Adobe's flexible gymnast

GIZMO GALLERY

Global corporations try different pricing and bundling schemes when it comes to selling their wares; some innovative, some not so.

One such infamous "pricing innovation" is what is called the Gillette Syndrome where you don't pay much for the razor and bundled blades, but pay a steep price for blade replacements. Other examples abound in the FMCG, computer peripherals, imaging and photography industries.

A notable exception is Adobe Systems Inc. When the company released the Adobe Acrobat suite in the early 1990s, it implemented a clever strategy: it distributed its PDF (portable document format) viewing tool, the Acrobat Reader, for free.

With this, the customers could read PDF versions of documents for free and could get a hang of some of its compelling features like protection of document integrity, rendition of fonts and images and the lightness of files created.

Soon, this viewing tool got widely adopted. Adobe had worked backwards to occupy top-of-mind recall too. It was then able to convince customers to pay top-dollar for its imaging, video and publishing offerings.

However, to say that Adobe's success (it has $1.2 billion revenues today, with earnings in excess of $230 million) is only due to this distribution and pricing masterstroke would be denying usefulness of the product.

One such product is the Adobe's Acrobat 6.0 suite, which is on review today. Some background first: Adobe Acrobat has dominated the electronic document sphere for some years now and has been the de facto tool to share documents online without compromising on the integrity of a document.

This is particularly relevant to enterprise and government users who have paperless processes at workplace. Acrobat allows a user "" with the click of an icon "" to create a PDF document from Microsoft Office applications like Word or Excel, digitally sign the document, take printouts and make comments without damaging the original document "" just like on physical paper.

Acrobat 6.0 takes the product ahead in terms of a better interface and some nifty features for top-end users. For instance, Adobe also redesigned the main Acrobat interface in the 6.0 with detachable menus clustered by functions such as "Review And Comment", "Create PDF", and "Advanced Editing". A Help bar sits on the right for the novice.

Some functions, such as aggregating several different document types into one PDF file have become simple. Just select the documents in their original formats (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, or even AutoCAD and image files in several formats) and Acrobat loads the applications, produce the PDFs and assembles them. Adobe also designed an intuitive workflow to make it simpler to distribute PDFs, track and audit changes, and insert comments in a PDF.

There are several online complaints from users who experienced trouble installing the Acrobat 6.0, but it was smooth for me. According to the cribs, you could run into trouble with the installation if you already have Acrobat 5.0 installed and you might even need to uninstall the previous version manually. No such troubles for me, even though I installed the program on a machine with Acrobat 5.0.

With the Acrobat 6.0, Adobe has adopted a three-tier selling strategy: it has three versions of the product aimed at the beginner to the professional with prices escalating with a telescoping set of features. The range starts with "Acrobat Elements" aimed at the novice priced in India at Rs 1,400. This is basically a PC-only application for Microsoft Office that allows one-click creation of PDF files.

"Acrobat Standard", aimed at business professionals who need to circulate documents for review. In addition to the Office PDF-creation features of "Elements", Standard saves individual Web pages or Web sites to PDF with a click, while retaining hyperlinks embedded on the pages. Available for both Mac and PC, this version is priced at Rs 15,600 and Rs 4,900 if you are upgrading from Acrobat 4.0 or 5.0.

Finally, "Acrobat Professional" adds industrial-strength features for creating, editing and restructuring PDF files. Tools herein include those for creating PDF forms; automatically generating layered PDF documents from engineering applications; previewing colour separations; and setting crop marks and bleeds. This platinum version comes at Rs 23,500 and costs Rs 7,400 per user when upgrading from previous versions.

(The writer works with content company perZuade. His views are personal and may not be endorsed by his employers, the company's investors, customers or vendors. Comments may be sent to josey@perzuade.com)