{"id":12317,"date":"2007-04-15T21:07:03","date_gmt":"2007-04-15T21:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.adobe.com\/jnackdev\/2007\/04\/some-perspective-on-how-adobe-apps-are-built.html"},"modified":"2007-04-15T21:07:03","modified_gmt":"2007-04-15T21:07:03","slug":"some_perspective_on_how_adobe_apps_are_bui","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/2007\/04\/15\/some_perspective_on_how_adobe_apps_are_bui\/","title":{"rendered":"Some perspective on how Adobe apps are built"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Mordy Golding, who spent a couple of cycles working as an Illustrator PM, has <a href=\"http:\/\/rwillustrator.blogspot.com\/2007\/04\/how-illustrator-gets-its-features.html\">posted some perspective<\/a> on how Adobe applications are created.&#160; It&#8217;s a bit of a long read, but Mordy touches on some common questions, including: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>How does the team decide which features to build &amp; for what markets?&#160; For example, how is something like Flash integration weighed against something like N-color printing support?<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Why doesn&#8217;t the team have more  resources to put towards various priorities? <\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Why doesn&#8217;t Adobe typically add functionality in small dot releases?<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>If a feature exists in one application (e.g. the OpenType palette in Illustrator, or separations in InDesign), why is it hard to move to other ones?<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;m never quite sure how much of this people outside the company will find interesting, vs. thinking &quot;Just get it done, guys.&quot;&#160; (I bounce between those poles myself.)<\/p>\n<p>As for resources, I think a couple of points are worth making:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Very often, products don&#8217;t get staffed in accordance with the money they bring in.&#160; Photoshop, for example, doesn&#8217;t get anything like the  number of engineers you&#8217;d expect based on revenue.&#160; Why?&#160; Because the revenue is needed to fund new areas of development that may not turn a profit for a while.&#160; Years ago, I&#8217;m told, the PostScript group (then the big bread winner) resented having to fund the dinky little applications group.&#160; Clearly, though, that was the right move for the future.&#160; At present it can be frustrating to know that you could do <em>Kickass\/Long-Requested Feature X<\/em> if you had just one or two extra bodies (<em>very<\/em> frustrating) , but that&#8217;s the nature of the biz. \n<\/li>\n<li>Although we all clamor for more engineers &amp; QE folks, without whom we can&#8217;t build anything, it&#8217;s probably good that we&#8217;re constrained.&#160; Otherwise, we&#8217;d go nuts building features, resulting in tons of complexity.&#160;That is, we&#8217;d be knocking ourselves out to serve customers, but rapid unchecked growth would probably overwhelm just about everyone.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Mordy Golding, who spent a couple of cycles working as an Illustrator PM, has posted some perspective on how Adobe applications are created.&#160; It&#8217;s a bit of a long read, but Mordy touches on some common questions, including: How does the team decide which features to build &amp; for what markets?&#160; For example, how is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12317"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jnack.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}