JD on EP

I gotta comment on this one. Again, IMO, Adobe needs to do more with the Open Source community. Open sourcing the Flex SDK was a step, but look, guys, don't try to beat M$ at their own game. Don't go the route of business as usual, profit driven economics. If you want Flash and Flex to survive and evolve then give it up. Open it up even more, make it so millions of potential developers can get it for free and do their thing with it. You will have made many many allies out of those people who are some of the best and the brightest and avoid control and greed dominated companies like M$ and would do their best to fight it if they had someone to give them the tools. Read Slashdot latetly? Those guys are stumbling over themselves between hatred for M$ and hatred for Flash, some of them are even hooraying Silverlight because it's a 'competition for flash'. But Adobe could tip the scales in their favor. Get wise, these guys and many like them are a valuable human resource. Give 'em the tools and turn 'em loose.

"a redundancy which primarily serves to reinforce Microsoft's single-source, not-invented-here type of control. In this case, their best tool for the job is not the one which works, but the one which Microsoft owns."

I think this sort of statement is typical of the anti-MS crowd. The primary problem with this is that when MS does use non-MS developed technologies people scream about how MS is stealing. When they don't people scream that MS is producing proprietary crap.

No matter what MS does they will never be on the winning side because folks have made up their minds long ago that MS is the evil Empire.

Personally I applaud MS for recent efforts to become more ubiquitous. I am a staunch Adobe supporter and probably always will be. However, competition is good, and I don't see anything they are doing as any more evil than any other multi-billion dollar company out there. Their technology, or use of technology, often leads to new ideas/technologies or wide adoption of existing ones. AJAX for example...

TJ Downes, nice comment. i like it :)

// chall3ng3r //

Do you guys see the distinction between opening up to more eyeballs (to gain larger audiences for their proprietary advertising implementations), yet having Office write to OOXML instead of ODF, Powerpoint write binary instead of SWF, trying to make a new browser plugin instead of using what the world has already adopted?

The "openness" mentioned in that article refers to efforts to penetrate larger audiences while still retaining tight, sole control over the technology stack. Do you see this?

jd/adobe

I see it, and I think that all the more reason for Adobe to support true open source standards and initiatives. With Flash being a de-facto standard for rich content, think what more Adobe could do by moving more in the directions of 'standardizing' Flash in some way, and how that would stand in sharp contrast to Microsoft's frankly lame attempts at being 'open'.