Thursday, May 01, 2008

Yes Virginia - Adobe does listen to Slashdot

Today I saw a comment on Slashdot (my all time favorite online community) that made me realize just how far Adobe has come.

“The mere idea of higher ups at a previously assumed Big Evil Company paying attention to discussions on Slashdot (with critiques here often ruthless, multifaceted, and heavily biased towards consumer interests) is pretty shocking, and heartening.

If this signals a major shift in Adobe's operating culture, I think it's cause for celebration.”


http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=539834&cid=23263596

Yes - it is true. In fact, we regularly peruse Slashdot to find out the latest, brutally honest opinions from the hardest to please tech-heads. I doubt we'll ever satisfy everyone but to recap, Adobe is definitely on the right track. PDF to ISO, The ActionScript Virtual Machine (VM behind Flash PLayer) open sourced via SourceForge, the Open Screen Project, The Flex Compiler open source project and BlazeDS are just a few examples of Adobe putting community and developers ahead of corporate greed. So what does this mean?

  • Anyone who complains that Acrobat Reader is bloated is free to (try to) write a new PDF reader that works faster.
  • Anyone who thinks the Flash Player is too slow is welcome to help.
  • Anyone who wants a bug fixed in the Flex SDK can fix it for themselves and others.
  • We all get to work together to build a cool technology stack that works for us.
Maybe I sound too much like an optimist or a hype. I do have faith in our company and really love working here. I love the change that is occurring and having a CEO and CTO that understand Slashdot and actually take time to read and take in what is being said.

What's next? Flash on the iPhone? Please already!!!

;-)

5 comments:

  1. If this is more than just fear of Silverlight and if a company the size of Adobe can be fast enough, then welcome to the game!

    How about trying to get SWF into ISO and giving it an independent governing body? Or has Microsoft bought so much of ISO that that's no longer possible? Look for Silverlight as ISO 32000 :P

    But kidding aside, I like the smell of all this. This is a huge step forward from the old situation. Greedy proprietary formats are a huge problem, for archival, for accessibility, for the free market, for independent developers, I'm sure you know the story. The less proprietary formats, the better.

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  2. What I find extremely interesting about this announcement is that by allowing vendors to create their own versions of Flash Player, Adobe has effectively beaten Apple at their own game and put the ball back in their court when it comes to Flash Player on the iPhone. I (along with others) have asserted for a while that Apple doesn't necessarily *want* Flash on the iPhone--and now they are likely backed into a corner given that they are as capable as Adobe of making that happen.

    I blogged about it this morning; but posting links in the comments here doesn't seem to work; nonetheless, I'm not going to rehash my entire blog post here.

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  3. Would be nice if Adobe noticed the general opinions of Slashdot about ColdFusion - hopefully then they might do something about it.

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  4. A agree. I Pinged Ben Forta with this and hopefully you can direct him (via this blog) at some of the Slashdot posts on Coldfusion he should read.

    THanks for taking the time!

    D

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  5. how did you get so much pr dear...lolz

    great going:)

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