Seattle.BloggersPub

As of late, it’s been easy to applaud the efforts of Adobe as they integrate Macromedia, increase their product offerings and look for success in the increasingly open corporate environments. Adobe labs (a Macromedia carry-over) gave people a chance to check out very early versions of Flex 2 and has since become a launching pad for nearly all of their products including less traditional releases like JamJar. The wiki format has further helped the knowledge transfer from the community to the company.

Adobe has also encouraged blogging in a corporate sense, with a ton of Macromedia expats blogging and a very healthy number of original Adobe employees blogging. While most of the posts by people at Adobe seem to be very technical in nature, there are a few blogs that stand out for having both technical merit and some industry analysis. They also encourage the community to blog about their products and provide MXNA to aggregate those discussions. It’s been a huge boon to small bloggers and gives everyone a voice in how Adobe does business.

While all of these efforts are laudable, the window into products and corporate vision still has the blinds closed. Most people associate Scoble with his blog, and it’s true that via that blog he provided a picture of how things within Microsoft worked, but his most valuable contribution at Microsoft was the video interviews he did for Channel 9. Adobe needs a Channel 9. They need a Jeff Sandquist and they need a Scoble who has freedom to roam around the company and show people the diversity in the products and the innovative things that are going on.

A Channel 9 is not a small undertaking, and there is bound to be resistance to providing the kind of transparency that a Channel 9 requires. But in the end, it builds brand loyaty, gets people excited about what is going on, and humanizes the people behind the scenes. Those are all great things for a company in today’s technology climate.

First off, I had a great “beer session” with Kevin Hoyt last night who is in town this week. It was a lot of fun to talk with him about his experience in the tech world and get his thoughts. I’m glad he’s out there spreading the good word about Flex via sales (although I can think of another product I’d like to see him jump to once Flex 2 gets ramped up *cough*Apollo*cough*).

Second, Microsoft continues to impress me. I took the time to install the Office 2007 beta this week and holy shit - it is awesome. Most things are subtle, but one huge thing is the addition of RSS feeds to Outlook. It is super easy to use, and so intuitive that it’s going to make RSS so easy for mainstream users. The implementation is solid, the integration with IE 7 is easy, and management/browsing is a breeze. They took the strengths of email and did a fantastic job of integrating RSS.

It’s already changed the way I read my news, and it’s not even an RIA. Two thumbs up for Microsoft.

MercuryNews.com has an article about Flash video penetration in the last two years (catchy title over at eweek). It really is amazing to stop and think about how quickly Flash has become the ultimate video solution. As Kevin notes in the article, the hard part in the beginning was getting Flash adopted. Now that it’s on nearly every computer on the web, there is a lot of potential. I used to wonder if Macromedia “got it” that Flash could be a driving force for so many initiatives, but I don’t doubt that Adobe does. I just hope they can solve the DRM issue soon and do it in such a way that it doesn’t cripple Flash.

The one thing that warrants mentioning is that Flash still has a ways to go. Accustream iMedia Research says that Windows Media Format still has 60% of all streaming video traffic while Flash has a much smaller 19%. Flash is getting bigger, but Windows still has a chokehold on the numbers. Of course Flash has more high profile users including ABC, YouTube and Yahoo. If they can expand on that growth, and I think they can, those numbers could be reversed in a couple of years. That would be quite a coup d’etat for Adobe.

Over the weekend Terry Ryan posted instructions and source code for integrating ColdFusion and Exchange. With the code you can create contacts and appointments directly from ColdFusion. There was talk about this being in the next version of ColdFusion, but Terry has the code right now. I’m really excied about what this might mean for Flex developers because now that we have a way to send data to Exchange, it would be relatively simple to create a Flex 2 replacement for the Outlook Web Access. Very cool stuff!

I blogged about this article over on my ZDNet blog but I also wanted to mention it here because I think it’s very significant.

Adobe is starting to push back. They’re putting their mouth where their money is (I realize that seems backwards) and talking up both Apollo and their view of the future of software. As my readers know, I’m very excited about Apollo. At first I didn’t get it, and it’s clear from this thread that there are a lot of unanswered questions. I think this is the first step in answering those questions for you. Adobe is finally talking about Apollo, and hopefully the specifics will follow.

I just had a really fun conversation with Brad Becker who some of you might be familiar with from his time at Adobe. He’s now the Senior Product Manager for Expression at Microsoft and he has some great insight into RIAs and the future of software. He was a great resource and I picked his brain about all kinds of things during the call including WPF, Flex, the Web, and the role of designers in software.

Coincidentally, there is a very good piece over at The FlashBlog comparing WPF and Flash. The calls I’ve had with Microsoft have given me a much better understanding of WPF, and I think WPF competes with Flex more than it does with Flash. Overall, I think that Lee’s comparisons are correct.

I’ve been lucky to get to talk to a lot of people at Adobe, Microsoft and OpenLaszlo that are shaping the next generation of software. Over on ZDNet I am going to put together a series of articles examining the strengths and weaknesses of each. I had planned to do a straight compare/contrast, but I think there’s too much information to do that. It’s not quite apples and oranges, because they all try to solve the same problems, but the technologies are more different than I thought.

The tech world explodes (this is the most Adobe talk I’ve ever seen on Techmeme) about Adobe telling MSFT to yank PDF and Scoble chimes in, Brian Jones throws in his two cents but the silence from Adobe is deafening.

This has become a big story, and I think a lot of it is misinformation and FUD, but the blank stare from Adobe does nothing advance the conversation. There are big issues here, on both sides, and while I realize that blogs provide the same level of civility as the wild west, we would all be well served by more open and communication about what happened.

A bit of a warning, this is going to trend towards the sensationalist. I’m not trying to come off like a crazy seer on the Ides of March, but I think this has huge implications.

For those who don’t know, talks broke down between Microsoft and Adobe regarding PDF integration to Office 2007. Microsoft monitor has some of the story here and Robert Scoble has picked it up as well. The Microsoft Monitor article is a good read, and makes some excellent points.

This isn’t really about PDF, it’s about software. While I’ll doubt you’ll get anyone at Microsoft to admit it, and Scoble tries to play nice, Adobe is a big, big competitor. A few years ago, the partnership worked very well, but as the industry has changed, the two companies have inched closer to each other’s market space.

Both companies are trying to change the way people use and develop software. Both companies realize the importance of designers in the new software world, and both companies know that the industry is being turned upside down. The potential gain is immense, and the stakes are very high. For the first time ever, Adobe is infringing on Microsoft’s core business. If Adobe can make the OS a non-factor, MSFT is in big trouble, and they know it.

This is going to get much worse before it gets better, but I think it’s an exciting time to follow software.

I just got off the phone with Microsoft talking about WPF and WPF/E and I came away very impressed, but also with more questions than I had going in. Tonight I’m going to be sitting down and putting most of my thoughts over on ZDNet, but there were a couple of things that I thought a more Flash oriented audience might want to read about.

I have always thought that WPF/E was a direct competitor to Flash. In some ways, it is, but Microsoft has a very different vision for WPF/E than Adobe does for Flash. With Flash, the goal is to deliver full fledged cross platform applications. With Microsoft, if you want to create an entire application, you’re going to use WPF, which limits you to Windows. WPF/E is more of an “interactive content” plugin. For instance you could build an application like Word (delivered over the web) in WPF, but not in WPF/E.

As the picture becomes clearer to me, WPF and Apollo are on a collision course. Both technologies are still in the early stages, and we’re not sure what the end product looks like, but that seems to be where some of the farm is being bet (how’s that for a sentence?). Apollo has the potential to be WPF, but cross platform. That has some significant implications for both companies? long term strategy. Can they both deliver on the promises? We’ll see. But the things WPF can do by taking advantage of the hardware acceleration via DirectX is going to set a high bar. It won’t be cross platform, but it will be impressive.

I realize this is kind of scattered, but I want to take some time to get the full picture in my mind. I have a much better understanding of WPF, and I’m still piecing together how that all fits in with what I know of everything else. Look for more on my ZDNet blog tonight.