Day Job Blues

So I’m at the Nvidia campus today to check out the new GPU whatchajiggers that are going to change the face of computing … and I’m under strict NDA, but these thingamobs are pretty ace widgetry, to be honest. No problem there.

And that’s not the story. The story is that part of the day was a series of breakaway sessions that involved heavy petting with the likes of the Weta Digital crew that made Avatar, and some Euro company that jacks up the Ferrari customer experience via online ray traced bread and circuses, and Adobe, which many of you may know as makers of expensive licensed shite that you use to fuck around with pixels on computers.

That last company is important, as it is the subject of the current story. And more specifically, the Adobe mouthpiece who delivered said story and in doing so, made me hate Adobe more than I already do as a dedicated hater of things that make other people happy and/or money and/or what’s the diff?

What follows is a lesson for marketers and PR types in how NOT to engage your audience if you have pre-determined that it possesses a fraction of a brain collectively.

1. Do not open your preso by declaring that your latest product (about which few in attendance give a crap) is a ‘game-changer’. That will be determined by readily available statistics later. And it’s a terrible cliche.

2. Do not ask the reporters in the room if they have heard about your latest product (CS5 in this case, if you must know) and what they think about it. People do not like to be put on the spot when all they are expecting from you is free coffee and some corporate swag. People who can later rip you a new one from bully pulpits are particularly the sorts of people you do not want to engage in this manner.

3. Finally, and most importantly, do not brag that your company has had a hand in literally *everything* your audience has ever touched. This was actually said by Adobe’s agent at today’s event. And in the sterile modern setting of Nvidia’s headquarters, it made a sort of sense. All of the labels and signage and iconography on all of the many very new things that surrounded us were *probably* realized in some way via an Adobe image manipulation product.

But to say, as the Adobe person did, that ‘it’s so totally great to work for a company that has had a hand in EVERYTHING you encounter in life’ (her example: the Cokes we were drinking at the time), is to make any reasonable person who knows about pine cones and asphalt and human artifacts fashioned before 1990 very, very angry and resentful indeed. And very possibly dismissive of everything useful you might have to say following that outburst of transparent evangelism.

So let that be a lesson to you, corporate marketers. Treat the (however borderline) intelligence of grumpy assholes who can later write about you with at least a modicum of respect.

 

Comments: 37

 
 
 

thingamobs are pretty ace widgetry, to be honest. No problem there.

Man, you kids these days have the weirdest fetishes.

Also, I used Painter, so NYEH!

 
 

Treat the (however borderline) intelligence of grumpy assholes who can later write about you with at least a modicum of respect.

That train has left the station, D. Get ready for 10 years of ” is a magical revolutionary product at an amazing price! Magical, revolutionary, amazing.”

 
 

Game changing is the new paradigm shift, but what is the new game changer?

It can’t be revolutionary. Revolutions are so ordinary. I mean, in the tech world people are all being lined up against the wall and shot every five minutes. Then a crack team of janitors mops up the brain bits and the new team comes in. Viva la revoltuion and all that.

So, what’s the new douchebag word for “new?”

 
 

So, what’s the new douchebag word for “new?”

“Dynamic”, maybe? In terms of Silicon Valley/tech geek douchebags, of course.

 
 

PR weasels, like all the cretins in “Human Resources,” end up in those slots because they “Like working w/ people,” where “working w/ people” means “couldn’t add, subtract, multiply, divide, write, spell or reason their way out of a paper bag.”

 
 

Was this presentation given by Adobe’s so-called product evangelist (a fat dude with a pony tail) in the manner of a sadsack magician at a kid’s birthday party? If so, I feel your pain, but, with the proviso that at least our Adobe event had copius free beer and lovely hostesses with flat tummies and Eastern European accents.

 
 

CS5 is getting effusive reviews…from Advanced Photoshop.

I have nothing witty to say—I’m a fangirl. Probably would have gazed at Comic Book guy adoringly.

 
 

1. Do not open your preso by declaring that your latest product (about which few in attendance give a crap) is a ‘game-changer’. That will be determined by readily available statistics later. And it’s a terrible cliche.

Unless your product is a new book of rules for popular games, in which case your product may well be a game changer.

 
 

Adobe? Respect their customers? Seriously? Now that would be an innovation worth reporting. Hasn’t happened yet though.

 
 

All the more reason to use the Gimp!

I don’t pay for PhotoShop, either.

 
 

Hrmmm. That link was ‘sposed to go to gimp.org.

 
 

Question: anyone here ever attend any of the Photoshop seminars/conventions? I’m finally living in an area where they have them, and I’m wondering…are they fun? Do ya learn neat stuff?

 
 

It is always wonderful to hear employees gloat rather than evangelize. If you aren’t talking about a feature, a better workflow that saves me time to drink more booze, or a FASTER launch time, then shaddup and pass me a beer.

Some of these get gatherings are useful and others are not. I’m waiting for the Nvidia and Adobe product that lets me make high quality animation AND fixes me a Hot Pocket… and it should NOT need six more gigs of memory shipped in the box.

 
 

It’s also fun watching just how fast Adobe can run from a market they created. Flash has gone from a major tool in TV animation to a disaster. I dont think any of the studios using it have upgraded past CS3.

Lucky for them, their major competition loves to charge a 150% premium on the industry-level packages, so no-one is really switching, but no-one I know is upgrading either.

 
Xecky Gilchrist
 

Unless your product is a new book of rules for popular games, in which case your product may well be a game changer.

Don’t make me Hoyle! I’m nowhere near a turlet.

 
 

I know you’re under a NDA, but are the next gen nVidia GPU’s going to be co-marketed with the new HVAC systems I’ll need if I’m going to let these flamethrowers into my server room?

 
 

baldheaddork – interestingly, the new ATI Firestreams have passive heat sinks (no fans) for precisely the reason that the fans on those hot power hogs screw up the airflow in servers. I’m guessing the next Teslas will go the same route … but I was at Nvidia to see the new pro workstation cards, which have fans.

 
 

Flash has gone from a major tool in TV animation to a disaster.

I know one of the poor people tasked to say nice things about Flash. HA HA you poor fool. Or well-compensated fool. One of those.

 
 

FYWP.

In any case every time I have used an Adobe product in the past couple of years it has been with regret.

A valuable Firefox add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/433/

 
 

Nowwaitaminnit – I’m one of those marketing types. A few bullet points (because that’s how we communicate 🙂 )
– PR is not marketing. Stop confusing the two. Aristophanes kept it mostly straight, but some of the commenters are confoozled.
– Just because Adobe scrod your presentation (anybody know that Boston / scrod joke? Anyone? Sigh…) doesn’t mean it couldna been done better. Like:
– Instead of “this is a game-changer,” say “This version of Adobe Creative Suite delivers more speed, more power and some of the biggest improvements we’ve made in our technology since we started in the late 80s.”
– Instead of “literally everything you touch…” (ugh) how about “Almost every graphic artist in the world has used or are familiar with our tools, and the tools that aren’t ours have features and functionality inspired by our software. (mumblemumbledon’taskaboutcontentawarefillmumble)”

Sorry you spent your day with toolbags, D. Could be worse – you could be learning about Excel.

 
 

Long-term, nVidia is going to be useless. The whole GPU thing is stupid stupid stupid. The drivers suck–on any platform–and they are desperate to expand their market beyond hardcore video gaming. Intel’s inbuilt GPUs are fine for almost anything except hardcore gaming, and their drivers tend to not suck (at least on Linux).

However, if the industry has any sanity we’re going to move away from specialized, undocumented, proprietary chips and back towards generalized hardware accelerated by quality software–software that is easier to debug and fix. If the industry can tear itself away from this GPGPU “massive parallelism” bullshit–for which we have no real use, because no one is smart enough to solve the major problems with concurrency–I would hope that things like Gallium3D are the future. It’s certainly enough to do nice GUI animations and desktop composition, maybe with the assistance of a dedicated CPU that is not an I/O device (as current graphics cards are).

If there is any justice in the world nVidia will be stuck trying to convince hardcore gamers to install their latest $400 silicon clusterfuck and associated shitty driver software, and no one else. They are trying desperately to avoid that fate.

 
The Goddamn Batman Was Digital Before Digital Was Cool*
 

The invisible elephant in the room with the Adobe evangelist claiming that his corporate master/daddy/top invented everything up to and including the Six Million Dollar Man and laser toast** is Apple, of course, which regularly issues genuine game changers and doesn’t even care what Adobe says because their market cap is about that of the Gorn Hegemony. That leads the likes of this shill to do things on the order of decrying the iPad’s failure to support game-changing sites like Bang Bros. because, you know, if Flash becomes a thing of the past, Adobe will have to limp along with minor amusements like Photoshop and Acrobat.

*Cf.

**IA RLYEH

 
 

Furthermore, for image editing the freebies are coming along:

No need for Photoshop for most people:

http://www.gimp.org/

I’ve never gotten the hang of Illustrator but here’s a freebie:

http://www.inkscape.org/screenshots/index.php?lang=de

And I really wanna see what people can do with VVVV:

http://vvvv.org/tiki-index.php

 
 

This post is a game-changer, D. Thanks.

 
 

Echo, if you check back into this thread, perhaps you could answer the question I asked upthread, since you seem to have some insight into this stuff. Are the training seminars worth the money? Are they fun? Will the average Photoshop professional learn something? I’m genuinely curious now that I’m not a bazillion hours away from all of them.

 
 

So, does CS5 also not work when you’re not connected to the internet? Maybe it polls once a minute instead of based upon mouse clicks…

 
 

Not that I would know of course, but the internet connections are usually defeated fairly easily. Google is your friend.

 
 

Look, here’s the deal with Gimp and everything else competing with the evil empire that is Adobe. The competing products don’t really compete with Adobe products rather, they exist as an “alternative” of diminished utility. When you do this stuff for money, you pays your money and complain, usually under one’s breath at the desk.

 
 

It’s been a long time since I used Photoshop: I remember it being pretty easy for what I wanted to do – which is make silly bullshit. What are the complaints?

 
 

Has Photoshop done anything really “game-changing” in their last two updates? Because I’m not finding it. And other than totally rewriting their ActionScript language, same goes for Flash. Adobe’s 18-month update schedule can suck it, as far as i’m concerned.

Oh, and just so we all remember, Flash and Dreamweaver aren’t Adobe products. They’re Macromedia products that were *bought* by Adobe.

 
 

Photoshop’s last game-changer was when they introduced layers. Let’s see… was that in 3.0?

I used to have something positive to say about Adobe, way back when: ‘Well, at least they aren’t Quark’. Sadly, they pretty much are now.

-fred

 
 

I hope you got some good coffee for your troubles, D.

 
 

As a working photographer, I find the lens correction feature in CS5 nice, but hardly a game-changer. What is a *real* game changer is the upgrade cost from CS3. Damn near had a heart attack when I got the credit card bill.

As for GPUs, my Dell Core Duo 2 (E8400 cpu) rig uses an onboard 1 Gb Intel G45 chipset. Running under Win 7 x64, this sucker is screamingly fast and crunches pixels like I have never seen on an Intel system. Who gives a fig about video cards? They’re just an added cost as well as something else to break at precisely the wrong time.

 
 

I wouldn’t mind Our Corporate Overlords so very much if they didn’t suck ass. Oh, and if they showed less of a blatant disregard for the welfare of the public beyond the content of our wallets.

 
valkyr of science
 

ice weasel said,

Look, here’s the deal with Gimp and everything else competing with the evil empire that is Adobe. The competing products don’t really compete with Adobe products rather, they exist as an “alternative” of diminished utility. When you do this stuff for money, you pays your money and complain, usually under one’s breath at the desk.

Eh, it depends on what you’re using it for. My dad works on graphics for TV (he’s not a graphic artist, but some sort of playback engineer), and he uses Gimp. According to him, there are some functions for which Gimp is actually better than Photoshop, and others where it’s just more intuitive.

For the (relatively minor) stuff I’ve needed Gimp for, it’s never given me any trouble.

 
Oregon Beer Snob
 

I never thought any company could fill me with rage like microsoft does, but Adobe is sure trying.

And the Gimp has definitely improved over the last couple of years. If you’re just trying to “get by” with some webbish stuff and aren’t working with any outside orgs that insist you give them PSD files, it’s just fine. And as somebody says “Free is a very good price.”

 
 

I’m late for this one, but Andrew nailed it anyway, so I feel groovy.

Not much point in an nVidia NDA. By the time their gizmo has its broken hardware fixed by the 124th 120Mb patch, it’ll be marked down to $60 at Fry’s and they’ll have chosen four new integrated technologies to pioneer — and everything you learned a few days ago will have been abandoned. And the software that was written for their new gizmo will be on the rack of $5 jewel cases and the publishers won’t want to hear your bitching, either.

nVidia/Sound Blaster in 2012! We’re still working on the problems from 2008, and new ones constantly pop up and break our drivers, so let’s just throw away the entire country and go buy a new one with larger numbers in the ad copy!

 
 

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