Winds buffet Adobe as it ponders on a plateau

It seems that 2010 is the year Adobe arrived on a plateau, where it found foes attacking the company whose market capitalization is 2x that of Autodesk. (The difference is usually much larger, but ADSK is at a 52-week high, while ADBE is near a 52-week low.)

Apple's animosity towards the company is remarkable. Flash missing from the new MacBook Air computers is a foreshadowing that it will be eliminated from all future Macs.  (My guess is that Apple does not support Flash, because Flash is used by many ads, and Apple wants to run its own ad delivery technology on iOS and OS X devices. This is about ad revenue, not problematic technology; as he has often shown in the past, Steve Jobs misleads about his intentions.)

One bit of good news: Google is bundling Flash with Chrome downloads.  (I wonder how much Adobe paid for the product placement?)

It spent the last year working on giving up on the 3D MCAD translation market; when I asked about the future of CAD in Acrobat, the company gave a vague answer about not abandoning it totally.

Anyone interested it Acrobat X? (I thought not.)

Its software is so feature-complete that customers are in no hurry to upgrade. I found very little changed between InDesign CS4 and CS5, certainly not enough for which to pay an upgrade fee. Plus, CS5's .idnn file format is incompatible with CS4's, which causes headaches for some of my clients.

It even suffered the embarrassment of a take-over rumor. (Being taken over by Microsoft: ugh!)

OTOH, their software for professionals is much cheaper than Autodesk's. You can get every bit of Adobe desktop oftware in the "Master Collection" bundle for a mere $2,600.

Comments

[DF]

Apple's animosity towards the company is remarkable.

Ralph, you base this on... what, exactly? That someone has told Adobe that their bloated runtime wasn't fit to be on mobile devices?

Adobe isn't just about Shockwave Flash technology (which it didn't even own until relatively recently). Apple and Adobe have partnered in a number of areas since the start of the personal computer era. In others they have competing products. This is no different than any of the other big players in the industry.

[DF]

My guess is that Apple does not support Flash, because Flash is used by many ads, and Apple wants to run its own ad delivery technology on iOS and OS X devices.

Not so. Apple were intertwined with Google when they rejected Shockwave Flash at the time - and they're only going into ads now because they perceived Google as betraying them with (iOS clone) Android. This technology (first of Macromedia's, now of Adobe) is a dog. Get over it.

[johan meier]

I think you are spot on about Apple not liking Flash for business reasons rather than technical merit. The Flash runtime provides an application development target for rich media apps or applets and Flash developers can build apps and distribute them anywhere there's a Flash player without asking anyone and without paying anyone royalties. This threatens the entire lock Apple has on its App Store in addition to the nascent iAd network. Adobe's banking on a future where Flash is baked into all manner of internet connected devices including TVs, tablets and smartphones (see: www.openscreen.org) and it won't be clear if this strategy works for another 12 to 18 months.

[SeanDotson]

Adobe delivers their own updates on Windows. However on OSX they rely on Apple's update software. Apple simply is tired of being responsible for Adobe's NUMEROUS security updates. They are forcing Adobe to be responsible for their own updates. Nothing more.

Sorry to burst your conspiracy theory bubble. I know how you love to paint Apple as the bad guy.

[SoxSail]

Mac hasn't stopped supporting flash, just arriving with it bundled. It's still fairly easy to install (and comes bundled with almost any other browser.)

[Jim Merry]

Per Johan's post above; Here's some evidence of Adobe's Flash strategy unfolding in slow motion:

http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2010/10/adobe-air-2-is-now-available.html

[Anthony Frausto-Robledo, LEED AP]

Ralph, careful about your use of words and phrasing here. Apple is not killing Flash from the Mac platform, simply choosing to not bundle it preloaded on a new MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is actually eliminating a lot of things, all suggesting the possible demise of certain technology items. You can still download Flash to any OS X computer and will be able to do so for the foreseeable future. There is simply far too many Flash sites out there that Mac uses need to see.

On the other hand, you are partly right about Jobs wanting to kill Flash in the market place by "maneuvering against it" by other means. Where were you Ralph when Microsoft was trying to kill QuickTime on the Net by maneuvering against it in favor of its own video standards? Or for that matter their more CAD-related and damaging maneuvering against OpenGL in favor, again, for their own Direct3D?

You write in the vein of a consumer advocate (a Ralph Nader of the technology world, perhaps?) but you are highly selective about who you speak out against and stand up for. What Gates did to try to assassinate OpenGL (and failed thank God!) is no different than Jobs and Flash. Just sayin...!