Monday, January 02, 2012

Adobe Community Help

This is a personal blog post.  Since I, Duane Nickull, no longer working at Adobe, I have received a ton of emails from people asking for help on various Adobe related technical issues.  I don't want to sound uncaring or unsympathetic, but the reality is that I cannot offer these services for free anymore.  Adobe has made a conscious decision to cut down on the number of employees helping their community and customers.   I was one of those and if I continue to offer free help, I working for free.

Please understand that this is not a personal attack, retribution or in any way something I am doing to be vengeful.  It is simple cause and effect.  I want to thank the 98% majority of you who respect this and understand why I am no longer offer free, unpaid consulting, development, tutorials or help around Adobe products.  For the few of you who have issues with it, please bring it up with Adobe.  It is their responsibility to ensure adequate support for their technologies and perhaps it will do you and them some good if they can let them know where they can be more effective.  

Uberity.com is my new company and we are working on something cool and new.  At the same time however, if you are really stuck and need consulting or IT services for LiveCycle ES, Flex Mobile Development or AIR development, Uberity does offer these services for a very reasonable rate.   Simple email info (at) uberity (dot) com.   Every Uberity employee is either a MAX Master, evangelist or top engineer from an Adobe product.  We employ the best of the best and would love to help you for a fair price.  We are open for business.

Once again, I also want to point out that there is no anger intended here.  This is just a simple boundary that needs to be set in order to help manage expectations.  I am not ruling out that I may print some tutorials in the future either but these will be done on a less frequent basis.

Best wishes to everyone for a prosperous 2012!!


7 comments:

  1. Makes sense Duane. I look forward to seeing what Uberity produces.

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  2. Dear Duane. I'm sad to hear you lost your job at Adobe. You were by far the most inspiring individual I met at MAX. I wish you all the best at your new company. - Faisal Saddique

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  3. Faisal:

    Thank you. It was not just me. A ton of really talented people got let go. This is one of the strangest things I ever saw. People who had earned the company tons of $$ and good publicity, very skilled and likeable people are now gone. Your kind words are very welcomed right now!

    Duane

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  4. Duane, couldn't agree more with your sentiment, and indeed at the challenge now facing Adobe developers... but one correction from an English native speaker...

    End of first paragraph
    "if I continue to offer free help, I working for free"

    Should be

    "if I continue to offer free help, I would be working for free"

    Really interested to hear what Uberity are doing and how that could give me an excuse to get to Whistler.

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  5. Keep on truckin Duane, you rock! :)

    I think Adobe really shot themselves in the foot over this whole thing - but I guess that's what you get when you let your company be run by stock market analysts instead of valuing your customers and products.

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  6. This was a surprising and very disappointing move on Adobe's part. I'm sorry, Duane. I know you'll do well, and I'm always around for anything I can help with. Oh, and of course you shouldn't work for free! Your talent has got real value.

    Rock on!

    Russ

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  7. Thanks all! We're already into development mode at Uberity and breaking ground with some new ideas. I love being an entrepreneur again!

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