Tim Anderson’s ITWriting

This announcement concerning advertising on Xbox Live together with these tweets from Microsoft VP Scott Guthrie add up to one thing: Silverlight 3 will run on Xbox 360.

Another platform (along with Apple’s iPhone) where Adobe Flash will struggle to find a place, I’d guess.

Yesterday I met Adobe’s Duane Nickull for a chat about the company’s efforts in SOA. Nickull is a battle-scarred enterprise architect with a deep knowledge of SOA standards, who is now a senior technical evangelist for Adobe. He represents what I think of as the other Adobe: not the company that does things you would not believe in Photoshop, but the one that has created an end-to-end development platform with LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (plus your favourite application server) at one end, and Flex at the other.

It is an aspect of Adobe that deserves more attention. For example, this note in Anil Channapa’s What’s New in LiveCycle Data Services 3 caught my attention:

The LiveCycle Data Services 3 beta supports an acknowledge capability that enables all communications between Flex-based applications for Flash and the LiveCycle Data Services server to be guaranteed. All that you have to do is mark the LiveCycle Data Services 3 beta server destination as reliable.

I think this is huge. As Channapa goes on to note, for developers contemplating ecommerce or financial applications, this is a key feature.

I learned from Nickull that this feature is based on WS-RX and that in general we should expect more WS-* implementations to turn up in LiveCycle ES. RESTafarians will be sceptical, but I suspect this will help Adobe to make inroads into enterprise development.

That said, I do think Adobe has issues positioning and promoting LiveCycle ES. The more glitzy Creative Suite tends to grab all the attention, and indeed accounts for by far the largest slice of Adobe’s revenue. When I attended MAX in Milan last year, I don’t recall any mention for LiveCycle in the keynotes; it was one of those things you had to discover, though there were some excellent sessions on the subject.

I think Adobe should push LiveCycle ES harder, particularly as a business model based mainly on selling a huge suite of design tools strikes me as precarious. Adobe is making a start and has announced a LiveCycle@MAX bundle for MAX 2009 [warning: autoplay sound] in early October.

The LiveCycle ES brand encompasses what used to be Macromedia’s Flex Data Services as well as Adobe’s PDF-oriented software for managing workflow and data gathering. If you look at Adobe’s LiveCycle ES page, it all seems PDF-centric and Data Services is hidden away as the last item under Data capture.

In reality LiveCycle Data Services ES has a lot to offer even if you don’t care a bean about PDF, but that is a fact that is easy to miss. Another positioning issue. Adobe has been over-zealous in its PDF-with-everything strategy.

I also asked Nickull how Acrobat.com fits with with Adobe’s SOA strategy. He said that a move to application hosting would be a logical one, though he implied that it would be geared towards SMEs.

Host your Java application on Adobe’s servers, with built-in LiveCycle Data Services for your Flex client? That makes sense to me.

Adobe CEO commented during yesterday’s earnings call:

We are also equally committed to bringing the Flash Player to the iPhone, so now we do have a Flash Player 10 version for smartphones. We continue to work with Apple. We need more APIs and cooperation to bring the capabilities of Flash to the iPhone and we think it’s in both of our best interests to make sure that 85% of the top 100 websites that use Flash, that that experience is available to the Apple customers.

The real question is not whether Adobe is committed to this, but whether Apple will allow it. I think the stake are high for Adobe, which is why I have such keen interest. The longer the iPhone remains Flash-free, the more those “85% of the top 100 websites” will question their use of Flash and wonder if they should try to migrate towards more universal HTML and JavaScript technology. On the other hand, if Adobe gets its stuff on iPhone it will give it a further advantage over rival plug-ins like Microsoft’s Silverlight.

I mean, if you build your entire cloud platform around the Flash client, what do you do if the key mobile device out there refuses to support it?

Transcript from Seeking Alpha.

As expected, Adobe is strengthening its “Flash Platform” strategy by renaming the forthcoming Flex Builder 4 (codename Gumbo) to Flash Builder 4:

This change will provide better naming consistency for the Flash family of tools and position Flash Builder as the development tool for the Flash Platform.

This is only a name change, nothing more. Flash Builder will still be based on Eclipse, and the original Flash Professional IDE, also part of Creative Suite, will continue as before.

My question: why doesn’t Adobe go further in clarifying and promoting its Flash brand? The current situation is still confusing:

Flash Builder vs Flash Professional: the names give you no clue about the difference. Why not Flash Developer and Flash Designer?

Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime): non-techie people do not realise this has anything to do with Flash. Flash Desktop Runtime would be better, though I guess that would not reflect the option for HTML applications. It would do a lot to promote Flash as more than just a browser plug-in.

Flex SDK: why retain the Flex brand at all? I presume the name was originally a contraction of Flash and XML, but since it is a language that compiles to Flash, this could just be called the Flash SDK.

Name changes themselves are confusing of course, so I’m surprised that Adobe is not being more thorough now rather than risking more piecemeal changes later.

The New York Times has released Version 2 of its Times Reader, for seamless online/offline viewing of its content. It’s interesting from a media perspective, but hardly a breakthrough, since it is not new. What’s more interesting to me is that the Times switched from a hybrid approach using WPF (Windows Presentation Framework) on Windows and Silverlight on the Mac, to Adobe AIR. Switches like this are bad PR for Microsoft, since it gives the impression that the developers were sufficiently unhappy with WPF/Silverlight, or so strongly attracted to AIR, that they were willing to throw away much of their previous development effort.

I’ve been tracking Times Reader for some years. It was presented at Microsoft Mix07 and I wrote up a panel discussion on the subject:

I asked about the cross-platform issue. According to Bodkin a Silverlight implementation is on the way, which includes most of the features in the full version, in “a matter of months.”

That was optimistic; but a Silverlight version was delivered and I used it successfully on the Mac; though it lacked some features of the WPF edition. It also attracted hostility from Mac users who are Microsoft-averse, as I reported here, and apparently ran into further problems because of incompatibility with Safari 4.

I tried the new AIR edition and it seems pretty good, though my impression is that it is not quite as smooth as the old WPF version. I might be wrong, since I could not install both on the same machine. The new version does add video support. Here’s the old one:

and this is the new effort:

I think this is a fascinating case study which demonstrates a number of things.

First, that cross-platform support is not an optional feature any more (if it ever was) for this kind of public application. Let’s assume here that the WPF version was just fine for Windows users, but was not viable long-term for lack of cross-platform support. It was inevitable that the Times would eventually either use Silverlight on both Windows and Mac, or abandon both WPF and Silverlight for a cross-platform alternative.

Second, that Silverlight is not yet mature enough for this kind of application. Although the Times developers were able to deliver a Silverlight version, it required a bit of hackery for offline support (embedded Safari on the Mac) and apparently ran into version problems when Apple upgraded Safari. Silverlight is also known to be poor for text rendering – a Google search for “blurry text Silverlight” brings back plenty of hits. Adobe also made a big improvement to text handling in Flash player 10, with the new flash.text.engine.

Third, that offline support really is a big deal. Would Silverlight 3.0 have been good enough? Possibly, though I haven’t seen any suggestion that Silverlight 3.0 offline apps will be able to run in the background while showing just an icon in the notification area, to support continuous synchronization.

It is possibel that these problems may be fixed in Silverlight 4.0. That’s a long time to wait though, when you need your application out now (and your industry is in crisis).

It would be silly to extrapolate this case study into a broader statement about the superiority of Flash over Silverlight. For the specific needs of the New York Times though, it is easy to see why Adobe AIR appeals.

I posed this question in a post over on itjoblog. There are several reasons why Silverlight struggles to get designer attention, including:

1. Designers are pragmatic and target the runtime that is already deployed most broadly, ie. Flash.

2. Flash is already good enough so why bother?

3. The tools: Adobe’s designer tools are a de facto standard, target Flash, and run on the Mac.

Developer is another matter. The cross-platform .NET runtime is Silverlight’s big advantage; and this time the tools tip the balance towards Microsoft (Visual Studio) – not for everyone, but for the substantial Microsoft platform community. That’s going to be further reinforced by Visual Studio 2010 which gets full visual designer support, plus of course Silverlight 3.0.

Microsoft does have a problem with Silverlight out of the browser. Developers need a way to have these run with more local permissions, subject to user consent, otherwise they will turn to Adobe AIR. Actually the whole Silverlight on the desktop story is confused, since you can also do Silverlight Mesh-Enabled Web Applications, or stick Silverlight content in a desktop gadget or other embedded browser. No, not the one in AIR (nice idea though): Adobe only includes Flash support and the PDF plug-in.

The tension behind this is that ultimately developers and designers need to work on the same applications, so this remains a fascinating contest.

On 21st April Adobe’s Ben Forta told a user group that Flex Builder 3 for Linux is on hold, citing lack of requisition, which is corp-speak for lack of demand.

Note that the Flex SDK does run on Linux. It is just the official IDE that is in question.

Linux is a free operating system, and this could be evidence that users of a free OS are less likely to purchase software than users of a paid-for OS. Or it could simply reflect poor market share for Linux outside servers. Even if it has just hit 1%, as hitslink reports, it is still barely more than 10% of the Mac share and a little over 1% of the Windows share. Some of those Linux machines will also be netbooks – secondary systems for users with a Windows or Mac for serious work such as design and development.

Nevertheless, I suspect there is more to it than that. I suspect Adobe would like to support Linux, because it wants to portray Flex as an open platform – the SDK is open source, though managed by Adobe, but the runtime engine is closed-source and proprietary. This may be another sign of Adobe’s financial stress. The company reported reduced quarter-on-quarter revenue for the the 3 months ending February 2009, and has been cutting staff numbers.

The backdrop to this, in contrast, is that Adobe is having great success with its Flash platform. There is no sign of Microsoft’s Silverlight denting the popularity of Flash on web sites, either for applets or media streaming.

The recession then? Partly; but this is also about Adobe’s business model. Adobe does not break out its figures in detail as far as I know: the last financial statement merely shows that its revenue is nearly 95% from product sales, the rest being services and support. Still, I’d guess that the largest component of its product sales must be Creative Suite. In other words, its business model is based on selling tools and giving away runtimes. When 47 million people watch Susan Boyle on YouTube, Adobe doesn’t make a penny, even though they are almost all using Flash to do so.

The tools market is a difficult one for various reasons, including competition from free products and the fact that the number of people needing development or design tools is always much smaller than the number needing runtimes. In a recession, deferring a tools upgrade is a obvious way for businesses to save money. Remaining primarily a tools company is a limit to Adobe’s growth and ultimately its profitability.

This is of concern to all Flash platform users. Adobe has proved to date a good steward of the technology. Some of us would like the balance of proprietary vs open tilted further towards open, but I doubt many would welcome a takeover or merger such as we have seen with Sun and Oracle (and there are a few parallels there).

There would also be many cries of “foul” if Adobe sought to further monetize Flash by starting to sell, say, a premium version of the Flash runtime.

Adobe is still a profitable company, and maybe when the economy recovers all this stress will be forgotten. Still, I’d guess that long-term Adobe will want to shift away from its dependency on sales of tools; and how and what it does to achieve that will have a big influence on the future of its RIA (Rich Internet Application) platform.

I loved this piece by Robin Bloor on The PC, The Cloud, RIA and the future. My favourite line:

Nowadays very few Mac/PC users have any idea where any program is executing.

And why should they? Users want stuff to just work, after all. Bloor says more clearly than I have managed why RIA is the future of client computing. He emphasises the cost savings of multi-tenancy, and the importance of offline capability; he says the PC will become a caching device. He thinks Google Chrome is significant. So do I. He makes an interesting point about piracy:

All apps will gradually move to RIA as a matter of vendor self interest. (They’d be mad not to, it prevents theft entirely.)

Bloor has said some of this before, of course, and been only half-right. In 1997 he made his remark that

Java is the epicenter of a software earthquake, and the shockwaves are already shaking the foundations of the software industry.

predicting that Java browser-hosted or thin clients would dominate computing; he was wrong about Java’s impact, though perhaps he could have been right if Sun had evolved the Java client runtime to be more like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight, prior to its recent hurried efforts with JavaFX. I also suspect that Microsoft and Windows have prospered more than Bloor expected in the intervening 12 years. These two things may be connected.

I think Bloor is more than half-right this time round, and that the RIA model with offline capability will grow in importance, making Flash vs Silverlight vs AJAX a key battleground.

Ribbit is an internet service for integrating voice communications into web applications. It is a US start-up that was acquired by BT in July 2008, but until now has not been available to UK customers. Today at Cloudforce BT announced Ribbit for Salesforce.com, an extension to the Salesforce CRM application and platform. In essence it adds a voice mailbox to your Salesforce.com account, enhanced with voice to text transcription. You can receive voice messages and have them sent to you as SMS or email; you can also use it as a voice memo utility where you dial in yourself to record the message.

A typical use case is for recording voice notes immediately after a meeting, perhaps when you get back to your car. These notes can then be attached to contacts or prospects for later reference.

The feature also adds a Flash-based VOIP phone to Saleforce.com, so you can make calls from your computer (not that this is anything new).

The cost will be around £35 per month.

I asked at the press briefing whether the voice-to-text really works. It’s good enough, I was told; the interesting part is how it done. First the message is processed using third-party technology. The automatic transcription assigns a confidence level to each word or phrase, and where confidence is low a human corrects it. Despite human involvement it is still only 80% – 90% accurate. I would like to know more about how many messages end up needing human intervention and how that impacts the time it takes – overall we were told 5-10 minutes for transcription on average. It would also be interesting to know who is doing this, where they are and how much they are paid – it sounds like an ideal use for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.

Ribbit is also an example of Enterprise Flash. Its API is Flash/Flex. This works out well for Salesforce.com integration, as Salesforce.com also has a Flex API. It’s not so good for mobile devices, partly because Flash is not always available (hello iPhone), and partly because Flash Lite does not give access to a microphone, making it useless for voice communication. Apparently a REST API is also under development, though that won’t solve the client piece.

BT says there is more to come, both in terms of other Ribbit applications, and integration with other BT services.

My reaction: Ribbit/Salesforce.com integration looks convenient but is it really worth £35.00 per month, when you could just record notes on a portable device instead? Well, the big feature turns out to be the automatic transcription. One BT guy at the meeting says he uses the service to have his voicemail emailed to him, and as a result rarely needs to dial-in to listen to the message. That has real value – text is better than voice for lots of reasons. That said, is the transcription service really good enough? I sensed some hesitancy about this, though with human involvement it certainly could be.

Adobe and Facebook have announced that ActionScript 3, the language of Flash 9 and higher, is now officially supported by FaceBook along with JavaScript and PHP. Information about coding for Facebook with Flash is here, and the library itself is on Google Code.

MySpace has announced the MySpace Silverlight SDK which will be hosted on Microsoft’s CodePlex open source site. The focus of the Microsoft Silverlight work seems to be on wrapping the Open Social API used by MySpace in a C# library.

Note that there is already documentation on creating Flash applications for MySpace. On the Facebook side, here’s an intriguing fact: there’s also an Fb:silverlight tag, though the documentation remarks: “For now this feature has no functionality.” Fb:swf is better supported. David Justice has been working on a Facebook library for Silverlight. It’s clear though that Flash is more widely accepted and supported on both platforms, reflecting its maturity and broader acceptance.

Smart developers can already devise code to access the public APIs of platforms like Facebook and MySpace from a variety of clients; this is about making that easier. It benefits the social networking sites if a wider group of developers has access to its platform, and with the advantages of multimedia features; equally it benefits the plug-in vendors if their runtime works smoothly with the broadest possible range of services. Therefore we should expect more of this type of announcement.

It is interesting to see technology partnerships bridging political divides. Microsoft has a stake in Facebook, for example, while Google has a partnership with MySpace.

Perhaps the most interesting outcome may be more Facebook applications based on AIR, Adobe’s Flash platform for the desktop. The existence of AIR applications like Twhirl and Tweetdeck has significantly boosted Twitter; maybe it is now Facebook’s turn.