Despite my loathing of flash-based websites (which long predates the Jobsian jihad on Flash), I really like Adobe. They are one of the best ever large development shops. Adobe Lightroom is in my apps hall of fame. Recent rumours of an acquisition by Microsoft are now fading. Let's hope they dissolve completely. I can't imagine a happy partnership. Adobe's more Apple-like on focus on functionality, while Microsoft is a monument to mediocrity and bloat.
(Although microsoft does in fact produce some astonishingly good technology, mostly in the realm of dev tools and core technologies. One of the great mysteries is how the same place can craft such great stuff for software development and then develop such awful software.)
4 comments:
"great mystery" = (perhaps) development tools are for those who can think, and use them, hence, are not as encumbered by the 'dumbing down for the masses' that the commercial releases are. Also, MS is a favorite of spam / mal / phish / nasty attacks, so the layers upon layers of security that the non-development products MS makes turn what was maybe a fine laboratory developed product into a hulking, anachronistic, bulky P.O.S?
Not being one of the smarter developers / programmers of the world, this is just an uneducated hypothesis, but it sorta makes sense.
Hm. I think it's something else in either case. Mediocrity is pervasive in most MS software, including (until, perhaps, very recently only) at the OS-level. Appeal to the masses is not the same as mediocrity. iPhoto does not meet my needs for photo management and editing because it's too basic, but it's not a mediocre piece of software. Word and Excel are anything but dumbed down, they are more bloated up -- everything to appeal to anyone is thrown in, which is different than a lowest common denominator approach.
Also, MS is lying in a bed of its own making regarding security vulnerabilities. They only have themselves to blame.
And this isn't like GE making good jet engines but, say, crappy phones. Those are completely unrelated activities. The mix of some technical excellence in an overall culture of mind-boggling mediocrity is the tragedy of microsoft.
agreed, an acquisition here would be a bad match. i'm still trying to figure out how MS and Adobe would work together in the mobile space, as Flash/toolkits on Android seem a pretty good fit.
i've seen flash apps run* on an iphone - they ran fine. like flash apps on desktops/laptops, how it runs is directly related to how it was programmed. the flash runtime itself is pretty darn efficient.
* i don't mean flash apps cross-compiled, btw. i mean running in a native flash runtime.
seems the acquisition rumors were pretty short-lived. as were the rumors last week about Apple considering acquiring Sony.
i'm still interested to see what a mobile-space partnership between Adobe and MS would look like, though Adobe seems pretty-well positioned at the moment, given that the to-iphone cross compiler is back on the table, and their announcement last week that there's a Flash to HTML5 converter tool. at least in use internally.
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