In the last post, I looked at how the Adobe takeover of Macromedia might affect the design industry. In part two, I examine the impact of the Flash format on Adobe’s future and begin to look at how The Empire and its fashionable cousin might react to the news.
I proposed in the last article that The Empire - which many of you know by its registered name, Microsoft Corporation, or its products, Windows, Office, and Bob - may have been angered by Adobe’s sudden position of having the dominant file format for secure, cross platform print distribution (PDF), and interactive rich media distribution (Flash) in its bag of clubs. To this point in web history (if you can call only 11 years since Mosaic history), Microsoft has treated Flash largely as amusing, but irrelevant. In the eyes of many in the industry, Flash was, after all, just a plug-in. You know, the one that everyone got annoyed with by the middle of 1999 because they had tired of clicking Skip Intro to get to the real website intended - something inevitably created in HTML. Microsoft never did answer the challenge of Macromedia Flash by creating a similar tool or promoting a similar file format. Being, at its core, still a company of operating system geeks and running on funds from old cash cows like Word and Windows Server, they were obviously unable to see beyond the animation and sound and notice a funny thing happened in the years since Skip Intro was smeared across the allegedly coolest websites going. Flash became a platform. For those of you not into tech speak - which is a bit like knowing Arabic in Indiana, impressive, but no one really understands you - a platform means that you can actually build and run software without using the parts of the underlying operating system. That means, in the real world, the IT department can install applications for the sales force, accounting staff, or call center drones that was created to run - not on Windows, Mac, or even Linux - but in Flash itself.
Startup companies that come up with alternative platforms that run on top of, or around, Windows is nothing new. Just ask BeOS. The idea, for years, has been to write software that can be authored once and run on any platform - Windows, Apple, Linux, your cell phone, your Palm Pilot - because the software includes its own platform. If this sounds vaguely familiar to hype from other Microsoft rivals hoping to rid the world of its dependence on the Start button, it should. The biggest name, a firm named Sun Microsystems, to try this approach named their cross platform language Java. Java was built to kill off the need to run Windows. Both Windows desktops and servers.
As a result, running Java applications on Windows machines is not exactly riding greens to the base. A declared enemy of Microsoft, Sun has tried everything including legal entanglements to increase the market share of Java applications. Microsoft understood from the beginning that any platform that was not Windows could upset sales of Windows licenses and must be marginalized. There is another example of this in the short history of the web. Ask the Department of Justice for details, but Netscape’s little browser application didn’t fly with Redmond either. The failure of Netscape and Sun to create an alternative cross-platform environment makes the rise of Flash all the more impressive. The makers of Flash, Macromedia (which actually bought Flash from a long forgotten company named Future Splash), understood that you can’t just release a platform and hope the world flocks to your Windows-less future world. You have to convince the public, and many skeptical IT people among them, to install it first. The public, IT skeptics included, bought the idea (for free, of course) of Flash - to the tune of over 90% of all web browsers. Why? The overwhelming market power of the lowest common denominator. Stupid web content. Stuff like greeting e-cards with dancing hamsters, and games that looked like 1980 all over again. Occasionally, some very cool implementations like MiniUSA.com’s car configuration app foretold of where Flash could be heading. While Microsoft was wrapped up in .NET (whatever that exactly means, we'll never know), arguments with the European Union (who are trying to play Othello on Microsoft's Monopoly board), and of course Longhorn, Adobe noticed this Flash content thing might be something. They tried, and failed, to replace Flash in the coming market for these so-called rich internet applications. Can’t beat them? Stock swap them.
So Flash did what Java could never do. It ended up on almost every machine on the web, quietly allowed to exist because it was harmless and there would be a martini throwing uproar from the executive staff if their online poker game was disabled by the IT department. But what about now? Is Flash still harmless, or is it really a platform capable of causing Microsoft problems?
To answer that, you first have to understand that Flash in the hands of Adobe is a very different thing than in the hands of a relative unknown like Macromedia. Adobe is not only a trusted name to many IT departments, thanks to Acrobat and PDF, but they are the makers of the tools every graphic designer the world over uses daily. So the first half of the answer is yes, if you believe Adobe can execute as a company with a development platform of its own. They certainly have a better chance than Macromedia every would have, by industry reputation alone.
The second part of the answer is the purely technical - is Flash a robust enough platform for developers to really build enterprise applications around it. Laughably, the question is whether Flash, as a platform, is able to run as well as Windows. A midget playing limbo comes to mind, but right now, Flash has a way to go before application developers trade in their .NET Studio for Flash Professional. In time though, I would say yes, Flash will be able to run enough advanced applications well enough to scare the cowboys in charge of Longhorn.
Thanks to three changes in Flash since last year, it might just make a suitable rival. First, Macromedia - and now Adobe - have a real development environment that is designed for Flash’s native scripting language, ActionScript. Called Flex, it means that coders that have no interest or talent in the artistic side of Flash don’t need to fool with it.
The other change to the Flash platform is the introduction of ActionScript 2.0. AS 2 isn’t Java, yet. But its all there. ActionScript is not just for making animation of blenderized gerbils come to life anymore.
The third change, which is now over a year old, is the maturation of the components of Flash. No longer just drag and drop for basic functionality, components allow developers to connect to XML servers and do other data handling functions that were infuriating or non-existent in previous versions. Components are a page taken from Microsoft and other real software tools, and move Flash further away from its roots as a simple animation tool.
Now that we’ve established that Flash could be the Java that Sun never got away with, application developers could conceivably use the new Adobe platform to create software that runs from a browser (or Macromedia Central), free from Add New Programs, the Registry, twelve more delays to Windows Longhorn and, most importantly, the whim of Microsoft’s licensing agreements. Add server-side ActionScript (yes, there is such a thing), and other software bought with Macromedia (ColdFusion, Breeze) to the mix, and Adobe has the keys to applications that could be hosted on Linux servers and run on any device that has a Flash player (cellphones, next generation television, your car?).
So is Adobe poised to be the next Microsoft, or the next Netscape? The answer lies in whether you think their strategy will work. No company that tried to compete with Microsoft on their turf (applications for Wintel devices) has lived to tell the tale, although it has been rumored that a Novell server was sighted in Ontario last month. So with these odds, it would seem Adobe needs a platform for its server and desktop applications that isn’t its chief competitor. A company, perhaps, like the fashionable outfit that already competes with Microsoft and markets reliable, Unix-based servers might have something to say about Adobe’s chances.
Apple is perhaps the only company except Adobe that has a religious following among creative people. Adobe’s professional creative tools - uh, dare I say it - monopoly was largely built on artists, photographers, and printers sticking with Adobe on Mac when there wasn’t anything remotely cool about doing so. Without Adobe on Mac, Apple might have been done before Return of the Steve appeared in little QuickTime windows around the world a few years ago.
That was then, and while the stated relationship between Adobe and Apple is friendly, anyone in the design field knows they are the couple everyone can see is getting divorced and have hired their own lawyers but haven’t told their friends. Adobe applications, even the mighty creative stalwart Photoshop, don’t really run any better on Apple. Adobe’s biggest rival in a very lucrative field is Apple, so they aren’t quite as interested in Apple’s success as they once were. The field I’m speaking of is digital video. Final Cut Pro HD, the editing software from Apple, and its companion DVD and special effects software, is a thorn in Adobe’s side. Their own editor, Premiere, was withdrawn last year from the Mac platform. Why? Who was going to buy it over Final Cut HD or its I’m-scared-to-just-download-pirated-editing-software-but-can’t-afford-a-grand-right-now kid brother Final Cut Express? After Effects from Adobe has clear competition now from - Apple, of course, in the form of Motion. All the way to output, Apple and Adobe are competitors in the video world as the makers of QuickTime and Flash Video, respectively. So the old bond is breaking. Adobe and Apple aren’t the artsy best of friends and aren’t holding hands riding off into a Jetta ad together.
The twist to the Apple and Adobe relationship could come, as some are hoping, from what I call the “gang up on Microsoft” theory. From this vague hope of the anti-Microsoft lobby comes questions like this - What if the new Adobe and Apple got together on the next iPod and made it run Flash? The question is usually immediately followed with, "Wouldn’t that be great?" as if some Manhatten Project had just been hatched.
Now that we’ve decided Flash could become an actual development platform, the idea is intriguing, but unlikely. Portable, connected applications that are free of the Windows CE (or CE Longhorn, or Longhorn CE, or PITA EU CE) logo (If you get that last acronym you really should go outside and play and stop reading the tech news) would benefit both companies. Apple would finally have a version of the Newton they could sell. Adobe would have several million devices that need applications built on its platform. What is in for Apple? A good bit of leverage to ensure that the creative tools their core audience loves stays on the Mac, and in working order.
But what if we take another look at this... and say for a minute Apple has had enough of Adobe’s slow withdrawal from the Mac platform. Photoshop features such as advanced color correction were in, you guessed it, the new version of Apple’s soccer mom editing software, iPhoto. Apple’s toy for home users to tweak their images included some pretty advanced stuff this time around. Its not hard to take that as a preview of things to come. Apple has a page layout software for laymen, called Pages (this article s created in Pages, actually) and Final Cut Express and iMovie HD for the needs of novice filmmakers. So I’ll go back to a concern I had in the first article about Adobe II. What about small shops? What about artists that aren’t interested in doing the work for 10,000 page websites with a global workforce involved? Well, if Apple adds their own Photoshop and perhaps some of the capabilities of Illustrator/Macromedia Fireworks to the software shelves at the mall near you, creative people have their tools. Life after Photoshop would begin in the graphic design field. Where would this leave Adobe?
Adobe could do fine without Apple. They would just - uh, put all their applications on the Microsoft platform? Or make them web based? Or, leave Apple and Microsoft behind and make the entire creative suite for Linux?
The Linux idea has a bit more to it, so we'll look at this in the next installment. But it gets back to the original question - how will Microsoft react a company that owns two dominant file formats and the leading tools to create for the formats, yet needs their applications to run on Windows because they’ve alienated the most viable alternative platform already, Apple?
I’ll examine this, and my free advice to Adobe to survive their situation, in the next article. For now, I’ll leave you with this bit of future journalism.
November 11, 2006 (AP) - Microsoft plugs security hole in Internet Explorer
Microsoft announced today that it is releasing a patch to secure all browsers running the Adobe Flash 8 Player, disabling the ability to store files on a user’s machine or run scripts that "could compromise system integrity." In the statement, Microsoft recommended all users download the fix immediately and are advised that some websites that use Adobe Flash may not run correctly after it is applied.
“This will have a negative effect on Adobe’s rich media web services platform.” said Samuel Hack, an IT analyst with Network Securities Group. “If the Flash Player is seen as a potential threat to millions of Windows users, many firms will shy away from further investment in the Adobe platform and likely standardize on Windows Media as the only viable, secure media platform.”
Don’t put it past Microsoft. And if you don’t believe me, fine, take a look at CNET today. Now go outside and play, enough tech news for one day.
Microsoft gunning for Adobe’s PDF format? by ZDNet's David Grober