One of the key marketing success factors for Adobe has been the uniformly high quality of Adobe’s written documentation coupled with the huge number of books and websites that are available for graphic designers or photo-editors looking for some creative ideas or operational help on key products like Illustrator or Photoshop. Look at the numbers:
Adobe Photoshop has 1632 books listed at Barnes and Noble
Corel PhotoPaint has 12 books listed at Barnes and Noble
Adobe Illustrator has 385 books listed at Barnes and Noble
Corel Draw has 360 books listed at Barnes and Noble
Adobe Photoshop has 109 million hits on Google
Corel PhotoPaint has 2 million hits on Google
Adobe Illustrator has 58million hits on Google
Corel Draw has 8 million hits on Google.
Now this did not happen by accident. While Corel, the initial leader in both bitmap and vector illustration software, lavished millions on an Annual extravaganza, Adobe put its marketing money into books and websites devoted to Illustrator, Photoshop, and other Adobe graphics software. And the effects were notable. Despite having arguably superior ease of use in PhotoPaint over Photoshop and Draw with a much broader feature and goodies set than Illustrator in the late 1990’s, Adobe products more than held their own against Corel’s. And a good part of the difference was all those websites and books explaining how to do things in Adobe products.
The reason I raise this point is the change in documentation in all software products and Adobe in particular. First, in the CS3 bundles, written documentation costs extra – from $20-40 dollars depending on which suite/bundle you are buying. A nominal charge – but consider the alternatives. Adobe’s electronic HELP documentation is not equal to its written documentation. Bottom line I consistently find the written documentation easier to use or more comprehensible than the equivalent HELP file even though the two are nearly identical. The biggest difference is that the written documentation continues on while the HELP file breaks at each Web page(its is Web based). The result is I can see 2-4 topics at a time in the written documentation. Also I find the written index a bit faster to search than the Web-based HELP file.
But the biggest beef I have with Adobe (and a lot of others’ documentation) is that it has gone live on the Web. I know this has the advantage that the latest and greatest is always available on the Web. It also allows Adobe (and other vendors) to provide detailed Related Information or Video Tips/Tutorials that they simply could not fit on their install disk without it becoming Mammoth in size. But there are 4 big downsides to Web-based Docs:
1)with my laptop going every place now I often cannot get a) a fast connection or b)any connection at all to the Web;
2)I can scratch little notes in my written documentaion; very little Web documentation is personally Wiki-ized in an equivalent fashion;
3)a book never runs out of power;
4)I am afraid that the electronic documentation has prematurely become Adobe’s most favored documentation.
Now to Adobe’s great relief they have the phalanx of books and websites to support them as they make this shift to predominately electronic documentation; but in the process they may be giving up some of their Documentation Advantage.