Adobe's Profile Rises with New Internet Development Tools
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Aided by its acquisition of Macromedia, Adobe staves off Microsoft's challenge and pushes graphics to new capabilities online.
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Adobe Systems Flash-based service, already integrated with Salesforce.com, lets developers embed voice services into Web applications.
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Adobe quietly begins testing the waters to increase its involvement in desktop Linux. Also: Open-source Web browsers Mozilla and Firefox post gains over Microsoft's Internet Explorer.
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In the technology industry, you can be pretty sure you&#39;ve hit the big time when Microsoft develops a product specifically to compete with you.That&#39;s the position Adobe Systems found itself in this year, when Microsoft developed a&#160;new cross-platform browser technology called Silverlight&#160;to rival Adobe&#39;s Flash, the de facto standard for developing and delivering video and multimedia content on the Web.Adobe is exiting the year not only as the company of choice for creative professionals everywhere, but as an influential force to be reckoned with and a power player alongside Apple and Google, the companies leading the consumer-savvy, multimedia-friendly Internet wave of Web 2.0.Over its 25 years, Adobe -- a company known less for its dazzle than its dependability -- has quietly turned itself into a multibillion-dollar software vendor on the strength of technologies that have become essential to computer users. Creative professionals would be lost without the graphic-design tools Photoshop and Illustrator, and Adobe Acrobat and PDF have made it easy for everyone to share documents cross-platform.But with its&#160;acquisition of Macromedia&#160;two years ago, Adobe also took on another role -- as pioneer of providing a next-generation platform for developing rich Internet applications. RIAs, as they&#39;re called, provide more intuitive and multimedia-rich user experiences on the Web than typical client/server or desktop applications, and are now in high demand as users expect more from their multimedia Web experiences with the rise in popularity of sites like YouTube and Facebook.Still, though the proud owner of PDF and Flash, two of the most ubiquitous technologies in the history of desktop computers, Adobe has never enjoyed the same powerful brand recognition as contemporaries that have also built widely used technology. While Google&#39;s search engine inspired the addition of the word &quot;google&quot; in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, Adobe&#39;s technologies have always spoken louder than the company&#39;s name itself.&quot;Adobe is not a real sexy brand,&quot; acknowledged Keith Cutcliffe, a professional Web designer and developer who uses the company&#39;s software.Indeed, Anthony Franco, president of Denver-based application design and development firm EffectiveUI, said his company leads customer engagements by talking about the Flash Player, not necessarily Adobe itself, because the technology is so well known. &quot;It&#39;s the brand recognition of the Flash Player first, then we connect the dots,&quot; he said.But that has begun to change. Adobe took charge of the Macromedia acquisition this year, eliminating that company&#39;s brand and merging its own long-popular graphics tools with Web-design tools acquired from Macromedia,&#160;such as&#160;Dreamweaver and the aforementioned Flash, into Creative Suite 3.To Melissa Webster, program vice president at IDC, Adobe&#39;s purchase of Macromedia was &quot;more like a merger than an acquisition&quot; due to how gracefully Adobe integrated the technology and former Macromedia executives like Adobe chief software architect Kevin Lynch into the fold. She said the company&#39;s skillful execution of the deal also proved it is capable of making significant acquisitions work, which paves the way for more purchases in the future.Ron Schmelzer, senior analyst and founder of research firm ZapThink, said Adobe handled the Macromedia deal so smoothly and the acquisition merged such complementary technologies, &quot;it&#39;s almost hard to believe that Flash and the other [Macromedia products] were ever separate from Adobe products.&quot;This year Adobe also built a connection between the Web and the desktop by introducing the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a technology that leverages the Flash player to bring Web applications to the desktop using the same developer code. AIR, which is now in beta and will be available in full release early next year, will drive the company&#39;s strategy to move RIAs from the Web and bring the same user experience to the desktop.Microsoft with Silverlight aims, in a sense, to do the opposite. With technology built on the Windows Presentation Foundation graphics layer of the Vista OS, Microsoft hopes to&#160;enable its formidable .Net and Windows developer base to build RIAs. While Adobe has a solid lock on the RIA tools market for now, moving to the desktop and into the domain of Microsoft is a strategy that will pose challenges, said Toby Bell, research vice president at Gartner.&quot;It hasn&#39;t yet been proven that Adobe has the enterprise relationships and eco-system of partnerships [that Microsoft does],&quot; Bell said. &quot;All the things Microsoft brings to the table, Adobe is still developing.&quot;Adobe also marked a leadership transition in 2007, with longtime chairman and CEO&#160;Bruce Chizen stepping aside in a planned changing of the guard&#160;to let technologist Shantanu Narayen take over the company. Analysts said the transition should go smoothly because the two executives had been working so closely together before it happened on Adobe&#39;s long-term strategy.Narayen also brings to the company a &quot;developer/inventor enterprise-focused guy when Adobe is going to need that,&quot; Bell said. He added that while Adobe&#39;s top executives have never had that star factor of a Larry Ellison or Bill Gates, &quot;we have to expect [Narayen&#39;s] going to have enough personality to improve investor confidence and inspire Adobe to continue to innovate.&quot;Through all of these twists and turns, the company continues to thrive financially. Adobe closed out the year with yearly revenue up 23 percent for the year, beating Wall Street estimates and reaching nearly $1 billion in sales for its fiscal fourth quarter. Its yearly revenue of $3.16 billion and quarterly revenue of $911.2 million were both records for Adobe, which expects another year of double-digit percentage revenue growth in 2008.While there&#39;s no question Adobe made its own smart strategic moves in 2007, the company also benefited during the year from good timing, as RIAs came into their own and opened up a whole new market for any company that can help developers build them.EffectiveUI&#39;s Franco said that RIAs are no longer the realm of early adopters, which tend to be smaller companies that want to be seen as having cutting-edge design for their Web applications. &quot;Where we&#39;re seeing our biggest growth is ... large industry players leverage the Flash Player to build RIAs,&quot; he said. And with Adobe AIR, EffectiveUI is also able to bring those same Web applications to corporate desktops.Among EffectiveUI&#39;s customers are eBay, Dow Jones, and Viacom. The company also built a package-shipment and tracking system for United Airlines. Using Flash, the application replaced an old &quot;green screen&quot; terminal user-interface without replacing the back-end mainframe technology powering it, Franco said.This cross-platform power is another boon for Adobe as it does battle with Microsoft to control the content being delivered on the Web, which Cutcliffe said is key to being a market leader and influencer in the current, Web-driven technology market. Though Microsoft has built Silverlight to be cross-platform and work in all of the common Web browsers, Adobe has been working with Apple for years to optimize its products for the Mac, which is becoming a more popular platform in its own right.&quot;I still believe the ultimate goal is content control,&quot; he said. &quot;If your tool becomes the favorite tool of developers, you&#39;re going to control the content in the long run. ...I think Adobe has the advantage if somebody wants to get into developing applications that can be deployed both on Windows and on a Mac, or whatever type of an environment they&#39;re running.&quot;As RIAs themselves have more market value, Adobe also is positioning itself to compete in the enterprise with products like Adobe LiveCycle, which allows business customers to automate the business processes and workflow of PDF-based Web transactions, IDC&#39;s Webster said.LiveCycle provides support for asynchronous Web transactions, which is helpful for users who are providing information -- for example, to an insurance company -- online but don&#39;t have all the necessary information on hand to fill out the forms. LiveCycle allows users to go offline in the middle of filling out Web-based forms and return at a later time online back to where they left off, she said.&quot;With [LiveCycle] it&#39;s easy to move that form back online and connect that document back up to the point in the transaction where it went asynchronous,&quot; Webster said. &quot;It&#39;s a win for both sides.&quot;This is another area where Adobe runs into Microsoft, which aims to offer similar workflow automation through products in its 2007 Microsoft Office System, particularly through functionality in its SharePoint Server and InfoPath software. Now that its RIA strategy is sound, proving it&#39;s a worthy enterprise player through products like LiveCycle will be a critical area of focus for Adobe in 2008 as it competes in the technology market on a whole new level.
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Adobe Systems Inc.  in  November will introduce the latest version of its flagship  Acrobat file-sharing product, marking the design software  maker's first major product release since its Macromedia  acquisition.
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Adobe Systems Inc. is working to  deliver all of its software via the Web as a service rather  than a packaged product, but the transition to earn money from  subscriptions or advertising could take a decade.
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Adobe's AIR allows applications to bridge the Web and desktop.
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In response, Adobe releases a new version of both Acrobat and Reader.
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Adobe and Yahoo are launching a new Internet toolbar that will provide users with access to Yahoo products -- including Anti-Spy, Pop-Up Blocker and Yahoo Search -- as well as Adobe products, such as Create Adobe PDF Online.
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The Expression Studio suite of design software is a stepped-up challenge to incumbent Adobe.
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Adobe, one of the top manufacturers of image editing software, has created a new format for digital images that will save the data in raw file formats to allow professionals more freedom to control the various aspects and key details of raw image files.
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Adaptive Path's Jesse James Garrett sees the just-released Adobe Integrated Runtime as another boost for web-based applications.
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On Adobe's anniversary, execs consider accomplishments, choices, and opportunities.
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Yahoo! and Adobe announced an agreement that will make HTML and PDF seem a more similar browsing experience. In the process, it should drive more traffic to Yahoo!
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The major Web browsers are getting facelifts as they increasingly become the focal point for handling business transactions and running programs over the Internet rather than simply displaying Web sites.
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(InfoWorld) - Developers have high hopes for Adobe's newly named AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software, but reservations remain about the technology's cross-platform capability and learning curve. Formerly called Apollo, AIR is described by the company as a cross-OS runtime enabling developers to use existing Web development skills to build Internet applications that can run on the desktop. Currently available in a beta release, it is due to ship by the end of the year. "I would say that [AIR] creates kind of a new breed of applications that are somewhere between traditional desktop applications and Web applications," said Lee Brimelow, senior design technologist at early AIR user Frog Design. "It kind of opens up a new world to Web developers. It enables Web developers to enter the desktop space," Brimelow said. "It allows you, for example, to take an online e-mail account like Yahoo Mail [and] you could have an offline app that allows you to read your mail and compose mails," he added. "One of the major [benefits] of AIR is that it is cross-platform so we donât have to worry about 'Is it a Mac thing, is it a PC thing?' " AIR is more or less a wrapper for Flash, said Gabor Vida, president of Teknision, a rich media application developer. But it is not tied to the operating system, he said. "We just deploy an AIR file, and it's the exact same file whether on a PC or on a Mac," with Linux support due soon, Vida said. AIR, however, is not as powerful as Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation or Apple's Cocoa development technologies, Brimelow said. With those, developers have fuller access to the user's hard drive and OS capabilities, he said. But WPF is only for Windows, Brimelow noted. One developer who said he has not tried AIR nonetheless was interested in it. AIR could be an improvement compared with third-party solutions for running the Flash projector offline, such as FlashJester, said Kurt Suchomel, founder of the Vermont Flash User Group and a developer at Draftfcb, an ad agency that also develops Web sites. "Itâs exciting to me to hear that there's a possible product that's something similar to that," but could offer more versatility, Suchomel said. But he expressed concerns about how effective AIR will be on different operating systems, wondering if there will be "possible gotchas on each platform." AIR is supposed to be identical on the Mac and on the PC, Suchomel said. "I would just hope that it is truly that way," he said. "It will "be interesting to see what the bugs are. "My natural concern is the learning curve for developing with Apollo, even though it does support all the major Web technologies [HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, and Flash]," Suchomel said. "I am looking forward to developing in Apollo since it gives me a way to create one rich Internet application and run [it] on multiple operating systems." Another developer who also had not experimented with AIR expressed similar curiosity. "It just seems like it's going to be really cool," said Steve Farwell, marketing director at Traveland USA, which sells recreational vehicles. He also is host of the Orange County Flash User Group in Southern California, or OCFlash. Farwell said he liked the idea of combining Web applications with desktop applications that can work with the local file system.Â  AIR could have benefits in applications such as hospital systems, where a physician has intermittent connectivity to the network, he said. Self-employed developer and AIR beta user Robert Hall, manager of the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group, reiterated what Adobe said about the project. "It makes it really easy to take your existing Web apps and all the skills you have â¦ and repurpose them for desktop apps," he said. "For me, the big benefit is I'm able to leverage my existing skills that I've been working on for years," Hall said. As the product still in a beta form, the feature set is not complete, Hall cautioned. AIR "fills a major, major niche," said Gordon Clarke, manager of FlexUserGroup.org.Â  Developers can move to the desktop and create client-server applications without having to learn a new language, he said. Sometimes-connected applications offer advantages, Clarke said. "If you want to have rich media, it's better to have a lot of it coming from your desktop than having to download it off the Web," he said. Clarke likened AIR to the iPod, where music can be downloaded or heard on the Web, and Microsoft Outlook, which lets users browse e-mail offline. At effectiveUI, which developed the eBay Desktop shopping application using AIR, the president of the company said AIR could supplement or displace Java in different instances. AIR could be used to help build GUIs (a weakness for Java), while Java could reside on the back-end server, said effectiveUI President Anthony Franco. "One of the things that Java developers struggle with is developing interfaces," Franco said. "[AIR] could replace Java in the GUI development of an application." Adobe's Flex and Flash are part of the Apollo, or AIR, framework, Franco said. But AIR differs from Microsoft's new Silverlight technology, in that Silverlight is more of a competitor to the Flash Player, he said. AIR has enabled effectiveUI to develop the type of application sought by clients and to do so within budget, Franco said. The advent of AIR also will mean development of office suites running on AIR, said Chris Charlton, group manager of the Los Angeles Flash Users Group and a Web architect at Adobe solution provider Almer/Blank. Packaged software, chat applications, and business tools will result, he said. AIR applications are going to pull some market share from existing applications that have been on a single platform only, Charlton said. Adobe's new technology represents perhaps the next evolution of how people engage with the Internet,Â  providing functions of theÂ  browser without all the overhead, said Michael Lebowitz,Â  CEO of Web design firm Big Spaceship. The firm is using AIR to build a media center application for energy drink company Red Bull. "The browser right now is sort of monolithic. It's a one-stop shop for anything you might do on the Web," Lebowitz said. "The problem with that is that's not always effective."
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Blog: The software giant follows through on better support for dynamic, or scripting, languages for Web development.