Seattle.BloggersPub

I’ve been doing some big thinking (read: way above my pay grade) about Adobe’s role in the open web, why we don’t seem to get much credit, and how we can genuinely move the whole web ecosystem forward while keeping our developer community and our shareholders happy. And right now we do a lot. There’s the open screen project which should become a lot more interesting as we get to those “next major releases” of Flash Player and Adobe AIR out there without any licensing restrictions or royalties required. We’ve encouraged and fostered the standardization of PDF which worked out well for the web community as well as Adobe shareholders through a broadening and “platformization” of PDF. And just today I read some nice kudos from Creative Commons about Adobe’s creation and support of keeping XMP open (XMP is a way to store metadata in various rich media formats).

Adobe is a huge company with a great design community, a great developer community, and a great footprint on the web. We have a ton of intellectual property that we’ve been open with because it helps move our own agenda forward but also helps innovation across a wide swath of technology including rich media, documents, and the web. Adobe has a long history of striking a good balance by continuing to make money off of open standards and specifications that we free and that others have created. Adobe makes money off of tools, servers, and services. We increase revenue by increasing the number of people using our stuff which allows us to be open with a lot of our biggest assets. And while a lot of that has focused recently on the developer side of the house, examples like XMP show that it really does come from every part of the company. Including the parts that make most of the money.

Hopefully we’ll see more of this next year and beyond because I think Adobe has a unique niche in the web ecosystem as it sits today. We’ve got lots of technology and a business model that encourages more openness.