I’m not privy to Google/Adobe business meetings, but when I see street-level Google staffers say “Flash isn’t ‘open’ enough for Google!” then I read it as Google not being able to lock in the advertising channel via Adobe Flash Player. It’s like what the iPhone scene is turning out to look like… Flash is oriented to content creators and connects across various OS, various browsers, various devices, various webservices, various ad networks. Flash would make the iPhone too open, from what we’ve seen recently of the iStore controls.

Adobe makes its money selling publishing technology to creative people. Adobe makes this money whether people use the predictable universal Flash runtime, or Dreamweaver or ColdFusion for HTML, or even Photoshop, AfterEffects, and other asset creation tools. We don’t care much about *how* you’re creative, just that you’re interested in digital expression and publishing.

Google makes its money selling audiences to advertisers. They’d love it if protocols, runtimes, and even creative content itself was commoditized. All that matters is that they get a lock on the advertising revenue.

In the larger scheme, Adobe is far more open than Google. We don’t care what you do with your content, how you earn a ROI on it. But the existence of alternative advertising networks is a direct threat to Google’s entire revenue base. If they can’t fragment Flash to secure their revenue lock-in (and, potentially, their web-beacon intelligence network), then that openness Flash enables, enables competitors to Google. And right now, Google seems to have difficulty locking-in people with Flash. It’s *too* open.

I don’t know if that’s how the rest of Adobe sees it, but that’s increasingly how the pieces fit together for me. Make sense for you too…?

jd/adobe