Newsmaker: Adobe plots its path on the Web

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The other piece of news is the number of applications that are coming out on AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime. These are Web applications that run on the desktop. Does AIR make the operating system less important?
Lynch: I think what we are seeing is a big shift to the Web for application development and AIR is basically enabling a big trend for the Web to come full circle back to the desktop again. We're basically betting on this move to the Web. We're seeing all kinds of application development go that way already.

What we're now seeing is the desire for those applications to become more sophisticated, richer applications that do take advantage of local processing power, make use of local resources like your files, being able to notify you. These are the things we used to be able to do with desktop applications that you can't do right now with most applications on the Web. But we think that you should be able to make applications that have those capabilities and build them with Web technologies. There are hundreds of applications running on AIR (which is still in beta).

Will you use AIR in all your product lines?
Lynch: Just like the industry is moving to Web software, we're certainly looking at doing that too. We have some of the most sophisticated pieces of software around--things like Photoshop and server technologies and a lot of deep technology so it's not like there's going to be an overnight shift from the way we currently build software. But you'll start seeing new products built for the Web that draw from that heritage.

It will remain a holy grail for anyone in the world to decide I'm going to write a rich Internet application today and to do that.

So for example with Premiere--it's a great video-editing tool built on the classic way of a software package that you get in a box. We are now hosting Premiere on the Web so you can go to YouTube and PhotoBucket...That's branded Premiere Express. The Premiere team is building it, they're using Web technologies (like scripting languages) to build it.

Same with Photoshop. Our CEO Bruce Chizen mentioned that we're working on Photoshop Express, very similar to Premiere. So you'll see a lot of that happening from us.

You'll see AIR, for example, start to be used in some of our software in different aspects. Maybe you like using Premiere Express--you don't need all of Premiere, yet you want to put it on your desktop. That could be a bridge...That's not something we're currently doing but you can imagine us doing it. There will be a spectrum.

What's the business model behind these hosted applications?
Lynch: Well, with Premiere Express, it's an ad-share model. The site that it's hosted on, it's advertising supported and we share in that revenue for people who are spending time using the Express editor. So ad-supported, subscription-based--all in new ways that people are monetizing software.

How do developers make use of these Web services?
Lynch: We're going to make a bunch of APIs to these services available to integrate things like voice into your application. With Share, for example, there is a document repository, file repository that we're hosting. Everybody's got a free gigabyte of space, and there are some Web APIs that anyone can use to access and make use of a data store. So you can build a file browsing user interface or you can build your own image editor and use Share to hold the documents behind it. Developers can do whatever they like to make use of that--there's just APIs available.

On the business side of that, there is an amount of free storage and beyond that we will provide premium services that could have revenue associated with them either through ads or subscriptions and models like that.

You are doing a lot more in tools and, of course, Microsoft is very strong in tools and they're doing more with Web development as well. How do you compete with that big machine over at Redmond?
Lynch: We've actually had a long relationship with Microsoft. So there are areas where we cooperate in their areas; where we compete we are one of the biggest software vendors on Windows in the world.

The areas that we do compete, in Web tooling for example, we've been competing for a long time. In the early days of Web authoring, I worked on the Dreamweaver project at the time and we were basically last to market. FrontPage was already out, there were already a dozen tools already out there. None of them had really had gotten predominance or really popular with pro Web developers and there was an opening for us to do that. We got in and designed a tool that really resonated with a community. We listened well and fed that feedback in. That managed to get an incredible level of popularity really fast. What we saw there was great success with Dreamweaver with pro-Web developers that beat FrontPage and other tools.

So even though Microsoft works on software, they don't always win in these markets. From what I've seen in these situations, you just have to be close to the customer, not be distracted by what the competition is doing in terms of trying to catch up with you or whatever, and stay on the leading edge and think about the next thing that is happening. And let the competition chase where you've been.

For us in the rich Internet application space, that's brought us more into developer tools. Things like Flex Builder, that's a new tool for us and it's doing very well. We've made the Flex Framework open-source and free. A lot of the frameworks for the Web now, of course are free and open-source. So to play, that's kind of the table stakes. So we've anted up.

Thermo (a planned tool to let designers write their own Web applications) got a lot oohs and aahs from attendees. But people have been trying to make development tools for people who aren't programmers for a long time, probably as long as code has been around. What are the limitations there?
Lynch: I know! But we're not doing a general solution for anyone to build an application. That's one of the key things--we had to be specific about who the audience is. It will remain a holy grail for anyone in the world to decide I'm going to write a rich Internet application today and to do that.

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