Adobe has had to make some wrenching decisions of late. It has chosen to abandon its Flash player technology on Mobiles. It has also closed down it Flex development by releasing Flex to Open Source much like HP did for webOS. Adobe appears to be trying to see if they can get freebie development and support for Flex. These two decisions have a major negative impact on Adobe’s AIR technology that requires a vibrant Flash/Flex development activity – but no presence on mobile client OS does not bode well for AIR. This Adobe decision in turn has to effect all the corporate shops that were developing in AIR as the most promising cross platform tool for the desktop and mobile platforms.
Now Adobe appears to embracing a rapidly evolving client computing and software development world of 3-4 isolated islands of computing – desktop, mobiles, cloud-powered consumer, and server based systems. Cross platform is only at the highest and least threatening level for the OS vendors – HTML5. So Adobe is committed to HTML5 development at the expense of Flash. Now with its new Mobile Apps the other shoe drops. Adobe is confronted with developing on at least 5 incompatible platforms – Mac, Windows, Linux,
Note that Adobe’s first six touch Apps are available on Android first [giving substance to Google’s Eric Schmidt who said this would be happening in 2012] and on iOS at some “Notify Me ” future date. But of even more import is that Adobe has had to do 2 other things – 1)Break up its Brobadingnangian Photoshop-leading desktop suite into a series of subapps [ Proto, Debut, Collage and PSTouch give parts of the Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign experience] and 2)price those apps at 1/10th of what the desktop programs sell for. Adobe currently unifies this development through its Adobe Creative Cloud and some file exchanges. But clearly how all the new mobile creatives fit together will be an ongoing learning experience for Adobe. In sum, along with monthly rates for key Creative Suite programs, Adobe is beginning to both design and price for a new era in Post-PC client computing.