“Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh, former Adobe mobile engineers, said they were raising flags at Adobe in 2007 about the same complaints that Jobs detailed Thursday,” Chen reports. “‘Walter and I, being the lead architects for Flash Lite, we were seeing the iPhone touch devices coming out, and we kept saying ‘Hey, this is coming along,” Icaza said in a phone interview. ‘You have this white elephant that everybody ignored. Half the [Adobe] mobile business unit was carrying iPhones, and yet the management team wasn’t doing anything about it.'”
Chen reports, “They said they left Adobe because executives did not take the iPhone seriously when Apple announced the touchscreen device in 2007. Instead, Adobe focused on feature phones (cellphones with lightweight web features, not smartphones) and invested in development of Flash Lite to play Flash videos on such devices. Subsequently, Adobe shut down the mobile business unit in 2007, and has suffered from a brain drain in the mobility space ever since, Icaza and Luh said.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Note: Note to advertisers: (including those who advertise via third-party ad networks and become, in effect, our advertisers): Your Flash-based ads are no longer reaching the most well-heeled customers online: 50+ million iPhone owners. They’re also not hitting brand new iPad users or 35+ million iPod touch users. If you care about reaching people with discretionary income, you might want to consider dumping your flash-based ads and moving to a more open format that people with money and the will to spend it can actually see.
Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Ask MarketWatch to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Ask CNBC to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video via email:
• Ask ESPN360 to offer HTML5 video instead Flash via their feedback page here.
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.
By the way, do not buy Adobe’s Photoshop Elements until you have tried Pixelmator’s free 30-day trial. We use Pixelmator daily.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “JJ Nash” for the heads up.]
What do you want to bet that some current Adobe employee blogger will dismiss Icaza and Luh’s comments as sour grapes from disgruntled ex-employees?
Adobe Management = Hubris
Quicken Management = Hubris
May 02, 10 – 12:31 pmComment from: HotinPlaya
“Would it make sense for apple to buy Pixelmator? Put resources into it? To compete with Photoshop ?”
Interesting. I think that’s what Pixelmator is hoping for. I’ve been testing it out for a bit, better than I thought! works well for most things, it’s light and inexpensive. about 90% of the PS shortcuts work making me almost feel at times I’m using PS. haven’t used any dodging or burning, tools I often use —can’t find ’em.
no, Pixelmator would make a good start for Apple… unless Apple’s already further along with their own efforts, which I don’t doubt.
Why don’t you ask to kill MSFT Windows by contacting all businesses by asking to provide more stable/reliable/whatever OS — MacOS
Just curious:-)
Seems like these days, Adobe and Google are the new Microsoft.
“Seems like these days, Adobe and Google are the new Microsoft.”
WHAT!
But all the Windows Weenies say Apple is the new Microsoft.
Could those Windows Weenies be lying?
Apple should buy 51% each of Pixelmator… Intaglio, VectorDesign, Lineform, DrawIt, EasyDraw, ColorIt, Pixel, Acorn, PhotoLine, and ArtRage.
Let ‘real’ competition ensue.
Watch as Adobe — Bender Rodríguez, style — drops a load of bricks from between their legs.
I have a love-hate relationship with Adobe but i think Apple truly is missing an opportunity here to try and make Adobe play nice with the Mac platform. Apple could use their influence to force Adobe to make better products and work more as a team. I personally don’t want to see Apple get into the pro design app business any more than they are.
I think they have a lot of areas they are branching out into and I’d prefer to see a company like Adobe be more focused on these products to try and keep them more efficient and well designed.
I know it’s a dream, and Adobe hasn’t done a very good lately, but there still is an opportunity for Apple to influence a company that many people buy products from.
Well now we see clearly how Adobe’s defence, or should I be blunt and simply say lies, are being found out one by one and its client hacks made all the more foolish by their drone like defence of ‘central office’. Always best to cover your rear before launching a desperate attack and no doubt the chair throwing syndrome will be growing rapidly from its original home in Redmond. Well the good news is at least one industry should be getting a boost from these technology dinosaurs.
I don’t understand why Adobe are clinging to Flash til grim death. It’s not even their original technology – their baby – to begin with, it was part of the Macromedia suite of applications they acquired. And Flash wasn’t even Macromedia’s dream child, but that of Futurewave Software, a company Macromedia acquired.
You’d think a smart software company like Adobe could quickly recognise the world was going in a different direction and move with it, instead of wasting time and money on now third-hand technology that had seen its peak.
In economics, there’s a concept called ‘the point of diminishing returns.” Adobe can see this point as the peak of the hill in their rearview mirror as they continue to careen down the slope.
@AtomicBeetle
“that’s the state of affairs for advertising agencies, we are at the whim of Adobe de facto. It’s a sad state of affairs, where there is no certainty.”
That is the very problem! Adobe has reached a stage where it literally dictates what applications we use as designers. It has crushed the competition by acquisition, wide-spread marketing, the CS bundles, and, in the case of InDesign; a blend of superb program development on top of Quarks own mistakes. Photoshop itself rules over everything in its class.
Certainly this is the case in the USA but obviously in South Africa you feel this too and it shows the global range of Adobe’s influence. Adobe is the Microsoft for this decade. As I said earlier, FreeHand should NEVER have been allowed to be bought and then crushed to protect Illustrator’s market share. Federal Trade Commission, where were you?
(fwiw, .ZA has a very large membership at the free freehand organization.)
Maybe GOOG now buys ADBE ?
@Stuart
You are spot on.
“You’d think a smart software company like Adobe could quickly recognise the world was going in a different direction and move with it, instead of wasting time and money on now third-hand technology that had seen its peak.”
@ newton*
“Adobe Management = Hubris
Quicken Management = Hubris”
Hubris = Stage One (of five) in Jim Collin’s “How the Mighty Fall And Why Some Companies Never Give In”
Unless the management in these companies can change, you can extrapolate the end result…
Question is, do they have the sense to?
@Ting, while I agree with the hubris, there is no threat to either Adobe or Quicken out there, alas. They are cash cows. Like Microsoft. We may see them as lazy and ineffective, over the hill, whatever, but they are continuing to be cash cows.
Their decline depends on a competitor who can begin to lure away customers. As every other post in these threads demonstrates, “I depend on Adobe products for my living” from all the blind designers, there is no current alternative that they are WILLING to try.
(There ARE good alternatives on the market, but most of these designers are too stuck in the mud to even try. Heck, more than half of them choose Adobe Lightroom instead of Apple’s Aperture! There is nothing wrong with Aperture, but it can’t even claw them away. These designers are totally stuck in their habits and refuse to budge. Therefore, Adobe is safe, and Adobe knows it!)
whats amusing to me is that Adobe got well off track from where they first started. What people need from Adobe is professional tools that enable professionals to do their job.
Adobe have seemingly forgotten this – as can be seen by the bloated software we see from them today.
Its not about creating a proprietary format in a sea of open web standards. The web is different than say print or video where proprietary standards are more easily accepted.
Apple needs to develop it’s own versio of the Adobe Creative Suite designed for professional creatives!
Please Apple do it!
Just had a look at Pixelmator, looks good on initial impressions – quite a powerful tool.
Gonna get my Designers to download it and try it out for a few weeks.
P Burrows | MD + Owner
SO // we create.
Nokia offering you the latest nokia models along with best and cheap nokia phone prices in the world
http://nokiaphoneprice.com/
adobe stopped innovating and they stopped wowing their customers. the technology that once was the crowning achievement of the web has been outdated. Even Microsoft gets it more than adobe. At least windows seven is in the ball park of what an operating system should be.
Adobe’s day was done when they hired a bunch of suits to run the company and moved to San Jose. They’ve been running on fumes ever since. Photoshop, starting with version 1.0, was a brilliant product that has not been equaled to this day. But nothing stays the same forever. One of these days, a worthy successor to Photoshop is bound to appear and, when it does, Adobe is going to fall very far and very fast. And they’ll have no one to blame but themselves.
Seems like these days, Adobe and Google are the new Microsoft. —MacBill
Adobe wishes. In reality, Adobe is a very small fish in a very big pond that just happens to make one very indispensable product: Photoshop. Without Photoshop, Adobe is irrelevant, whatever delusions they may have to the contrary.
The worst thing about this is that adobe has the creative industries by the balls.
They know that there isn’t a competitor around that offers the same broad range of packages and value.
So why is it that in order to access my pages and numbers documents in idisk on my ipod touch, I must first rely on Adobe and convert them to a pdf file on my macbook and save the duplicate in idisk? Seems to me that if pages and numbers can work in ipad, they could be available for a 64gig touch.
Or is this just about Flash?