Frank Boosman

Atheist, Blogger, Brainstormer, Business adviser, Designer, Entrepreneur, Idea generator, Marketer, Parent, Technologist

I create product plans, marketing strategies, and business relationships to take ideas from inception through to customer delivery and market success. Over the last 20 years, I've been fortunate enough to be part of some fairly groundbreaking projects (and if luck is "the inner man externalized," as Robertson Davies wrote, then hopefully this says something good about my inner man). I take new ideas and assemble teams of people to bring them to life, with a strong strategic marketing and business development perspective along the way. Acrobat started when a VP at Adobe called a meeting of four engineers and me and said, "John Warnock has an idea to do platform-independent documents." Much hard work later, Acrobat was born, and is now on the order of a half-billion-dollar business. Rainbow Six started when a colleague and I visited the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team at Quantico and saw a demonstration of their abilities. When we were launching Red Storm Entertainment, I proposed building a realistic hostage rescue (later to become special operations) title. Much hard work later, Rainbow Six was born, inaugurating the category of realistic first-person shooters. My goal is to keep pushing the envelope in whatever I do -- to do things that haven't been done before. I also want to continue to work with people I like, trust, and respect. Life's too short to do otherwise.

Product conceptualization, Product evangelism, Simulation in healthcare, Simulation-based training, Strategic marketing

I've been to one TED conference, TED3 in 1992. I was the product manager for Adobe Acrobat, which we launched at TED3. John Warnock gave a talk on the future of digital documents, and I did the on-stage demo. At the time, Acrobat was still well over a year from release, and as a result, wasn't completely stable. This was made worse by the fact that, as part of the demo, we wanted to show conversions of some of Richard Wurman's ACCESS guide files -- extremely complex maps and the like that were destined for press use. We made elaborate preparations to work around any crashes, but once we were on stage, thank goodness, Acrobat worked like a charm. If you're interested, the longer (> 1,000 character) version of this story can be found on my blog.