I've been running Adobe Acrobat 5 for the longest time now. I'm not even sure what the latest version of their free 'reader' is - I couldn't care less.

Don't get me wrong - I love the idea of a ubiquitous document format, and there's no argument - .pdf is it. It's just that I hate how crappy the reader is. 5 is way more stable than version 6 (when I tested it years(?) ago) - but it's still a miserable piece of software that takes entirely too long to load, consumes resources like a cannibal in a kindergarten, and crashes or locks-up entirely too often.

Recently I've been playing around with some spiffy .pdfs for a *cough* table-top miniatures game that I like. Some of the .pdfs I pulled down to look at these rules were only 1-2 MB in size, though one was a little under 8MB. Regardless, each time I loaded them in Acrobat, I could swear that I had traded in my state of the art laptop for an 8086 with dual floppies.  That and reading these docs locked up my entire machine 3 times, and crashed the program twice.

Then I read about Foxit on Scott Hanselman's blog. It's an Acrobat Reader that (hold on to your hat)... doesn't SUCK. So, you can bet your sweet bippy (whatever that is) that I downloaded Foxit in a jiffy.

And the thing is AMAZING. It renders in record time - and doesn't feel sluggish in the slightest. Furthermore, complex 'pages' that took an obscene number of 'painting' passes in Acrobat render instantaneously in Foxit. It consumes considerably fewer resources too. That, and it doesn't even need to be 'installed' - it's just an XCopy deployable .exe - talk about nice.

Which makes me wonder: How is it that a small, effectively insignificant (i.e. a non-megacorp like MS, Google, IBM, Adobe, Macromedia, etc.), company can do a better job of 'acrobat' than adobe can? Seriously, how many devs worked on Foxit? And it SCREAMS.

And then, what does that say about big organizations and their development lifecycle? To me it says they are stagnant.

Seriously, what if Foxit turned their attention on Outlook? Or what if a 'crack' team of devs sat down to completely rewrite Outlook in the same way that Foxit rewrote Acrobat? Not really CHANGING anything significant - just taking advantage of the established success of the product, and taking out all the things that SUCK?

Do you think it could happen? I do. So why can't MS rewrite Outlook in the same fashion? Seriously... they've had entire teams working on it for the past few YEARS - and all we're getting is some eye-candy menus, a 'stolen from apple' chrome feel (which is ... um, sweet), and some better task integration. Years? Teams? Huh?