Cringely on Adobe

Posted on July 10, 2007
Filed Under Markets |

He, Cringely wrote a piece about Adobe last week that was pure enjoyment to read. It answered the questions, what kind of hand is Adobe holding really, and where does it think it’s quietly going?

Adobe to me has always felt like a very ambitious company, and as tough as Microsoft but thankfully without the scale (one was enough to get annoyed with). Now of course we live in a world where all the vanishing points suddenly are casting different shadows, and who can say where anyone will be in ten years? Cringely lists the possibilities for Adobe, beginning with its assets.

It is much more rare for software to become invisible. Microsoft Windows still hasn’t made it, though html and zip encoding have. In terms of software applications, I can think of only two that have reached the point of ubiquity and hence invisibility — Flash and PDF, both of which come from the same company, Adobe Systems, the promised subject of this week’s column. Being the owner of two invisible technologies makes Adobe more powerful than most of us can even imagine.

Cringely discusses the current play, not for the desktop so much as for the rich application space, and he names three players: Sun, Microsoft, and Adobe. None of these players, by the way, especially cares to own the desktop, not anymore, not even Microsoft: the cloud offers vastly more wealth. And the cloud is the parking lot for mobile.

Here’s a clue. Describing why Adobe bought Macromedia (it was to get Flash) an Adobe employee said, “We tried everything, but we couldn’t get Acrobat small enough to work on a cell phone. You can do a Flash interface that’s a fraction of the file size.”

So that’s the plan, says Bob Cringely - and he’s right 53.3 percent of the time. Here’s how it shakes out over time:

Once you own the interface to every mobile device you can make those devices talk more easily to your networked applications than possibly to those from Apple, Microsoft, or Sun.

But you’ll have to go to the article itself to read his punch line.

Comments

2 Responses to “Cringely on Adobe”

  1. thetracksuitceo on July 11th, 2007 11:25 am

    Glad I clicked through to the “punch line”.
    Do you really think Apple will allow their iPhone to communicate with non-iPhones?

  2. Hunter on July 11th, 2007 5:05 pm

    not only that, but happy to do it - they’ve seized the turf as the first in a whole new breed of platform; the more apps and extensions that get built for the iPhone platform, the safer from all the soon-to-release competitors they’ll be.

    Actually we were so busy with Foremski’s take on the iPhone, we didn’t link to Cringely’s take, give it a read too:
    Faster iPhone faster! Kill!! Kill!!

    poor old microsoft, eh?

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