Dear Adobe
blog.cloudomatic.com
blog.cloudomatic.com
Fast forward to now and they're regularly putting out solid updates with good communication via the blog. I recommend the application.
Loved your "some gaps to fill" article, btw.
I still think the underlying limit, though, is the lack of a federated identity management system. Certainly oAuth is a huge step in the right direction, and avoids many of the problems of OpenID. But fundamentally, desktop applications are "single sign on".
Imagine if you had to log in again to open office productivity software, then log in again to open a web browser, then log in a third time to launch your music player, and once more to balance your checkbook.
Clearly SOME people are willing to do some degree of multiple sign-on (Logging in to gmail, then Pandora, and again to open Mint, for instance.) But until these context transitions are much smoother, there will continue to be blocks in adoption even if everything else you address is fixed.
Identity is a huge problem. Not only for authentication, but for de-authentication as well. What if you fire someone and want to delete all their accounts you have for them on your SaaS apps? You have to deactivate each account manually: (basecamp, salesforce, wufoo, dropbox, and probably 5 others).
http://www.onelogin.com/ is doing something interesting in this space.
#quicklinks { position: absolute; }
I'm sure Adobe is cool with killing that income stream since you wrote them this nice letter though.
I honestly think that adobe flash video will be pervasive much longer than you might think. Do you know how to send a live video stream in HTML5, in case you wanted to make the HTML5 analog of chatroulette? Neither does anyone else.
You won't see justin.tv switching from flash any time soon.
Livestreaming is certainly one of those use cases that will be using flash for a while. It's beyond my area of expertise, but I think someone mentioned websockets in HTML5 might make it doable. That right there is a really big potential idea. Would love to see it built.
If Flash is a no go because of HTML5, why does the iPhone app market exist?
However, I agree with this blog post. Flash is going the way of the past, HTML5 is the wave of the future. Adobe doesn't make money on flash players but does on content creation applications. It makes sense (and if Adobe's demonstration of targeting HTML5 for output is a demonstration it does to them also) to build HTML5 content creation tools. Adobe is the best at making content creation tools, they should do this.
That's a cheap, unsupported distraction.
The no-Flash in the browser on the iPhone/iPad/whatever is entirely and absolutely Apple's choice, and no one can make that choice for them. They can argue benefits/detriments, but no one can make Apple pollute their platform against their will.
That is debate number 1.
The debate now has NOTHING to do with the web (and it's honestly quite ludicrous to claim that it does), but instead is Apple deciding to rewrite the rules of the app market just to exclude certain manners of developing software.
Using the web to blanket that argument as well is, quite honestly, offensive propaganda.
If Steve said "We're implementing new quality rules to ascertain the quality of apps by a panel of testers, and we're demanding that all apps use features {X} {Y} and {Z}", that would be one thing. That isn't what they did. Instead they said "Due to the fact that a lot of very gullible, very silly people will accept out ridiculously inaccurate correlation, we're blanket eliminating a broad realm of technology choices just to thwart a competitor".
Unless you work for Apple you should not be embracing that. It is a grievous offense to intelligence.