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March 04, 2008
Lynch interview
Lynch interview: Darryl Taft of eWeek interviews Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, post-AIR (single-page view). Big shocker: Daily successful Player installations are now averaging twelve million each day. That's up from quotes of 8M/day last year. These aren't "downloads", these are successfully completed installations. Doesn't really get us much further in distribution (only 2-3% of people don't already have Player 9), but definitely speeds your use of new abilities without audience pain. Very significant... an audience of over a hundred million can now use the persistent framework caching in Flex 3, for instance, and should reach 200,000,000 by June. The interview has many more topics (and a few typos), but here's a great quote: "The more diversity in operating systems, the better off Adobe is, because we make software that runs across operating systems. Whether that's Reader and PDF or it's Flash Player and AIR, one of the things that people really like about the software we make is that it works really well regardless of which OS you have."
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 4, 2008 07:27 AM
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Disclaimer on the quote: Yes, Creative Suite hasn't been ported and supported for Linux... AIR/Linux is in beta, and 1.0 release is expected this year... for Player/Linux use a 32-bit browser or 64-bit emulation for plugins... for Player/Mac, the true test is running in a Projector or in AIR to avoid the processing restrictions in browsers.
Posted by: John Dowdell at March 4, 2008 07:48 AM
Its worth noting that these statistics apply primarily to consumers. The details on the stats gathering say that users who survey from a corporate machine aren't turned away, but they don't distinguish them separately from consumers either (Under the screening criteria section: http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/methodology/). I asked a while back if there was a way to start getting install base statistics on corporate machines, and received an answer that basically amounted to "thats really hard".
[jd sez: fwiw, awhile ago there was a comparison of people on home machines and people on business machines, and the percentages of Player capability were essentially the same. But corporate distribution is a lot more "lumpy" than consumer distribution, because some intranets are locked down pretty tight -- tends to be more all-or-nothing, depending on the individual audience.]
I'm sure it is really hard, but its also worthwhile. Its much more difficult to justify creating Flash based B2B marketing and application development for corporate users when many of them are still on Flash 8 or earlier. From my experience that 97+ percent of all users doesn't apply to corporate users at all.
I'm not saying you shouldn't be proud of the distribution of Flash in the consumer world. Its great that the platform can reach so many people, but it just seems like Adobe has become so proud of their consumer distribution numbers that they aren't even paying attention to the corporate side of things.
Posted by: Chris Rebstock at March 4, 2008 09:56 AM