jump to navigation

Apple vs. Adobe Flash May 1, 2010

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Apple.
Tags: , , , ,
7 comments

VentureBeat published an analysis I did of Steve Jobs’s Thoughts on Flash. As one would expect, the comments have been lively. Since I used to work at Macromedia, the creator of Flash, now part of Adobe, I wanted to share my broader perspective and biases in this matter:

  • I am a proponent of Web architectures and open standards. I was part of the founding team and chief architect of Allaire, the company that developed the first Web/HTML-centric application server, ColdFusion. ColdFusion ran on Windows, Solaris, HP/UX and Linux. I’ve worked on open standards at the W3C, OASIS and the Java Community Process, open-sourced WDDX and led a team that built key parts of the Apache Axis web services engine.
  • I’m weary of anyone having too much control. I grew up in Communism. Need I say more? This applies to government regulation because it tends to be designed by consensus and far less flexible than the future requires.
  • Eight years ago I was involved with Flash. After Allaire merged with Macromedia, I was chief architect at Macromedia and worked on initiatives that later became the MX platform and Flex, which is open-sourced under the Mozilla Public License.
  • I am agnostic with respect to technology. I learned programming on an Apple ][ clone in Bulgaria but I’ve never owned a Mac. My Windows laptops have Linux VMs on them. I use both Flash/Flex and HTML/CSS/AJAX. I love my iPad, iPhones and iPods for what they are great at but am frustrated by their sometimes arbitrary limitations and use a Verizon Blackberry as my work phone and an Android phone when I travel in Europe.
  • I know a bit about cross-platform mobile development, security and advertising. In addition to my work on programming models and runtime environments for the Web, I co-founded a mobile startup that built a cross-device runtime, which is how I learned about the core issues surrounding mobile platforms and mobile application performance. I also co-founded an advertising compliance company and helped start and invested in an application security company.
  • I deeply appreciate and admire Apple’s focus on design and UX. I wish Apple bought Tesla and started making cars. I don’t yet care about my car being open and hackable.
  • I don’t directly own AAPL, ADBE, GOOG or MSFT. I bet some of the funds I’m invested in have stakes in those companies.

Net of the friendships I have at Adobe, I have a reasonably educated and unbiased perspective.

Let me know what you think in the comments or on Twitter @simeons.

Adobe’s Open Screen Project Indicates Strategy Alignment May 3, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe.
Tags: , ,
4 comments

Adobe’s Open Screen Project is a good move for the company and a reminder that, per Andy Grove, only the paranoid survive. TechCrunch has a good article on the details of the announcement. What’s perhaps a little more interesting is the fact that there have been some significant changes at Adobe in the past few months:

  • CEO Bruce Chism departed and was replaced by COO Shantanu Narayen.
  • The co-head of the platform business unit John Brennan departed. The top job in the platform business unit (which has Flash, Flex, ColdFusion, etc.) went to David Wadhwani who used to lead Flex product development.
  • The head of the mobile business unit Al Ramadan departed to be replaced by the head of mobile marketing Gary Kovacs. Mobile, having been a separate group, came under the platform group where it logically belongs.

The net result is an alignment of strategy around Flash with a focus on market penetration & share grab in new markets such as mobile. This adds much needed coherency. In the past, for example, Flash Lite tried to balance penetration with driving revenue. That didn’t work well. Similarly, online Flash was open-sourced and standards-based in some ways and proprietary in others. Now file formats and wire protocols get opened up.

By opening up this way, Adobe is altogether eliminating or putting at risk some small revenue streams (Flash Lite licensing and some of the enterprise data services) with the hope of cementing Flash’s cross-platform leadership.

But, you might say, Flash has had all the market share online that it might ever need yet this hasn’t translated into a huge business for Adobe. What’s the real impact of the Open Screen Project likely to be? My guess is that all those leadership changes, followed by as big an announcement, are indications of an upcoming shift in how Adobe views the business model around Flash across platforms.

Flash vs. AJAX is The Wrong Question February 27, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Flex, Macromedia Flash, Mobile, Web 2.0.
Tags: , , , , ,
5 comments

Following my post on the Flex 3 and AIR launch, a number of you have pinged me privately about the Flash vs. AJAX question. It goes something like this: “I know you are going to write that you prefer Flash/Flex because you were chief architect at Macromedia but what are you telling your own companies? Should they go with Flash or should they go with AJAX?” Flash vs. AJAX is the wrong question for a number of reasons, the most obvious one being that Flash is an application runtime environment and AJAX is a design/implementation pattern for applications.

In the next few days I’ll collect my thoughts and do a post on real question, which is about technology/tool/platform choices for building Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 and Mobile Web 2.0 applications. 

Adobe Engage 2008 To Launch Flex 3.0 and AIR February 24, 2008

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Allurent, Facebook, Flex, Google, Industry News, Macromedia Flash, Microsoft, Web 2.0, startups.
Tags: , , , , , ,
14 comments

Tomorrow, at the invitation-only Engage 2008 event in SF Adobe will launch AIR and Flex 3.0. If you want to get a sense of what will be shown, here are the slides from the January pre-release tour. The event has attracted a high-powered group. For example, Marc Benioff, Chairman & CEO of salesforce.com will speak. (Salesforce.com’s AppExchange platform has a number of Flex-based extensions, including our own Centive.)

The AIR / Flex 3.0 launch is a big deal for three reasons:

  • The AJAX ecosystem is heavily fragmented
  • Flex 3 is a big step forward
  • AIR is a disruptive innovation enabler

There are just too many pure AJAX frameworks out there. This may be great for some abstract notion of innovation but is pretty bad for market adoption. It causes confusion and friction. Developers hate that. They want to feel like they are developing skills for the next cool technology which will be around for a decade. The tooling is also pretty immature, although my friend Paul Colton @ Aptana is doing some pretty cool work. I have also seen a number of new startups trying to make things better in this space but for now the situation is not great. After initially missing the AJAX boat in a big way, Adobe has recently gained traction in repositioning from Flash vs. AJAX to Flash vs. DHTML, both of which use AJAX. As proof, I’ve seen more startups mixing Flash/Flex with DHTML/AJAX.

There seems to be a rule that really big software companies get things right by version 3.0. That has been the case for years with Microsoft and now Adobe may be large-enough to join the list. Flex 1.0 shipped late and left a lot to be desired, which made Flex 1.5 more or less a requirement. Flex 2.0 was a big step forward but there was much more left to do to build a great RIA platform. Flex 3 steps up the innovation pace on a number of fronts. Better developer tools. Improved frameworks. Smaller application size. Better data handling throughout. And the Flex SDK as well as the BlazeDS remoting and messaging services are now open-source. Everything is in place to accelerate Flex adoption. There is a massive shortage of Flex developers in the market, always a good sign for a platform. The main challenge for Adobe remains monetizing the platform. I’m not 100% on board with the Flex Builder tool as the main revenue driver although the team recently added some great people from the ColdFusion team who really understand Web developers. For examples on what Flex can do, check out the app showcase. Warning: you may spend more time there than you previously  imagined.

AIR will become the biggest enabler for media-heavy Web applications. To get an idea about what I mean, check out the Allurent Desktop Connection video. This only scratches the surface of what one can do with a cross-platform, always on, richly interactive application with Net access and plenty of local storage. Adobe isn’t the only company who gets this–Google has plans based on Google Gears and Facebook has also moved in this direction with the Parakey acquisition–but Adobe has so far executed the best. Not surprisingly, Microsoft remains paralyzed by the Web <-> desktop strategy tension.

AIR is truly disruptive–in Clayton’s exact sense of the term–for two reasons. First, it given Web apps access to the desktop. Second, it does so while subverting the native operating system installers (using the Flash player executable as a conduit) which gives Adobe and its ecosystem substantial freedoms. One caveat–security. Adobe has done a pretty good job with the Flex 3 security model but it hasn’t been extensively tested in the wild. Also, the anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors have often been trigger happy in the past to blacklist totally legitimate software. I’m not expecting them to blacklist the AIR runtime but who knows how they’ll treat some of the apps… I hope the Adobe platform marketing team and evangelists have spent enough time with the security vendors. This is something I advised them to do at the Engage event last year based on some bad experiences from our portfolio.

With this launch, Adobe cements its platform leadership in Web 2.0 and makes life easier and more interesting for millions of developers and designers. A shout out to all my friends at Adobe who worked hard to make it happen and to everyone who put skin in the game during the beta process.

Adobe MAX 2007 October 1, 2007

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Adobe MAX.
add a comment

It’s a warm gray day in Chicago and the Adobe MAX 2007 keynote is kicking off with a bunch of examples of very engaging Rich Internet Application (RIA) experiences. The core positioning is that creating truly engaging experiences requires Adobe technologies. That feels a little fragile in the sense that it is difficult to compete on ideas–there are many examples of great experiences created using competing technologies. I hope the platform value prop will go a level deeper.

max

Worth noting:

  • Moviestar. Launched in August, an update to the Flash player that supports H.264 all the way to 1080p. Looks cool and is a necessary response to Silverlight. Let’s keep in mind that the online video revolution, e.g., YouTube, was driven by the updated video codecs in the Flash player (before that it was impossible to easily experience decent video online). So HD support in the Flash player is a very big deal. More broadband, please.
  • AIR. The Adobe Integrated Runtime is nearing v1.0. Lots of companies are experimenting with great apps: from a cool Twitter client to eBay giving you a better way to make sense of the huge number of items available on the site to Frog Design doing an app for Disney travel agents to my own Allurent redefining the way retailers can engage their customers through personal catalogs. Behind the cool stuff lies the bigger strategic play–AIR is Adobe’s move for independence from both the browser and the OS, an attempt to cement the company as a platform player.

Google Gears Powers Web-to-Desktop Convergence May 31, 2007

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Google, Industry News, SaaS, Web 2.0.
2 comments

Google Gears will bring offline processing to AJAX applications, which promises to be a step towards closing the last big delta between traditional desktop and Web 2.0 applications.

Web-to-desktop convergence is a very interesting topic and one that is bound to change the way we think about software packaging and delivery, which has big implications for software-as-a-service. The driver for convergence is that consumers want the best of both desktop and web applications. I wrote about this last year.

The default distinction between “Web” and “desktop” apps is based on old assumptions. The former typically means something that runs in a browser and needs a server all the time. The latter typically means something that runs on the desktop and doesn’t use the Internet. These distinctions are now outdated. Most meaningful apps these days use the Internet. Yes, even MS Word does. So, the distinction really is about (a) implementation and (b) connectivity.

I built my first “Web 2.0 desktop convergent” web app in 1998. It used WDDX for passing data back and forth and storing it locally. The app only ran in IE because it relied on file system access COM objects for offline access.

The best approach for building rich, convergent Web applications that I know of is Adobe Apollo. There are many examples of convergent applications that leverage Apollo. I recently wrote about Web widgets coming to the desktop. It’s great that Google and Adobe are thinking about how Gears and Apollo can work together.

I’d be interested to learn more about Gears.

Widget Convergence: Web-to-Desktop March 21, 2007

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Digital Media, Industry News, Macromedia Flash, Web 2.0, startups.
1 comment so far

The guys at Goowy and yourminis blog that you can now put your widgets on your desktop, all thanks to Adobe Apollo. I tried it and it’s pretty neat, despite the fact that it is alpha tech running on alpha tech.

I’m excited to see a broader migration of Web content to the desktop, blurring the divide between hosting containers (desktop, browser, Flash runtime, etc.). If we can do that, then there is also the hope that getting widgets on mobile devices will become easier.

Scraping Ideas February 28, 2007

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, VC, Venture Capital, startups.
6 comments

After the Adobe Engage event a few of us grabbed drinks at the Jade Bar. The conversation spanned the gamut from RIA design patterns to magic tricks (thanks to Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering). Many interesting stories were told.

Mike Sundermeyer, head of design for all of Adobe, provided new light on how Tom Seibel started Siebel Systems. (Mike worked with Tom in the early 90s at Gain Technology, a multimedia company that sold to Sybase.) According to Mike’s story, Tom used the few tens of millions he’d gotten from his Oracle days and the sale of Gain to pose as a VC and meet with every startup doing work in what became the CRM space. He’d use the “I’m an investor” line to get away from signing NDAs. He aggregated all the lessons and self-funded Siebel.

This type of IP scraping sometimes happens with professional investors also. Some of it is part of the fundraising process. When I hear a company pitch, I learn more about a space. I cannot wipe that knowledge from my head. It does inform how I think about the next pitch in the same space. That’s OK. What is not OK is blatantly using proprietary information obtained as part of the fundraising process. Two examples come readily to mind. Sharing proprietary information with another company, even if a VC hasn’t signed an NDA, is a big no-no. Unfortunately, I’ve heard stories from entrepreneurs of this happening. What’s much worse, however, is when investors seed a team with the ideas of others. I’ve heard it happen a few times.

Trying to get VCs to sign NDAs is not a solution. Most, including me, won’t do it. When VCs are interested in a space, it is very natural for them to look at all viable companies in it and try to make an educated decision about which one to back. Any startup talking to VCs understands that. Most of the restrictions of NDAs, especially around residuals, don’t make sense in this situation. In addition, VCs really don’t have the processes to manage confidential information. Almost everything we touch is CI. Our laptops, servers and offices are overflowing with it. The best we can do is to be really careful and never share CI we’ve obtained by looking at companies or through the diligence process.

Ultimately, investing is a reputation business, a repeatable game where news of bad behavior spreads and where those who misbehave see their deal flow dry up. That’s the market feedback system that keeps things from going out of control.

Startups are most likely to get burned in one-off situations where the game is not repeated, where bad behavior has limited consequences, as in the example of Tom Siebel. My advice would be to avoid these situations and deal only with professional angels and VCs with established track records.

Adobe Engage Notes February 27, 2007

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Macromedia Flash, Mobile, Web 2.0.
1 comment so far

The Adobe Engage event worked out well. The audience was sharp and with a broad range of perspectives. A few interesting points worth noting:

  • Apollo
    • Apollo comes with the WebKit engine. This is telling of Adobe’s ultimate desire to let Apollo apps go to mobile devices (WebKit is the basis for Nokia’s S60 browser).
    • Robert Scoble asked a good question: can you build P2P apps using Apollo? Although you cannot build servers that process in the background the basic answer is yes because you can (a) open sockets and (b) start asynch file transfers and get woken up (through an event) when the transfer is complete.
    • Apollo is installed by the Flash player and skips the native OS installation process. This is huge for Apollo apps in terms of ease of distribution and low barriers to installation, as pointed out by Joe Chung, CEO of Allurent.
    • Issues to consider
      • Adobe hasn’t fully thought about how to integrate the Apollo installation process with anti-virus and anti-spyware vendors.
      • Apollo apps are native OS apps and therefore cannot be hosted in the browser, used as widgets, etc.
  • Demos worth noting
    • Jeremy Allaire gave a demo of AfterMix, a new consumer product by Brightcove led by my friend Sean Neville. AfterMix uses Apollo to get local file access.
    • InteliSea a Flex 2.0 app for controlling luxury yachts. It combines diagnostics and control with weather, tides and maps with cool new capabilities such as anchor drag alarms. It’s even mobile-enabled with Flash Lite. Very impressive. Just because of it, I should put the 130′ yacht on the Christmas list this year.
    • Acesis did a first-time-ever public demo of extensible, interactive forms for healthcare. They’ve solves the information architecture problem but still have to address the flow of Q&A, which is the area where most electronic medical records front-ends fail.
    • Goowy showed YourMinis widgets downloaded to the desktop with one click. IMO, there is a big opportunity for Apollo to help with cross-OS widget deployment. It makes no sense to have Mac/Vista/Yahoo/Google-native widgets. Web widgets should just run on the desktop.
    • Joe Chung demoed the new Allurent e-commerce 2.0 site design tools. The e-commerce experiences that can be created are pretty impressive.
    • Scrybe‘s interface is getting more and more appealing. Scoble videotaped the presentation. Check out that video.
    • Virtual Ubiquity‘s editor has made a lot of progress–their pagination and typography engines are impressive. The company will open a private beta in May. The skip paragraph numbering feature alone is worth the trial. I hope someone from MS/IW/Office/Word is reading this.
    • Mike Sundemeyer, head of the Adobe design team (working across 70+ products) showed a number of very innovative Flash Lite interfaces for mobile phones for an Asian audience (cute, highly animated, etc.).
  • Deep thoughts
    • Tim O’Reilly pointed out that Adobe is focused on creating great experiences for content providers, which is not always the same as creating great experiences for consumers.

For other posts on the event, go to the aggregation that John Dowdell is keeping.

Adobe Engage February 26, 2007

Posted by Simeon Simeonov in Adobe, Flex, Macromedia Flash, Web 2.0.
2 comments

I’m in SF this week to attend Adobe Engage on Tuesday, a private all-day “influence the influencers” event. The focus is on the Adobe platform, encompassing both online and enterprise technologies. (I don’t think the Mobile group will be represented–they are ODM & operator-focused at this point.)The list of presenters and attendees is impressive, from Jeremy Allaire to Mike Arrington to Om Malik to Robert Scoble. It should be a day full of good conversations, which will be continued at the Jade Bar after the event, courtesy of Polaris Venture Partners.

Here is the kind of applications we’ll be talking about:

An application called Tour Tracker 2.0 launched today for the Tour of California bike race going on this week.  The entire application was built in a few weeks with the Flex Framework, with Flash Media Server and Flex Data Services providing video and data streaming for the application.  If you haven’t seen it yet, you can check it out at http://www.amgentourofcalifornia.com/docroot/tourtracker2/index.html