As announced on Twitter, 33 Sticks has decided to no longer create publicly available Extensions for Adobe Launch.
I’ve made the decision that @33Sticks will no longer create public Extensions for Adobe Launch.
Blog post to follow with why I’ve made this decision if you are interested.
— jason thompson (@usujason) March 7, 2019
While the company has taken an informed decision against creating publicly available Extensions, 33 Sticks will continue to build private Extensions that will be made freely available to our clients, as well as work directly with Adobe customers to build private Extensions for their unique business requirements and challenges.
Why did 33 Sticks come to this decision?
Having been involved with Adobe Lunch since its Alpha release and having the experience of building multiple Extensions for the public marketplace, we identified three major concerns that led to the decision to discontinue our program of creating publicly available Extensions for Adobe Launch.
- 33 Sticks: Are we in a position to properly support a public product?
- Adobe Customers: Does an open marketplace have any negative effects on Adobe customers?
- Adobe: Is there a potential impact to the Adobe brand?
33 Sticks
Creating new things is really fun but with creation comes great responsibility.
The basics of it is that most individuals/companies shouldn’t be creating products for public consumption unless they are in a position to support/maintain/mature the product post launch.
It’s like making a baby, walking out the door, and saying “good luck with that.”
— jason thompson (@usujason) March 7, 2019
The Internet is cluttered with tools, sites, all sorts of things that were created and then forgotten. Building an Extension for Adobe Launch is actually the easy part, the hard part, and the part that makes one a true product owner, is what happens after you have created the Extension.
Do we have a way to offer support to our users? How will they contact us? How do we ensure support tickets are followed up on?
Do we have a product roadmap in place for ensuring we evolve the product so that it continues to provide value as the needs of the market change?
Do we have people who can own the product from a security perspective to ensure that we are putting out a product that will do no harm?
The answer to most of the questions we asked was ‘no.’ Currently 33 Sticks is not a product company and creating products for public consumption, without a foundation to support that product after the launch would be careless and would run counter to the 33 Sticks culture.
Adobe Customers
We have a very real concern for Adobe customers, even those Adobe customers that are not clients of 33 Sticks. What impact will a fully open marketplace have on them?
This will definitely be an issue for Adobe later this year and I don’t think there is a good solution now that they’ve accepted Extensions from 3rd parties. There will need to be a way to mark an extension as unsupported/deprecated, what versions of turbine it supports, etc.
— Philip Lawrence (@_MisterPhilip) March 7, 2019
Adobe
With an open marketplace, we can foresee a marketplace that is crowded with mediocre Extensions, and potentially dangerous Extensions that introduce security holes, impact data collection, or damage the user experience. This will no doubt reflect on the Adobe brand as much, if not more than it reflects on the Extension developer.
With that said, it’s a tough spot for Adobe. If you look at other solutions in the market, many fully control their extension catalog which means they have extensions that are woefully outdated because the solution provider just doesn’t have the resources to maintain an extensive and updated catalog. Having the Adobe Launch Extension Catalog open to 3rd parties, it makes having an extensive catalog much easier but the downside is you potentially lose control over the quality of the products that are offered in the marketplace.
With the smart brains within the Adobe product organization, we are confident that they already know all of these things and have a strategy for how to address these concerns.
We have plans to improve the marketplace to help resolve some of these concerns. These are common problems for platforms though and we’ll work through them. I respect/appreciate the stance of not releasing something that doesn’t have committed support.
— Aaron Hardy (@Aaronius) March 7, 2019
We are huge believers in the future of Adobe Launch, we believe that the Extension framework is an ideal solution for replacing custom code which often dooms an implementation, and we will continue to support the industry by helping Adobe customers build private Extensions and assisting Adobe product partners in building public Extensions.
If you are a SaaS vendor, an agency, or an individual, our goal is not to discourage you from building public Extensions for Adobe Launch. Our goal is more to challenge you to question if you have the ability to commit to maintaining the Extension longterm, if you are committed to building Extensions that ensure’s the safety of your users, and your are committed to providing timely support for a large public market of Adobe customers. If you can confidently answer ‘yes’ then by all means, build away. If you answer ‘yes but not at scale,’ then think about making your Extensions private for a controlled number of customers you can be confident in supporting.