A well known Adobe evangelist is forced to say good bye to his employer. He was notified about being fired while vacationing in Mexico. Should he be a pregnant woman, Adobe wouldn’t be allowed by law to fire him remotely…
Duane posted a blog about this important event in his life.

First, I wish all the best to Duane in his future career in both software development and music. Not the end of the world.

Being a professional, Duane posted a politically correct Thank you note for Adobe for being a great employer. But let’s re-read the reason for firing Duane: “Adobe is doing a major refocus and as part of that, many of us “enterprise” types are no longer required.”

Adobe is planning to turn its back on the enterprises… Back to selling Photoshop boxes (or subscriptions?).

Let’s see… Their heavy-weight and way overpriced enterprise product called LiveCycle didn’t make it.
They had a more useful server-side product called LiveCycle Data Services, which was seriously overpriced too. On multiple occasions I’ve been posting blogs and talking to Adobe’s employees asking to lower the price and stop killing this good product. But who am I to give advices to Adobe. The lead of the LCDS development team left the firm a couple of years ago.

Now Adobe’s claiming that they are into cloud. I have my reservations. You can’t just nuke one server-side product after another and then resurrect from ashes in the market where such 800-poung gorillas as Amazon, Google, and other big guys already feel at home. Who’s going to build your cloud if you’re firing best people?

I don’t like firing of Duane for yet another reason. It shows that Adobe doesn’t care about their best people. Is abandoning of the some enterprise solution product lines a reason for getting rid of good people? Don’t they think that Duane could have been re-trained to something else? I’m a partner in a rather small consulting company, but we’d never even think of firing our key developers when they are in between projects. We keep them busy while something else comes up. It’s so easy to destroy a team, but so difficult and expensive to find good people regardless of what technical skills are required. Even more so, finding an instructor who gets 4.96/5 is mission impossible. This is simply a proof that Adobe’s management lost their feel of reality, which is a pity.

The chances are very slim that I’ll be attending Adobe MAX next year. It’s a place where the top management of the company makes fools of 5000 attendees. This serious change in the company’s direction as well as laying off 750 people takes time to prepare. Adobe’s top management knew about it BEFORE MAX. And Kevin Lynch had guts to go on stage and not even mention serious changes in the company’s roadmap.

Being a part of the community Flash Player Platform expert group I’ve attended this special meeting (during MAX) where Adobe was asking for our feedback. No one in the room has mentioned that some drastic changes were being cooked.

Another one bites the dust…and another one…and another one…and another one bites the dust…