Tim Anderson's ITWriting » adobe

On BlackBerry 10, Cascades UI and Adobe AIR

tim — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 17:03:35 +0000

I spoke to Jeff Lejeune, RIM’s Advanced User Interface Director, here at BlackBerry DevCon Europe in Amsterdam.

He is part of the team responsible for the Cascades UI, a native code UI framework for the forthcoming BlackBerry 10 OS. One of the things he told me is that the Cascades name is actually being used for parts of the API beyond the user interface. It is a major part of the new operating system.

I had not appreciated until today the extent of the likely difference between BlackBerry 10 and the current Tablet OS 1.0 or Playbook OS 2.0. Since the PlayBook OS is already based on QNX, I had assumed that BlackBerry 10 would be an incremental update rather than a radical new direction.

Certainly there is less difference between PlayBook OS 2.0 and BlackBerry 10 then there is between BlackBerry 7.0 and the PlayBook OS, so my assumption was not completely wrong. That said, the introduction of the Cascades UI acquired with The Astonishing Tribe is a major change. Lejune told me that Cascades UI will be in effect the native UI of BlackBerry 10, and the built-in apps will use it.

The first version of the PlayBook uses both native code and Adobe AIR for its built-in apps.

RIM has given full backing to Adobe AIR at this event, presenting it as one of the supported development platforms and saying that it will support AIR for as long as Adobe does and maybe even longer. Even so, it would be fair to say that RIM is moving away from AIR and towards native code and Cascades UI in BlackBerry 10.

Further, Adobe itself has changed direction since the launch of the PlayBook last year. Adobe has made it clear that while Flash, Flex and AIR are still important, its strategic direction is HTML 5 when it comes to development platforms. Some aspects of Flex, the code-based approach to AIR authoring, are being wound down, including the visual designer in Flash Builder.

My sense therefore is that AIR is not the best choice if you are considering how to develop for BlackBerry 10 – and BlackBerry 10 is the future of RIM’s platform. The primary choice should be between Cascades UI, for best performance and integration, or WebWorks (PhoneGap), for development in HTML and JavaScript and cross-platform code.

Adobe sheds more light on its LiveCycle plans–but what is happening to its Digital Enterprise Platform?

tim — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:50:25 +0000

When Adobe announced a shift in its business strategy in November, it was not clear what the implications were for the products that were no longer favoured. Since then bits of information have dripped out, presumably as the company itself works out its priorities. In December developers learned that Flash Catalyst would be discontinued and Flash Builder would have features removed. Now VP Arun Anantharaman has posted about what is happening to LiveCycle, the Enterprise Services side of Adobe.

Quick summary: Anantharaman says that the following “core offerings” will be the subject of continuing investment:

Modules: Reader Extensions, Forms, Output, Digital Signatures, Rights Management, Process Management, PDF Generation
Tools: Workbench, Designer
Solutions: Correspondence Management
ECM Connectors: SharePoint, IBM Filenet, Documentum
Advanced Offerings: Data Services

While it is reassuring to see that Data Services will not be abandoned, and that the most important PDF-based server products still have a future, not everything is clear regarding Adobe’s enterprise strategy. It is telling that Anantharaman’s post is entitled “The Future of LiveCycle”; yet the LiveCycle product page still says that LiveCycle has been replaced by the Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform:

The next evolution of LiveCycle is here. The new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform (ADEP) brings together core LiveCycle capabilities and much more.

So why not a post on the future of ADEP? If you look at the FAQ about ADEP it seems that many of the modules mentioned above have been replaced by ADEP services.

It would also be helpful to spell out exactly what is being dropped, rather than leaving customers to work this out by spotting what is not mentioned. It does appear that the work Adobe has done on composite applications (“Mosaic”) is a casualty. Collaboration services are another obvious omission. Correspondence seems to be the sole survivor from what was three Solutions Accelerators: the other two were “Review and Approval” and “Interactive Statements”.

There is also the question of what is happening with Adobe’s Enterprise Content Management story. In October 2010, Adobe completed its acquisition of Day Software, thereby acquiring REST pioneer Roy Fielding as well as Day’s core product, CQ (Communiqué). ADEP seemed to bring together the CRX content repository which is used by CQ with Adobe’s previous investment in Enterprise application development, as well including the PDF document services that go back many years at Adobe, before the Macromedia acquisition.

Now, Web Content Management is still a focus at Adobe, being part of what Adobe, with its love of the Experience word, calls Web Experience Management. This is from Anantharaman’s statement last November:

we are now planning to focus our Enterprise efforts on products targeting the digital marketer, including the Digital Marketing Suite and Web Experience Management solution.

That suggests CQ and CRX are alive and well at Adobe; but what exactly is happening to ADEP?

I have asked Adobe for clarification of its Enterprise strategy, and while nobody was available to speak to me on the subject immediately, I have been told that this should be possible in a couple of weeks time, so watch this space.

Adobe: why the big business shift when financial results look so good?

tim — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 09:09:49 +0000

Adobe released its quarterly and full year results last week; I am catching up with this now after a week in China.

The company is doing well. Revenue is up by 11% year on year and it generated $1.5 billion in cash. It is buying back shares, usually a sign that a company has more money than it knows what to do with.

Here is the comparison with the equivalent quarter last year:

	Q4 2010	Q4 2011
Creative and interactive	404.8	437.2
Digital Media	165.9	186.4
Digital Enterprise	273.3	342.4
Omniture	109.0	131.1
Print and publishing	55	55.1

In other words, all business segments grew – impressive in uncertain economic times. See this earlier post for a rough breakdown of the segments.

A couple of observations. First, Adobe is benefiting from the big trend in IT towards web, cloud and device. Many companies regard apps (as in mobile apps) as vehicles for marketing, and Adobe’s tools are a natural fit, with or without Flash. We are in a more design-centric IT world than was the case a few years back, driven by Apple, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and just because we can: technology now performs basic computing functions with ease so design becomes the key differentiator.

Adobe is nevertheless remarkable in the way it has managed the transition from print to digital. Few companies manage that kind of fundamental shift in their market successfully.

The other point that interests me is why Adobe announced a major change in its business model in November. Digital media and marketing will be the focus, while it winds down its enterprise development platform, as well as moving away from Flash and focusing on HTML5 for delivery.

Unless the announced figures disguise future problems that are only visible on the inside, this move was driven by bad results. Digital Enterprise, which includes the middleware business, increased revenue by 25% over the same quarter last year.

In 2012 the Digital Enterprise segment is being renamed Digital Marketing Solutions, expressing the company’s intent.

Adobe’s change of direction caught me by surprise, as it was not really flagged at the MAX conference the previous month, though there was evidence of struggle with regard to Flash versus HTML5.

I would describe Adobe’s moves as bold. Taking action ahead of when it becomes inevitable is a good thing, but there are significant risks. Adobe’s platform is all about synergies, and chopping off bits that still have a significant following may have unexpected consequences.

Another curious facet of Adobe’s move is that its normally excellent PR department has done little, as far as I am aware, to brief the press. Major news concerning what will be donated to Apache, or the discontinuation of Flash Catalyst, has emerged from sporadic reports instead. Normally that is a sign of a company under stress, rather than one which is about to deliver excellent results.

I guess this time next year we will have a clearer picture.

Adobe discontinues Flash Catalyst, clarifies Flex and Flash Builder futures

tim — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 09:18:34 +0000

Adobe has told a group of Flex developers, invited to San Francisco for a special reconciliatory summit following the sudden announcement that Flex is moving to the Apache Foundation, that Flash Catalyst will be discontinued. Developer Fabien Nicollet was there and posts:

CS5.5 version of Catalyst is the latest version of Flash Catalyst. It is compatible with Flex 4.5, but compatibility will not be ensured for future versions.

Flash Builder will also have features removed in future versions. Adobe’s slide talks of:

Removing unpopular and expensive to maintain features: Design View, Data Centric Development (DCD) and Flash Catalyst workflows.

The Monocle profiler, shown at the MAX conference as a sneak peek, “continues as a priority”.

The FalconJS project, to compile Flex to HTML5, will be discontinued, though ~~possibly~~ donated to Apache at a date to be determined.

AIR on Linux will not be given to Apache because it would mean sharing the proprietary Flash Player code. This is bad news in the Apache context.

Nicollet concludes:

Flex still has a bright future for companies who want to build fast and robust applications . Not to mention the people who will have a hard time building complex applications on HTML5, for whom Flex will always be a viable and mature alternative.

That is the optimistic view. What is clear from the summit is that Adobe is greatly reducing its investment. I guess we knew this already; but hearing about how Flash Builder will be cut-down, Catalyst discontinued, and so on, will not improve developer confidence.

A lot depends on the progress of the Apache project. My concern here is that since the Flash player, which is the Flex runtime, remains proprietary, this will dampen enthusiasm in the open source community and limit its ability to innovate around Flex.

Adobe favours HTML over Flex, retreats from its enterprise app platform

tim — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 11:59:55 +0000

Adobe has stated that Flex, the xml-based language for developing applications that run on the Flash runtime (also known as AIR) will gradually give way to HTML 5:

In the long-term, we believe HTML5 will be the best technology for enterprise application development. We also know that, currently, Flex has clear benefits for large-scale client projects typically associated with desktop application profiles.

The company is also giving the Flex SDK to an open source foundation:

we are planning to contribute the Flex SDK to an open source foundation in the same way we contributed PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation when we acquired Nitobi.

though Adobe will continue to contribute to its development. Adobe also states that it will continue to develop the Flash Builder IDE for Flex.

I am surprised by this announcement. I understand Adobe’s reasons for abandoning Flash for mobile devices, but since you can use Flex with the packager for iOS or the captive runtime for other mobile devices, it is not necessary to abandon Flex as well.

But is Adobe abandoning Flex? Not as such; in fact the statement linked above says that Adobe is still “committed to Flex” and “committed to Flash Builder”. The problem though is that there are several clues showing that Flex is in decline and no longer strategic.

First there is the statement about HTML5 versus Flex in the long-term.

Second, Adobe says it is not sure what is happening to the Flex roadmap as discussed recently at the MAX conference in Los Angeles:

The Flex roadmap will be determined by the governing board once it’s been established. We plan to contribute framework features previously highlighted as part of Adobe’s Flex roadmap, into this new project.

Third, the delivery of a project to an open source foundation can be interpreted as a signal that a company wants to distance itself and lacks commitment to its long-term success. I would not make that argument with respect to PhoneGap, but for Flex I am not so sure.

It may already be too late. Imagine you are an Adobe partner trying to sell a Flex project to your customer. What answer do you have when your customer says, “but isn’t Adobe moving to HTML 5?”

When Adobe made its first announcement about the change in its business model I came up with the phrase more publishing, less programming. That view was further strengthened by CEO Shantanu Narayen’s recent post:

The future of the Internet comes down to content – creating it and monetizing it. This is where our customers rely on Adobe, and it’s what is shaping our strategy moving forward.

I take this then as not only a retreat from Flex, but a retreat from enterprise application development in favour of content creation tools.

Charles Humble at InfoQ has an informative post on this issue here.

Adobe’s cloud plans: most customers will migrate, pay more, get more

tim — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 20:21:06 +0000

I’ve been listening to some of the sessions from Adobe’s Financial Analyst meeting in New York City yesterday. Since this event was focused on financials, Adobe talked in detail about how it intends not only to win its customers over to a cloud model, but also to make more revenue from them. I found it fascinating.

First, a little background. Adobe announced its Creative Cloud at the MAX event in Los Angeles last month. I was there, and while it was obvious that the announcement was significant, I did not appreciate until yesterday how profoundly the company is changing its business model.

Adobe has its own take on what cloud computing means. There are no plans for Creative Suite – which bundles products including Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash and Premier Pro – to become software as a service in the manner of Google Apps or Salesforce.com. Rather, the Creative Cloud is primarily two things:

1. A new purchase model for Creative Suite and associated tablet apps, based on subscription rather than perpetual licencing.

2. A set of cloud-based services which extend the features of the desktop applications. These services include storage of your projects, synchronisation across different desktop PCs and mobile devices, font licensing, digital publishing, analytics, and website building.

There is also a community aspect. I grabbed a screen from one of the presentations, and on the right you can see that the customer has a Twitter-style “followed” and “following” count, as well as status activity reported.

In the main part of the screen, you can see the desktop apps she has installed “on this machine” – implying some link between cloud and local machine – tools “you do not have yet” which can be installed from the cloud, and a set of Android and Apple iOS touch apps also marked “click to install”.

One thing Adobe made clear to its analysts is its intention that all its Creative Suite customers will eventually move to the Creative Cloud, and that the majority of its Creative Suite business will be cloud subscription within 4 years.

Why will you move? Well, Adobe is going to reserve some benefits for subscription customers. During the Q&A at the end of the day, the execs were asked whether Adobe Edge and Muse will be in Creative Suite 6, the next major version. Edge is for designing HTML 5 animations, while Muse is for building web sites without writing code. This is what Senior VP David Wadhwani said:

We’ve announced they will be available in the CS6 timeframe. They will be available as point products, as subscriptions, and in the Creative Cloud. Our current thinking is not that we’ll be adding them to Creative Suite. Creative Cloud is what we believe adds more value to our customers and we want to continue to drive people in that direction.

It is not just adding value to customers though, it is adding value to Adobe as well. Adobe presented figures which spell this out (it was a financial meeting, remember). The example was CS 5.5 Design Premium.

This particular suite costs as much as $1,899 today if you buy a perpetual licence, or as little as $399.00 as an upgrade from CS 5 (still a perpetual licence). Adobe has a sliding scale of upgrade prices, which rise according to the age of your current version, though apparently this is changing and you will no longer get upgrade prices more than two versions back (I think this means that CS 4.x versions will not get upgrade pricing for CS 6).

The existence of upgrade prices makes calculating revenue per customer over time rather complex, because it depends how often they upgrade. CS is now on an annual release cycle, and according to Adobe this means the revenue from a perpetual licence customer might be as much as $3,894 over six years, or as little as $1,424 if they are an existing customer who upgrades just once at the beginning of that six year period.

On average, Adobe says, its perpetual licence Creative Suite customers pay $30.00 per month “over all CS suites and geographies”.

By contrast, the Creative Cloud subscription would be either $49 or $69 per month (I am not quite sure what extra you get for the $20) and over 6 years, allowing for some customers to drop out, Adobe reckons it will get $40.00 revenue per month.

In other words, it is projecting that its Creative Suite customers will pay on average 33% more under the new Creative Cloud model, than they do today.

I am not clear how dealer margins affect these figures; but Adobe did say that it will continue to work with its retail channel and partners, so that will continue at some level.

One analyst asked why customers will be willing to pay more than they do at the moment. Here is Wadhwani’s answer:

There’s a lot of new value in the creative cloud. You get all of the desktop tools as they’re ready. You get all of the touch tools. When our creative Suite customers are starting to use tablets they want automatic synchronisation and the ability to use those directly with the desktop tools. That’s one of the functions the creative cloud includes.

There’s a lot more in there around community, there’s a lot more in there around training. We’ve talked about Adobe gurus, people that are recognized names in the community participating and helping our customers with new ideas. We’ve also introduced the idea of some segments of the digital publishing suite and business catalyst and some of our publishing services being available,

And recently we’ve acquired a company called Typekit which addresses one of the biggest issues as people move to being more digital, which is how do they manage and licence fonts? That whole aggregate value is substantially more than what they get with a single version of the creative suite.

Is that worth on average 33% more? It is hard to judge as it depends on the individual customer’s pattern of work.

Whatever you think of this strategy, it is in line with something Adobe has been pushing hard in recent years, which is to drive for recurring revenue rather than one-off purchases. In fact, this is stated in the financial presentation. Apparently, 40% is already recurring revenue, but the company plans to transition the majority of overall Adobe business to recurring revenue within 4 years.

What next for Adobe Flash? Think runtime not plugin

tim — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 12:18:47 +0000

Adobe is stating that mobile Flash will no longer be developed:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Although this seems like a major shift in strategy, Adobe has been moving in this direction for some time. At the MAX conference last month the company was clear that most web developers can be expected to use HTML 5 rather than Flash most of the time, reserving use of the plug-in for video, games and certain kinds of application. As for mobile, all the talk was about AIR and the captive runtime, an approach similar to the iOS packager which bundles the Flash runtime into your application so that no plug-in or additional download is required.

This approach is now explicit, and I reckon we can further conclude that if the Flash plugin for mobile is being abandoned, then the Flash plugin for the desktop is also less important than before. Mobile browsing is huge, and likely to grow, so developing web pages for Flash is unattractive other than in cases where there is an easy way to direct mobile browsers to a non-Flash alternative. Flash as a browser plugin will now decline forever, which is a good thing for web standards even if it is not necessarily a good thing for web developers, who must face the challenge of cross-browser development.

So what is Flash now? It is still Adobe’s runtime, and the client for its media services, and in that role it remains significant. Thanks to Adobe’s packaging work, you can take your Flash or Flex application and deploy it to most desktop and recent mobile platforms, though not to Windows Phone or older Android devices. Could you not use HTML 5, JavaScript and PhoneGap instead? Maybe in some cases; but Flash is a richer, faster and more consistent platform, as well as benefiting from Adobe’s design and development tools.

See also my piece for the Register: Down but not out: Flash in an HTML5 world.

Update: Added official Adobe link for statement on mobile Flash.

Adobe “shifting its business model”: more publishing, less programming

tim — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:20:21 +0000

Adobe has announced a shift in its business strategy, together with the loss of around 750 employees.

So what is changing? Adobe says it will be focusing on digital media and digital marketing, while investing less in “certain enterprise solution product lines.” In line with this strategy, Adobe acquired video advertising company auditude last week.

Here are the things which Adobe says are “important elements” in its new approach:

Creative Suite extended with tablet apps and delivered through the cloud
Greater investment in HTML 5: Dreamweaver, Edge and PhoneGap
Flash positioned for “advanced” web, video, and mobile apps
Digital publishing solutions
Video advertising
Document services such as electronic contracts and signatures

So what will Adobe be doing less? This is harder to discern as the releases, naturally enough, say less about it. The key remark is that:

the company will reduce its investment, and expected license revenue, in certain enterprise solution product lines

We can conclude, I guess, that the Digital Enterprise Platform once known as LiveCycle is going to get less attention as the company focuses more on digital content and less on providing a platform for enterprise applications. I would guess that this will impact the middleware services more than things like the Flex framework and Flash Platform tools, but I am speculating. More information is coming in a financial analyst meeting tomorrow in New York.

Adobe MAX 2011 and the future of Flash

tim — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 10:50:53 +0000

The unstated theme of Adobe MAX 2011 last week was this: what is the future of Flash? The issue being that with HTML 5 ascendant and Apple wrecking the idea of Flash as an ubiquitous web plug-in, should Adobe be frantically retooling its design tools for HTML and apps, or does Flash still have a future?

The answer is a little of both; but let’s be clear: there was more Flash than HTML at MAX. What was the most eye-catching demo? It was Flash running Unreal Tournament with the claim of better graphical performance than on Microsoft Xbox 360 or Sony Playstation 3.

It is also worth noting that the touch apps demonstrated at the day one keynote were created in Flash and compiled into apps using the new Captive Runtime feature in AIR 3.

At the same time there was a substantial amount of HTML effort on show. There was the announced acquisition of Nitobi, makers of PhoneGap – though note that PhoneGap itself is heading to the Apache Foundation – and demos of the Edge motion and interaction tool for HTML5. Adobe also told us about its work on CSS Regions and CSS Shaders. I also saw how HTML export, including partial ActionScript to JavaScript conversion, is coming in a future version of Flash Professional.

My perception is that while Adobe is serious about stepping up a gear with its HTML tools, its heart is still with Flash. That said, there is a shift of emphasis away from Flash as a web plug-in, other than when it is the “Games console of the Web”, and towards Flash and Flex as a cross-platform development platform. Adobe is using Flash and AIR for its own Touch apps, previewed at MAX.

Let me add that the new features in AIR are huge, in particular the ability to package the Flash runtime as part of your app, called Captive Runtime, and the ability to extend your AIR app with native code. Cross-platform mobile tools are a particular interest of mine, and Adobe’s offering is strong in this field, though it will never be the most efficient. Adobe is also pressing ahead with something like web workers for ActionScript, providing a form of concurrency, though this is not in AIR 3 but planned for a future release. Another big new feature in the Flash runtime is Stage 3D, accelerated 3D graphics which enabled the Unreal demo mentioned above.

Nitobi’s Andre Charland was at MAX and I could not shake off the thought that he will find joining the Flash company difficult.

It will be near-impossible for Adobe to be equally enthusiastic about both PhoneGap and AIR, and given that Flash and AIR are so deeply woven into the company’s products I suggest that PhoneGap is more likely to be neglected.

Take a look at Adobe’s agenda for the Back from MAX event in London next month. It is 100% Flash and Flex.

What about the MAX attendees? I have contradictory evidence here. I noticed that a session on Building mobile apps with HTML, CSS and JavaScript (ie PhoneGap) was packed out, while the session running at the same time on What’s new in AIR – and what’s next was sparsely attended. This session was repeated, which means Adobe thought it would be a popular one. I was also surprised by how few went along to hear about Flash Professional Sneak Peek: a glimpse at the future which was a fascinating session if you are interested in the future of this tool. Adobe must have been surprised too, as it was in a large room.

That said, a session on native extensions for AIR was moved from one of the smallest rooms to one of the biggest and was still full. There was also great interest in concurrency in the Flash runtime. Many of the attendees I spoke to saw themselves as Flash and Flex developers and there was more talk about how to fight off the perception that the tech world is moving to HTML, than of how to encourage it.

Getting rid of Flash may seem like obvious progress to someone annoyed by the Adobe updater, or who is an Apple iOS enthusiast, or who does not like the idea of proprietary plugins. It does not feel like that though if you have a browser-hosted app to maintain and enjoy targeting a single runtime rather than testing in every browser, as well as using features of Flash that are hard to replicate in HTML.

Adobe’s design and development platform is still Flash-centric, which is either good or bad news depending on your perspective.

Adobe: no new features for open source BlazeDS data services

tim — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:44:08 +0000

Adobe’s Damon Cooper, who runs the BlazeDS and Data Services team at Adobe, has posted about BlazeDS vs the paid-for Data Services.

It is a curious post, in that he simultaneously highlights new features coming in Data Services 4.6 while also giving a number of reasons not to use BlazeDS.

BlazeDS is the free and open source version of Data Services, for publish/subscribe messaging and remote object invocation of Java objects in a Flash or AIR application.

He points out that the LGPL licence may be problematic; he emphasises that BlazeDS is unsupported; he says that while it is open source there are no non-Adobe committers; and as the knock-out punch adds:

Additionally, while we will absolutely be making sure we keep BlazeDS fresh and the bug fixes flowing, we don’t currently have any major new features planned for BlazeDS. That could change, but we’re currently full-out on delivering innovation to our customers have asked for in Data Services and we are full steam ahead there.

It does sound like a retreat to me; and while I do not think Adobe is under any moral obligation to continue developing BlazeDS it does make me wonder what has changed between the moment in 2007 when Adobe decided it was a good idea to open source part of its LiveCycle Data Services, and today.

At Adobe MAX last week Adobe announced the acquisition of Nitobi and with it the open source PhoneGap project. PhoneGap is heading to the Apache Foundation – probably a good thing considering that Adobe sometimes seems to struggle when it comes to managing open source software.