Adobe interview: Bob Wulff, Sr. VP for Acrobat Engineering

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Bob Wulff, Sr. VP for Acrobat Engineering, has been involved with the Adobe technology from the earliest days and has become one of the steady hands that’s guided its development through successive generations. He talked recently with AcrobatUsers.com about the recently announced Acrobat 8, the impact of the Macromedia acquisition and more.

Kurt Foss: Adobe announced Acrobat 8 on September 18, and says it's slated to begin shipping in November. How much work remains for you and the Engineering team—what kinds of issues and final tweaks are you dealing with?

Bob Wulff: "At this point in the project, we're really dealing with the final fine-tuning of the product. We're doing lots of testing, only fixing critical bugs that would have a negative customer impact. We also are spending time on the final localizations of the product—we simultaneously ship four languages for our tier 1 products, and then the other languages follow soon thereafter.

From a feature- and a user-interface point of view, the work's done. We're testing all of the different features of the product. And there are many, so it takes a long time to go through and thoroughly test them."

Foss: Who is involved in the pre-release testing of Acrobat and Reader?

Wulff: "We have three different groups. We have our own internal quality-engineering group, many who have been involved with Acrobat since version 1.0. Second, we have our beta testers—outside customers—many who also have been with us since the product's very early days. They do a great job testing. We pour over their bug reports as they enter them; we look at every single one. And third, we also have a lot of internal Adobe testing. One of the nice things about Acrobat is that everyone at Adobe—with 5,000 or so employees now—uses the product. We get lots of internal comments and bug reports from people throughout the company."

Foss: Having been through all eight Acrobat product releases, what was different for you this time? How did the challenges with Acrobat 8 compare to and differ from those with earlier versions?

Wulff: "I think every release of Acrobat tends to have its own personality. With version 1.0, we went from having nothing to inventing a whole new product category. As I look through the releases, Acrobat 8—by which I mean the family of products, including Reader—was probably a little unique for a couple reasons.

Acrobat 7 has been such an incredibly successful product, from the point of view of customers, features, performance and revenue. We really hit the ball out of the park. A lot of people have asked 'What are you going to do now? How are you going to follow that up?' I think everyone will see that Acrobat 8 is a great follow to Acrobat 7, with many great features.

Something that's a lot different with Acrobat 8 compared to previous versions was how much the outside world has changed around us. Look at what's happening with [Microsoft] Vista, Office 2007, Internet Explorer 7, Intel chips on the Macintosh, 64-bit machines, emergence of hosted services and so on—what I call 'outside forces'—that are things we have to deal with. We have had to allocate much of our engineering and QE resources to making sure that Acrobat runs well on these new platforms. I think if you add up the number of new platforms that have happened in the last 12 months and/or the next 12, there's a lot more change from a platform perspective than we've seen with other releases.

The third thing is the acquisition of Macromedia—that was a big event in our company's history and it's certainly changed our ability to add new features to the product. We're able to do things that we could not have done before, such as adding Web conferencing to Acrobat and Reader—with Acrobat Connect—which to me is one of the most exciting features we have in the entire product. We didn't even start that project until after the acquisition was completed. We were able to add it to the product line pretty quickly. As we go through a product release cycle, we do the best we can at the beginning to come up with all of the features we think we're going to need, but we always like to leave some spare cycles near the end because we know things are going to come up that we could not predict. I think Connect is a good example of that.

The planning process for Acrobat 8 began with the release of Acrobat 7, so we were halfway through the entire cycle by the time the acquisition happened in December. Had we not left ourselves a little bit of room for those unpredictable opportunities that arise, we would not have been able to put that feature in."

Foss: How do you decide on a balance of adding new features that continue to evolve the program without creating an application that, due to its myriad capabilities, is seen by some as bloatware?

Wulff: "I think there are a couple different answers to that question. First, we spent a lot of time on Acrobat 8 trying to improve and to streamline the user interface. There are a lot of features in there. We took a just-in-time philosophy to the user interface where you're not presented with everything all of the time, but still have easy access to the various elements as you need them and when it's appropriate. I think the user-interface team did a great job on Acrobat 8, and that's something we'll continue to invest in heavily in the future.

Second, you're also seeing the Acrobat product line turn into a product family. Not everyone needs all of the features, so we want to make sure we have a set of products where the feature set, price and the user interface is appropriate for that customer. Acrobat Standard and Professional are the most common ones, but there's the simpler version called Elements and the higher-end version called Acrobat 3D. Our goal is to make sure that the right features get to the right customers.

A lot of people think of Acrobat as the free features they see in Reader, and there are a lot more Readers out there than there are copies of Acrobat. There are a lot of people who really do need the more professional and high-end features, so it's a balance. How do you go all the way from your average consumer who just needs the Reader to look at their tax forms or something like that, all the way up to a high-end professional who does need all the depth and sophistication of some of the Acrobat features? It's a challenge, but we think we're up to it. With the Macromedia acquisition, we had the chance to increase the number of experienced, user-interface designers to help us present a nice, clean user interface."

Foss: Speaking of the Adobe acquisition of Macromedia less than a year ago, how did that — occurring when Acrobat 8 already well along in development — impact your work? In particular, what Engineering challenges did you face with the first product release that integrated technologies from the two companies (Breeze being rebranded as Acrobat Connect)?

Wulff: "I now manage the engineering teams for Breeze and the Flash Media Server, in addition to Acrobat. The former Macromedia teams are still located in San Francisco, so I spend a lot more time there these days. The great news is that the teams blended very well, and I was happily amazed that once you got down to the engineers and the product managers, trying to figure out how we were going to take Breeze and put it into Acrobat and Reader, a common vision was developed very quickly. We had a team based in Seattle do much of the work, so it really was a San Jose-San Francisco-Seattle joint effort. And we have other Acrobat engineering teams around the world, including a very big team in India. And we recently opened an office in Beijing, China—they've been helping us a lot with our localization testing for this release.

You get very good at reading e-mail pretty much all day long and having phone calls with groups around the world early in the morning and late at night. That's just part of the new lifestyle of having a development organization where the sun never sets. We use Breeze—now Acrobat Connect—a lot. That works out extremely well."

Foss: Acrobat has moved from a product to a family of products and now to a brand. Can you share with the global user community any of the vision for where things are headed from here (Acrobat 8) in the world of Acrobat and PDF?

Wulff: "There are a couple different paths that we'll be moving ahead on. There are a lot of PDF files in the world and there's a lot of copies of Reader and Acrobat. We need to make sure that the base functionality of the product continues to work well, as the world moves forward and new pieces of hardware and new operating systems continue to come out. There's the basic viewing, printing and searching that we always want to make sure works really well for our customers.

Acrobat 8 has a taste of some new features that are really just the beginning of what you'll see in the future. A good example is the integration of Connect with Acrobat. That's really Step 1 in what I think will be a long and very exciting journey. Now that we're almost a year into the integration of Adobe and Macromedia, I think in future versions of Acrobat you'll see a tighter integration of other Macromedia technologies into the Acrobat product line. An example might be something like Flash where we have a little bit of integration now, but you can imagine doing a lot more exciting things with that. A third area certainly would be hosted services. There are just some natural places where it would make a lot of sense to have some of the Acrobat functionality for the file storage up on the server rather than on the local desktop. Over time I think you could imagine more services that we take from the desktop and put on a hosted service.

Our message to the Acrobat community is: We're not done yet! We have lots of features that we've talked about for many releases that for whatever reason we didn't have the time to implement for Acrobat 8. And we keep thinking of new ideas every day. We're going to be doing this for a long time to come. There still are lots of great ideas out there for Acrobat."