“If you’d like to make a new pitch, I’m open to being persuaded. How shall we continue this conversation…?”

Okay, here’s my new pitch: Adobe continues to take over software companies, but promises to always keep all of the software it has purchased active and upgraded. Nothing ever again hits the abandonware bin.

In all seriousness, I’m not really looking to debate the issue, since i have my opinion, you have your opinion, and neither of us are going to change each other’s minds. But I appreciate your taking the time to comment here, regardless of whether we agree or disagree on the issues.

Thanks,
Anthony

Overall I’d liken your overly dramatic post to the kind of thing I hear from heaps of people about the music industry. “Boo hoo, big record labels kill innovation, no-one writes good music any more, blah blah blah”. Innovation is still out there. You just have to look beyond the end of your nose to find it. It’s only natural for leaders to emerge over time in pretty much any environment. Their existence or wide-spread nature doesn’t inherently make them omnipotent or negate the merits of those ‘beneath’ them. Further more, corporate juggernauts may have financial sustainability and a marketing edge over the likes of start-up businesses and open source initiatives but the products of commerce will always be playing catch-up to the products of passion simply because the bigger a company or software product grows, the more consumers and shareholders they are responsible to, which is an innovation stifler FOR THEMSELVES, NOT for others who answer only to their passion for what they are doing or desire to make a difference.

(I come from Macromedia, and have done tech support for Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash from the start of each. And I’m very bullish on what Adobe is contributing to the web ecology today.)

Some tidbits: Dreamweaver 1.0 was oriented specifically to the then-beginning DHTML (dhtmlzone.com is still in Internet Archive). The HomeSite text editor came with the Allaire acquisition years later, and I don’t know of any code-crossbreeding between them.

Flash Video is as high-quality as it gets, bringing advancements to H.264 deployment and use. You can certainly auto-compress for poor results though.

Generally, innovation comes at the edges, at new and under-served fields. We wouldn’t expect to see many new entries in basic image-processing these days… still possible, but it would have to offer very plausible new conveniences. Multi-screen display is a hot topic of research right now, as are intelligent graphics, content-aware graphics, metadata-driven graphics, the whole field of video, and so on. It’s possible for new entrants to make significant contributions here, but Adobe is investing greatly in core imaging research across all these fields, to enable new successes for content creators.

If you’d like to make a new pitch, I’m open to being persuaded. How shall we continue this conversation…?

tx, jd/adobe

I think we are going to see an alternative pretty soon, specially because Adobe isn’t putting anything new and astonishing on their new releases, the innovation is going to move other paths.

This happens not only with web design but almost all industries. How many companies did Google buy in the past? The only thing they invented was PageRank, their email filter is Postini, Analytics is Urchin, Google Earth is….we could go on and on.

There’s many similar tools, but Adobe products are most complete and integrated which makes them attractive to bigger customers who don’t mind to spend some $$ on tooling.

Ah and terms “prices going higher” and “market dominance” are contradictory – don’t put them in one sentence. If they were true, someone would find a business plan to provide a cheaper alternative.

And Flash is more and more loosing its importance since (most) developers are very eager to make accessible and user friendly websites. Basic animations can just as easy, and with better results, be done with jQuery (or similar) and for videos you can use a non flash player. This will also create better SEO’d websites.

And Dreamweaver? I don’t know anyone using that with programs such as Coda (and others) doing the job much better.

Most problematic for me is Illustrator. Now that’s the program with no real alternative (ok, sure, there is Corel Draw – but I don’t like it).

But, don’t get me wrong. I’m using Adobe’s products myself.

/David
http://twitter.com/davidpaulsson