designerly skills to create visually stunning presentations, what’s the alternative (besides hiring a designer)?

I’ve blogged about the power of visual thinking, and have recommended a book by Dan Roam, Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. This is a great resource for business people (and teachers).

This book can help you learn how to think through and then convey complex situations through the power of simple visuals. Throughout his book Dan Roam uses simple, cartoon-like sketches to illustrate his points (as he does here on his company’s web site).

I think the approach that Dan Roam teaches offers wonderful possibilities for helping you crystallize your thinking and share your ideas — and how you got there — with others in very powerful ways. But some people might find his visual style too casual…

For situations that require more formality or visual elegance, the best of both approaches is to:

• apply Roam’s framework for thinking through the challenges and your communications options, and
• design the presentation (and your voice-over commentary) with the help of the principles outlined in Presentation Zen.

In a nutshell Presentation Zen explains that what makes messages memorable is some combination of:

• simplicity
• unexpectedness
• concreteness
• credibility
• emotions
• stories

I wish I had learned these principles back in school — or at least, much earlier in my career!

For Your Bookshelves

And now there’s a deceptively simple business book that can help you become less dependent upon consultants’ help, if you learn how to apply visual thinking to problem solving and group communications.

This book is written especially for people like me and you who think they can’t draw. It focuses on helping you see differently, explore and think things through visually, and then convey the insights you develop by this visual thinking technique.

In its own way, this is a practical guide for people who want to “Think Different.”

Simply Powerful

Besides its charming stick-figure sketches, the secret to The Back of the Napkin is its simple but powerful framework and the explanations on how to apply this framework to real-world problems:

• “seeing” problems in terms of the classic 6 W’s: who, what, when, where, how and why;
• exploring what’s most important to understand and then convey — for you as problem solvers, and for your audience (or the people you’re trying to convince) — via 5 key dimensions the author calls “SQVID”;
• discovering insights or fresh alternatives through the patterns that emerge from your visual combinations;
• and then applying the best communications approach given the audience and your objectives.

As evidence for the power of his framework, the book’s author, Dan Roam, cites scientific research that reveals the brain is “hard-wired” for fast processing in response to the 6 W’s, when information is conveyed visually.

As an antidote to “death by PowerPoint,” I highly recommend The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam.

Have Markers, Will Travel

When you’ve mastered the visual thinking framework laid out in Dan Roam’s book, all you need for client presentations is a set of markers and a surface to draw on. (The surface depends on the size of the team you’re interacting with: a napkin or piece of paper works fine in small meetings, a whiteboard or easel pad for larger groups.)

For situations that require PowerPoint (or Apple’s Keynote), the author recommends scanning hand-drawn sketches and inserting those graphics into your slide deck. He’s not suggesting you stop using PowerPoint, but instead learn how to visualize and convey important problems using his framework:

When we think about the more elaborate and insightful pictures required to show complex interactions of when, where, how, and why, the point isn’t to replace all the words; the point is to use a picture to replace those words that are more effectively conveyed, understood, and remembered visually.

Making Your Point

For best results, Roam recommends thinking through what should be drawn on the whiteboard before others arrive, and how to stage elements to be added later. He’s learned through experience that sometimes the best communications occur when you take people through an abbreviated tour of your visual thinking journey.

People who master visual thinking will find themselves in great demand in the business world or in situations involving multiple stakeholders and lots of complexity or ambiguity.

And as American schools fail more and more to teach students how to think critically and communicate clearly, books like Back of the Napkin have something important to offer.

Thanks to a short break between client engagements, I was able to indulge in some of the latest thinking, spanning the gamut from consumer-centric marketing pundits to B2B gurus. Here’s a quick tour of today’s nuggets.

Getting Marketing Back In Synch

Today I attended a webinar featuring Seth Godin who was launching his latest marketing provocation, Meatball Sundae.

Godin’s new book outlines the 14 key themes that are reshaping the marketing landscape. Whether you specialize in B2B or B2C marketing, there’s something here for everyone to consider. As a case in point, Godin opines that scarcity and abundance create wonderful opportunities — but between them lies the curse of mediocrity and obscurity.

What I liked most is his recommendation that marketers take responsibility for crafting the customer’s entire experience, from product inception through to delivery and the product’s integration into the customer’s life. This means rethinking the value chain, from the factory to the point of consumption. It’s another take on his theme of meaningful differentiation.

To explain what he means, his webinar (and probably the book) cite a stream of business innovations from Josiah Wedgewood (whom Godin calls the greatest marketer of all time).

Wedgewood innovated in many ways, such as:

• branding things made of clay (pottery in all forms) — even 200 years later, we can still recognize the traditional Wedgewood pottery, thanks to brand characteristics that are intrinsic to those products
• introducing the first product showrooms in London (think Nike Town, circa 1700’s)
• persuading the British powers-that-be to build canals to his factory so Wedgewood could reliably transport their fragile products via their distribution channels to their end-customers
• leveraging the power of “lighthouse customers” and word-of-mouth marketing — by sending a full set of product samples to the crowned heads of Europe (at great personal expense to Josiah Wedgewood)

After all these stories, I’ll look differently at the Wedgewood china we inherited from our in-laws…

Aspiring to Customer Affinity

I was equally impressed today with a recent report sponsored by the CMO Council on Customer Affinity: The New Measure of Marketing. Although the writing lacks the lighthearted fun of Meatball Sundae, there’s great food for thought in this report on how to drive superior relationships with customers.

Here’s a nugget (their definition of customer affinity):

…Customer affinity is more meaningful than customer satisfaction, loyalty or advocacy. Customer affinity goes beyond current, top of mind perceptions; it looks into the depth, breadth, and importance of the customer-vendor relationship in order to determine its capacity for sustainability, strategic value and trusted, long-term engagement. Indeed, we have found distinct differences in this study between customer advocacy, which is basically a willingness to refer a vendor, and customer affinity. We believe that customer affinity is the more powerful and substantive issue for vendors, channel partners and customers alike. In today’s fast-changing and disruptive markets, superior customer interaction may be the most essential competitive advantage.

For people engaged in B2B marketing, this report is definitely worth reading.

Is the Marketing Funnel Still Valid?

Last summer David Armano raised the question of whether a spiral might be a better alternative to the classic marketing funnel as a metaphor for the core marketing function. His blog sparked a lot of debate.

Check out his blog to see his thinking and how he illustrates his ideas, as he reflects on some 2007 thought pieces from Forrester regarding marketing best practices.

Armano’s key point is that if customer engagement matters — if there’s some form of interaction among customers, or between the customer and the vendor — then a spiral might be a more useful mental construct.

Here’s Armano’s illustration. The interesting question is, how valid is this concept for B2B enterprise products, particularly those that fall into infrastructure categories? It’s easy to imagine its relevance for consumer product categories, in which the end user cares enough about the product to engage in a conversation with others.

To me the question isn’t either/or — it’s both/and.

I find myself drawn to two books we purchased this fall, Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters, and David Allen’s classic, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.

Although both books look quite interesting, Susanka’s approach appears more holistic, probably not so surprising, when you consider her profession as an architect.

Are We Really More Productive?

With hundreds of in-bound email and other electronic communications every day, it’s hard to believe that our working lives are better than they used to be. As Susanka writes in The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters,

With all the instant messaging, e-mailing, and cell-phoning going on, often simultaneously, there’s not nearly enough thought or discernment involved in any of it. We’re engaged in a race against time, but the race itself is entirely fabricated and of our own making. And we’re rarely present in our interactions at all.

When was the last business meeting (other than a one-on-one in a coffee shop) in which meeting attendees weren’t checking email (even if surreptitiously)?

One good thing about web-based conferences: at least you can’t see when people’s attention has drifted off to their email (even if you can hear their keyboards clacking away)… Needless to say, group interactions suffer as a result when everyone’s attention is anywhere but the meeting. I wonder how much productivity is actually lost as a result of multi-tasking while in meetings?

Quantity Does Not Equal Quality

Quality suffers too. My husband, who works for an enormous Fortune 50 company, complains that the incessant emails have become so overwhelming that people have little time to read or think about what’s in their in-box. He grumbles that ill-considered responses to incoming messages only add to the confusion and rework. People fire off half-ass responses because they don’t take time to think through the implications of what they’re reading. He’s seen multiple situation when decisions are made and unmade and remade over the course of several months as a result of this multi-tasking malaise.

To make matters worse, many people check their email via Blackberries or BlackJack phones with tiny screens — ill-suited to longer messages required for dealing with complex situations. Certain situations just require more than a few sentences to set out the arguments or rationalize the recommendation — regardless of the device being used to check email.

What’s the Solution?

I certainly don’t have an answer on how to deal with the electronic frenzy that’s overtaking our lives, but I’m looking forward to exploring options in 2008. In the meantime I’ve got some great books to read and ponder — and some exercises to try.

And if you’ve found a solution that works well for you, please share it!

Like a smart phone it affords way more functions than most people need, and suffers from too much complexity as a result.

The performance of each individual function is probably mediocre, compared to a dedicated function tool — like the embedded cameras in smart phones compared to digital cameras. Or emailing or surfing the Net from a smart phone compared to browsing or emailing from a notebook computer.

In any case you won’t find me carrying one of these devices!

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.