SAN JOSE, CA—The Acrobat team at Adobe Systems are excited about this week’s update to their Acrobat Reader product, the ubiquitous software that allows PDF documents to be viewed on home computers.
“People think PDFs are just these static documents that don’t need to change much”, said John Gelsen, the manager in charge of the product update team. “But they couldn’t be more wrong. We’re constantly making improvements.”
Many of the improvements involve embedding pop-up promotions for Adobe’s cloud subscription service. Others improvements include updating the security of the software.
“Some people think it’s ridiculous that there needs to be frequent security updates for a PDF reader. Well, I think those people are ridiculous,” Gelsen said.
“I don’t think people understand the thrill that me and my team get when we make an important update and it goes to literally tens of millions of users around the world. I click a button, and bam! The little reader icon is jumping up and down demanding your immediate attention, or a popup box is blasted all over your screen.”
“Actually, I think our users enjoy being totally powerless to what we’re going to do to them. Users might cry out ‘no’, but their fingers click ‘yes’.”
“Oh, God! I’m going to go push an update out right now,” Gelsen said.