Details - InterAKT Site :: Open Letter to Adobe and former Interakt

To whom it may concern,

a long-time Adobe and Interakt customer, I have noticed the latest acquisition of Interakt by Adobe with great interest. Please allow me some personal remarks.

Let me congratulate you on this acquisition, as Interakt's products have set highest standards in terms of innovation and quality. Interakt's founders and staff who obviously will now also be part of Adobe have been delightful and extremely dedicated, enthusiastic people with great merits. To everyone who had the pleasure of doing business with Interakt over the past years, Interakt was an outstanding partner, delivering products tailored to the needs of their clients with very alert and swift support.

I do hope that, besides the physical assets acquired by Adobe, these qualities will continue to flourish as products and staff merge into the Adobe corporation.

In addition to being a happy Interakt customer, I had the honor of being invited to be part of a group of developers known as Team InterAKT who were frequently asked by Interakt to provide ideas, opinions, and expertise for general business and product development and to contribute to new products in the concept, alpha and beta stages. Thus, the members of this team have been in close contact with Interakt and have additionally been active in the support forums assisting other users. This form of community has been of the keys to Interakt's success: listening closely to and working closely with its customers.

The acquisition now fails to continue this customer involvement, au contraire, it confronts us with the immediate retirement of substantial part of the products portfolio and the imminent discontinuation of support within six months.

While the acquisition may entail exciting new opportunities for customers, the immediate demise of large part of Interakt's product portfolio is very painful for all those who have come to rely on the product range. Please be aware that the immediate discontinuation of the products, most notably the "AJAX Toolbox", which was only released a month ago, can only be regarded by the existing customers as a decision that only takes business strategy into account while fully ignoring the interests of customers who have purchased the product or even been active in contributing to its development. Since the product was still on its way to maturity, and since it so heavily depends on functioning properly in frequently updated internet browsers, and even more so in Dreamweaver, any continued use of the product and professional deployment in websites for our clients would be negligent, especially when it is certain that the upcoming Spry framework will be the main AJAX platform for Adobe, making a switch to this particular framework inevitable within a short amount of time.

By choosing to announce the immediate discontinuation of the products, you did not give us any time to adjust and make according decisions on the further use of the product. In more complex websites, the imminent discontinuation of support in the announced six months period of time requires us to take immediate action to switch to other solutions in order to safeguard proper functioning of the websites in the future. This causes extra efforts and significant changes in our work, which you probably were not aware of. A longer transition period, which allows customers to adjust to the given lifecycle of the products, would have significantly improved the situation we are now in.

I assume you understand that former Interakt customers are now very worried about the future of the products now known as "Kollection". Since we've seen similar products (namely Alapi Behaviors, and Attain Objects - later known as CourseBuilder) acquired by Macromedia, sold for a short time and then retired as well, we are afraid that this may be the destiny of "Kollection" as well. After all, Adobe stands for building quality software, not quality software e

Hallo Bernd

Thank you very much for this "customer view". Your letter expresses all the concerns that we, the loyal Interakt customers, beta testers and community, have right now.

We definitely need answers from Adobe/Interakt on what we, the clientbase, can expect in the future. The sooner, the better.
Your suggestion, to transfer the future development of the discontinued products to other companies or open source could be a way.

Let's fight for "our right to Interakt".

Willi

Very nice letter, Bernd. It expresses my sentiments as well. Thanks for writing it.

--Meredith

You some up my feeling exactly, except I would not have been so diplomatic.

Excellent piece Bernd. I've only just found out about the acquisition in a newsletter I've just received. And what a shock this is. I did actually suggest a couple of months ago while helping with the beta testing of AJAX Toolbox that I wouldn't be surprised if Adobe had an eye on them and would do this very thing... but I certainly didn't expect it so soon. And the killer news is the instant dropping of many of the products especially AJAX Toolbox when it's barely out of nappies.

My big question is regarding the re-installing of any of the products, especially the discontinued ones as it requires username and password back to Interakt's site. Will this continue forever? I have a niggly feeling it won't. And having invested a lot of money in just about every product they've ever produced I'm worried that should I ever need to reinstall then I won't be able to - and nearly every site I've ever developed relies on these extensions.

And the features on the wishlist for AJAX Toolbox I guess will never happen now which is a really big shame. And what about Kollection 4 which I know lots of us are very much looking forward to?

Could someone from (what was) Interakt come back to us on this?

Can I also finish with a huge well done to all the Interakt staff and developers. They were by far the best company I've ever dealt with for product quality, features, support, speed of support, etc. I only hope that Adobe can continue this.

Jon.

Thank you Bernd for expressing in your letter what most of us are feeling, I totally agree with you.

Ivan Saavedra

 Bernd, eloquent as ever.

I wholeheartedly agree and would like to add that my VERY recent purchase of Ajax Toobar and MXshop where based on the future of these products, I wanted them now so I had a head start when MXKart4 and updated Ajax products got released.

I now feel fully ripped off! Its hardly been a month! I purchased 4th August...

The lack of information and proper thought from Adobe fills me with dread for the long term development of the tools we have grown to love and of dreamweaver itself!

Long Live Interakt!

I am very disapointed to see several of the products that are being discontinued. W use many of them in our sites and have not been able to find other simular products.

Also, we really needed to buy CSV Import-Export yesterday but found it discontinued with no options to purchase so our trial has expired and there is nothing we can do.

I understand their wish to discontinue the products but I wish they had given some notice so that we could have purchased the products we needed with the understanding that there would be no support after six months.

Even better, they could have offered the extentions as a free product to show good will.

I agree to the letter just written!! However it would be nice if InterAKT owners will make available for FREE the extensions that were discontinued due to the Adobe purchase of the company....to show your goodwill and committment to your members. You can do this even for a range of time - from a couple of hours to a couple of days maybe (since we as members, were never given the heads up that an acquisition will be in the works). I feel like we are left high and dry after investing so much and being loyal clients.

Just give us MX Shop, Kommerce or other discontinued product for free for a time period then get rid of it....PLEASE!!!!

Bernd, you explained the issues very well. Especcially the work it will take to redesign sites for the entire customer base, while everything was tailor made to work with the Interakt behaviours, names sessions etc. It is going to take forever and even worse I cannot think of any party that has extensions that will allow so many application developments to be made with such ease. Just think about user logins for example... everyone has different ideas about them and everyone implements them differently. With the full set of features at the disposal by all the interakt products is was 9 out of 10 times easy to develop applications yourself instead of buying third party applications that will never fit into the site completely.

In my opinion the ajax toolbox, MX Kollektion 4 and MX Kommerce 4 were to become the greatest applications around. Like many others I spent a lot of time in the development area of these products, waiting for new releases coming out that incorporated all the things that where discussed in the development forums, loving evey minute while playing around with the new releases almost felt like going to the carnaval for the first time over and over again. Also in this field there are no alternatives, no choices, no future plans. In the case of the Ajax toolbox with the current tools have already become second nature in my application development processes however like many others the question rises. What to do, continue using products of which you know they will only have a lifespan of 6 months, or start looking at alternatives now and do some damage control.

Jon had some very interesting questions too, and also in my opinion should receive a clear answer on questions like: future installations of purchased products possible with activation? Will we get the manual activation codes for them? Will the interakt behaviours be supported in any future releases of what adobe cookes up even though the products are discontinued without notice?

To the former Interakt people, I was one crazy ride over the past few years, making a lot of difference in the way web applications where created, setting standards in ease of web development where no one even thought of them before. The internet development world changed for the better each and every time a new or upgraded product came out. I hope you will continue to make a difference in the adobe world that allows for some radical products to be developed.

To move on, I would like to hear suggestions from other beta testers, interakt customers and the former Interakt employees where to look next. You are one of the greatest teams I worked with over the past years, and surely there must be some way to preserve and extend the applications that have been built and the effort that went into them.

Yours truly,
Richard

I now consider myself to have been conned. At the time of putting the Ajax Toolbox and Kollection Pro products for sale it appears negotiations were well advanced and people have bought these products which are now discontinued. The products are immature in many ways and have defects. They have no future and doubtless some features I have paid for will be incorporated into the next Dreamweaver and I will have to pay for them again in the upgrade costs. Vague 6 month promises are inadequate.

The only honourable thing is to offer refund in full those who paid for these products and any other ones discontinued and paid for since negotiations began. Many, like me, who purchased Kollection 3 and the upgrade to Kollection Pro and Ajax Toolbox have the other products that make up the new Kollection so the upgrade offer is insulting and totally worthless.