Kevin Lynch: "There's still a lot to learn about how technology can assist meetings, particularly distributed meetings." [Werblog]
I've been waiting for somebody else to pick up on this and the OTHER Kevin did, so now I'm gonna run with it.
I just love it when technologists suddenly realize that there's a problem that their products don't solve or (god forbid) may even cause! I attribute this behavior to the fact that the technologists start to use their products themselves and suddenly find themselves in the role of END-USER!
This is happening to Dave Winer right now - as he tries and gets Harvard up and running - with blogging. Boy is he in for a surprise. :-)
Meanwhile back at Macromedia - it was apparent that Norm and Rob finally used one of their own products - the wonderfully simplistic Presedia 'traning'/presentation tool, which I consider to be a major milestone. With that one simple task, the world's largest multimedia tool company MAY now come to grips with just how gosh darn hard it is to produce multimedia. This may lead to new and better product development (or most probably acquisitions.)
Kevin blogging his experiences about doing cross-country meetings, and letting us all know what he learned led him to make the statement above. Hurray! Now we're going in the right direction! Not only is he grokking blogging, and how to use the community to disseminate knowledge and insights, but he's also using blogging to do their marketing, gently letting us know that Macromedia is changing.
Congradulations to Kevin, Rob, Norm and the rest of the team at Macromedia - at discovering what real humans want. Listen - there's nothing wrong with focusing on superhumans like Jim Collins, Joe Sparks, Stuart Sharpe, Roger Jones, Peter Mitchell, Ariel McNichol, Wes Middleton, etc.
But that gets tiring eventually, and I'd bet that both Macromedia and Adobe have hit the ceiling on how many multimedia artists and prodiucers there ARE out there. Now it's time to move down the pyramid. Welcome to the world of normal humans.
