A long, strange trip to Adobe

I've traveled 100 miles from my New Hampshire office to attend a product demo at Adobe's offices in Newton, Massachusetts. I arrive 20 minutes early, so I have plenty of time to observe the austere reception area while I wait. It's a large, open room with tiny, '50s retro chairs and a small glass coffee table. To my left, far off in a corner, a half dozen small displays sprout up from the floor on silver pedestal poles of different heights, each monitor tilted skyward.

To my right I see a wall with embedded monitors that are dark. In front of me sits a bowl of fruit - but no magazines or vendor literature of any kind. The bookcase to my right holds no books. I ask the receptionist where the books are. "It's always been empty as long as I've been here," she says. There is, in fact, not a thing to read anywhere in sight.

If it seems strange that a business built on the design and layout of words and graphics would have a lobby cleansed of those objects, the pretext for the meeting is just as strange. Four people from Compterworld are attending this meeting but I am the only one physically present. The others have dialed into a conference call and are following the presentation and product demo online.

One editor has called in from San Francisco - an interesting bit of trivia considering that some of the Creative Suite team had flown in from the San Francisco Bay area to give this presentation. Meanwhile, not one person from Adobe's Newton office is present. The office is simply our rendezvous point.

For a 90 minute overview of the next release of Creative Suite, four people have travelled 3,000 miles, schlepped at least five laptops and a tangle of cables and accessories through airport security and set up a conference call with Computerworld editors, most of whom were not physically present. While it's nice to have face to face meetings, I think in retrospect we probably should have done this one online.

As for the product, it was the next release of Creative Suite, which from what I saw will have some pretty compelling new features. In 90 minutes we barely scratched the surface. I wish I could say more -the details are under nondisclosure - but beta versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth CS4 are available at the Adobe Labs Web site.

UPDATE 6/6/2008:

According to an Adobe spokesperson, lobby furnishings appeared a bit sparse because the company is in the process of moving to a new, $44 million facility nearby.