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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.
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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.