Google/Adobe? No.
I had intended to write a post about Google’s Chrome Operating System, but then the New York Times called looking for an Op-Ed piece on exactly that so I gave it to them. Look for the column to appear Monday and I’ll put a link to it here.
The Times column is here.
Beyond the broader implications of the Chrome OS, one reader asks about the strategic involvement of Adobe Systems in the project, since Adobe is in the short list of companies mentioned in the Chrome OS FAQ. Why is Adobe on this list, asks the reader, and is Google likely to buy Adobe?
I have no inside information here, just the usual informed guesswork. The logical acquirer for Adobe, if the company is to ever be acquired, is still Apple, which would gain some real synergies in its entertainment endeavors as well as some needed technical depth.
What Google needs from Adobe is primarily Flash video. Remember that YouTube made Flash video a factor in the streaming market and Google now owns YouTube. Remember, too, that Apple’s iPhone has specifically shunned Flash, somewhat to its detriment. Apple’s reasoning — that Flash takes too much horsepower for smart phones — no longer really stands with the iPhone 3GS shipping. So Google’s embrace of Flash video for the Chrome OS AND Android helps YouTube while differentiating both products from Apple.
But does Google also need Adobe’s Flex and AIR platforms? That is less clear. Both Flex and AIR are runtime environments for cross-platform applications (Open Source applications in the case of Flex). Knowing a bit about how Google thinks, it is very possible that Flex and AIR will be seen as too heavy and — more importantly — too non-Google. So we might see Flex but not AIR, for example. I simply don’t know.
But I seriously doubt that Google will be buying Adobe or, for that matter, making ANY huge acquisitions in the months ahead.
Looking forward to the NYT column. My first thought when reading the Chrome OS story was: “Cringely should be good this week!”
Agreed. There has been a lot of discussion of Chrome OS in the news over the last couple days. So far all of it has been guess work, at best. I can’t wait to see well reasoned, informed discussion on it. Go Bob, Go!
I think that Apple is so focused on controlling the entire media experience, that buying Flash would be seen as a failure internally. It’d be a smart move to do, but one that I think egos would get in the way of. I could see synergies with Google, but think it would be an odd fit for them. Of all the companies out there, I think one of the major Hollywood studios would benefit the most by owning them. They are spending billions on social networks without revenue streams, when there is an entertainment monopoly available to them. Good thing they studio execs still don’t know how to identify good tech from bad. It’s probably best for consumers for Adobe to remain independent.
Apple was trying to get away from Flash because they remember the last time (or at least Steve Jobs remembers) when Apple/NeXT depended upon Adobe for a major part of their OS component. NeXT used Display PostScript which was still a proprietary technology under Adobe. If there was an issue with Display PostScript, Adobe would send down a developer to NeXT who would lock themself into a room with a NeXT computer. NeXT became completely dependent upon Adobe for their OS and didn’t like it too much.
Apple is also remembering what happened to them in the 1990s when the Internet started looking like Microsoft’s exclusive playground. Apple users were locked out of many websites because they required IE, Windows, and DirectX to work. That, and a lack of Microsoft Office almost killed Apple. (Yes, incompetent management also helped drive Apple into the ground too).
Apple knows its future depends upon the Internet and complete compatibility with it. That’s why Safari/WebKit was developed even though it meant that Microsoft would pull the plug on IE for the Mac. That’s why Apple is so involved in the HTML 5 standards, and had been pushing the HTML 5 standards to include audio and video linking capabilities. The idea was to completely eliminate the need for Flash.
Unfortunately for Apple, the HTML 5 committee just pulled the plug on the video and audio standards. Apple didn’t want to use Ogg Theora, but wanted H.264 since QuickTime already used that and it was a well known standard. Others insisted upon MP4 because it is more popular although there are copyright questions. Still others wanted Ogg codecs because they’re “truly open source” even though the tools for Ogg codecs are not hard to come by. With no consensus, there will be no standard.
Apple is doing its best to keep proprietary Flash from being a defacto Internet standard by keeping Flash off of the iPhone. Many Flash only websites have started rewriting themselves to remove the need for Flash navigation. Otherwise, all those iPhone users can’t surf your website. However, with the new Pre, Android, and other full feature smartphones coming out, Apple will need to allow Flash to work with the iPhone.
Apple will have to buy Adobe just so they aren’t dependent upon some third party for Flash. That’s a very weakspot for Apple. My prediction is that Apple will buy Adobe and make Flash open source. That would allow HTML 5 to be able to specify Flash as part of the standard. It will also eliminate the threat of Silverlight since all browsers will come with Flash. The last thing Apple wants is to have the Internet be dependent upon a proprietary Microsoft standard.
Imagine if a good percentage of the websites used Silverlight and Microsoft hadn’t gotten around to build a Silverlight plugin for the iPhone. Will people still buy the iPhone?
I have always had a problem with websites that require you to use Flash or some other tool that requires a browser plug-in just to visit the site and poke around. It is okay to use Flash to do specific things, but the over all web page, navigation, etc should follow open, public Internet standards.
Have you seen this? Flash has ISSUES:
Why Do Adobe Flash Videos Slow Down?
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/02/why-do-adobe-flash-videos-slow-down/
Its always a risk for non-engineers to write about technical issues. The idea that Apple needs to buy Adobe for “some needed technical depth” would be amusing if it wasn’t so wrong-headed.
Flash is nothing more than a very lightweight, and poorly implemented scripting language. “Flash Video” is a hack that attempted to make flash remain relevant in an age when it was quickly becoming obsolete.
Even Flash Video is obsolete now that h.264 is an open standard. Its only a quirk of fate (and a bad business decision on the part of YouTubes founders) that YouTube went with flash. There was no technical expertise or core technology advantage there.
The only thing Flash ever had going for it was bundling deals with Microsoft to get it installed in the browser and a bit more dynamism than existing html markup allowed. And then a hack to play video.
These have all gone away. Apple is clearly behind H.264 and HTML 5 both open standards that go to the core of the value that flash added to the web experience in the 1990s.
If you look at the rest of Adobe’s product portfolio, its overpriced junk that hasn’t had any innovation in a decade– hell their mac products aren’t even using Cocoa, and are built on the OS9 compatibility platform known as carbon.
Adobe’s apps give microsoft’s a run for the money in reaching the worst value and lowest reliability and highest user hassle factor.
Apple’s beating them in video editing with Final Cut, and will probably take over the rest of the business in the next half decade.
Why by Adobe? They’re a has been. And they have nothing to offer a company like Apple.
Well, maybe some brands and defensive patents. But those aren’t worth the amount Adobe, which still thinks its a relevant company, would be asking.
@ ‘engineer’: you said: “Its always a risk for non-engineers to write about technical issues.”
I say: Then you need to change your handle, ‘engineer’, because you clearly fall into the non-engineer category–as based on the number and severity of mis-statements in your post!
Claim: “Flash is nothing more than a very lightweight, and poorly implemented scripting language.”
Facts: Flash is: 1) a virtual machine (VM) and run-time environment (the Flash ‘Player’); and 2) is also the name of the tool/application which one uses to create dynamic images which run in the VM. The Flash VM can execute AS3 & AS2 code. It executes _binary_ (byte) code and NOT _source_ code. Note: Java and the .NET languages (i.e., C#) use similar byte code and VM technologies. Flash AS3 code supports modern object-oriented programming constructs (classes, inheritance, interfaces, polymorphism), plus other mechanisms such as: generics, data binding, both static and dynamic typing.
Counter-claim: It would be no more accurate to call Flash AS3 code a “scripting language” than it would be to call Java or C# the same.
Informed Opinion: you called [Flash AS code] “…very lightweight, and poorly implemented…”. I would argue that Flash’s strongly increasing acceptance as a Web Application and Cross-Platform Application tool (using the Flex and AIR frameworks) would contradict your claim. Furthermore, it has seen great acceptance among software developers with an interest in strong software _engineering_ (for example, among leading-edge Java developers).
Claim: “Even Flash Video is obsolete now that h.264 is an open standard.”
Fact: The most recent versions of the Flash VM include H.264 support.
Question: So _how_ has Flash Video become obsolete? Please, be _specific_.
Counter-Claim: The Flash VM’s inclusion of H.264 is a solid indication of its continued relevance and popularity.
Claim: “The only thing Flash ever had going for it was…a bit more dynamism than existing html markup allowed.”
Fact: major applications have been built with the Flash VM as their underpinnings. These include complex things like word processors (Buzzword), image editors (Photoshop.com), Visio-like diagramming tools; and countless Enterprise/Line-Of-Business applications (being used internally by major corporations).
Counter-Claim: applications can be built on the Flash platform that are as portable as Java applications and potentially are as rich as Java/MacOS (Cocoa)/Windows (.NET) ones.
Claim: “Apple is clearly behind H.264 and HTML 5 both open standards that go to the core of the value that flash added to the web experience in the 1990s.” (sic)
Fact: HTML 5 is still a _draft_ standard. Furthermore, only SOME (really a few bits) of it has been implemented and only in _some_ browsers.
Counter-Claim: HTML 5 is (largely) irrelevant until (and unless!) it is widely deployed across the mainstream web browsers.
Informed Opinion: We now have over a decade of _actual experience_ in seeing how new technologies and standards get defined and deployed over the Web. That experience suggests that HTML 5 will take a long time (if ever) to become widely useful/to be relied on. Specifically:
– The standards setting bodies work _slowly_.
– Technologies that only work in _some browsers_ face an up-hill battle, particularly when those browsers don’t have sufficient market share.
– Technologies that work differently between browsers and even ones that are unevenly implemented face challenges in becoming widely used.
– The vendor of the browser with the pre-dominant market share has expressed, at best, only grudging interest in implementing HTML 5 features. Their _actual actions_, however, demonstrate little if any progress on that front.
OK, ‘engineer’, the ball’s over to you!
Don’t forget about Acrobat. The one portable display document standard across *all* operating systems – Windows, Mac *and* Linux – is PDF.
Mac OS X’s implementation of PDF was written by Apple and used no Adobe IP – very deliberately. It’s also several orders of magnitude faster than Adobe’s own implementation.
NeXT’s PostScript was always impressively fast – just not ACTUALLY fast. Sure NeXT boxes rendered Display PostScript very impressively indeed, but it was always a serious bottleneck on the system. In fact NeXT had a technology called Intercepter (which basically blew a hole in the Window Manager for direct access) to allow applications that needed more speed (Insignia’s SoftPC is the obvious example). However, Display PostScript was always an Achilles heal and an example of NeXT’s brilliance (yes, it can be both things at the same time! – Apple wanted the latter without the former, hence they built their own implementation of PDF – and thought long and hard about speed).
I think that Apple potentially buying Adobe has everything to do with their creative tools and nothing to do with flash. The reason that flash support is so few and far between with smartphones is that quickness of interface and battery life are two of the most important user experiences for smartphones. I just don’t see HTML 5 and its video embedding capabilities not blowing flash out of the water in the browser space. Everybody wants it, but they just didn’t agree about the codec – letting the babies have their respective bottles and using local codecs seems like a fine, if clunky, idea to me. Apple has no problems with doing things like that anyway.
Back to Apple buying Adobe, I think that has a snowball’s chance in hell of actually happening. I could never see Adobe conceding that particular slapfight. If I had to guess, Apple will just grin and bear the fact that we’re not getting 64-bit creative tools from Adobe until the year 3000. Apples’ position will be hurt in the process, but I just honestly don’t see Apple forking over 5 billion dollars for Adobe, even less Adobe conceding to being bought.
No Flash on the iPhone. All the other cellphone makers should have such a detriment.
I’m sure Chrome OS will fully support Flash. There’s no reason not to. Google is not engaging in a traditional technology war, per se. They just want to steer as many eyeballs to their products and feed them as many targeted ads as they can.
As for Adobe AIR, it does conflict with their Google Gears technology a little bit. If Chrome OS really is just instances of the Chrome browser sitting on top of a thin Linux layer it might make AIR a bit of a moot point anyway. So far it seems that Google wants developers to embrace a pure AJAX/HTML 5 development ecosystem rather than AIR, Silverlight, and all the other technologies that are used by traditional platforms.
The bigger questions that arise are: Has Google orphaned Android? Will Chrome OS actually be a browser shell for an instant-on pre-boot environment? If not, will it be a full-fledge Linux distribution like the mythical Goobuntu Google purportedly uses internally? Will it seriously only be a browser that you boot to and, if so, has Google gone completely insane?
Why do you say that Flex is for Open Source applications? The Flex SDK is open source, but applications produced using Flex need not be. (And the Flex SDK by itself is rather bare-bones; the full-featured FlexBuilder IDE is *not* open source.)
Also, contra your article, Flex is not a run-time environment; it is a development tool. Applications developed using Flex/FlexBuilder use the same runtime as Flash animations. So Google doesn’t “need” Flex, it just needs a full-featured Flash engine, and developers can use either the Flash dev environment or the Flex dev environment to develop for it.
And I agree with Edward: Google wants to encourage the use of HTML 5 as a development environment, and so is unlikely to provide AIR as an alternative. But Flash itself is a must-have to make Chrome OS acceptable to users.
Google needs Adode to port Photoshop.
While office-applications can run as regular web-apps, data-intensive and cpu-intensive tasks like manipulating photos or video have a problem there.
Google announced their own NX-Project. So if they had Adobe port their Suite to the data-centre couterpart of Chrome-OS, they could run Photoshop in their “shippable data-centre containers” you wrote about some time ago, and users could control them over the web.
I tried remote-controling GIMP on regular Ubuntu over a DSL-Line vie FreeNX. It works fine. So imagine what would be possible if Adobe/Google rolled out a optimized Photoshop/NX – that thing would fly!
Apple buying Adobe – Not going to happen. Don’t think either company wants it either. Adobe wants to be a Windows only company (just look where features appear first and how they disregard the apple interface guidelines, which even Microsoft has had to follow do to customers screaming about non-standard UI stuff). Mac is a step-child in Adobe. Apple thinks they can do it better than Adobe.
Flash on iPhone – not going to happen. H.264 requires an expensive license due to patents but Apple holds some of those patents so it’s all they’re going to support on the iPhone and in Safari. YouTube makes some (not all but quite a few) available on the iPhone (and Apple TV) by having an H.264 version without flash available. I think YouTube will be dumping flash in the near (1-2 years) future. Adobe has been incapable of making Flash for mobile devices. Flashlite has seen very low adoption rates (maybe 1 phone has it? The Chumby uses it but that’s all I can think of)
Webapp version of photoshop – yeah not going to happen either. see Adobe’s inability to make a mobile version of flash above. Making a version of photoshop that doesn’t hog the whole CPU and suck down video card bandwidth like a lake through a broken dam is beyond them. trying to route that over the web to a browser is going to be too slow or too compromising for high-end professionals to adopt.
@Kevin: “Webapp version of photoshop – yeah not going to happen either.”
I think you need to look at this link: https://www.photoshop.com/
I thought, “how curious that I.C. wrote in such abbreviation.” But the beauty is in getting the ball rolling as it were.
Visually intensive apps can run over the pipe fairly well. Just look at some of the things Citrix has done with their technology. Many videos exist on YouTube showing them run multiple gfx heavy apps on light clients and even on the iPhone.
Edward Dinovo says: “I’m sure Chrome OS will fully support Flash.”
It certainly will, but will Google write their own? The current Linux flash plugin from Adobe is an awful performer, and the 64-bit version is highly unstable.
[...] Google/Adobe? NoThe comments are the interesting part. [...]
The real reason Apple doesn’t want Flash on the iPhone platform is a strategic one. Flash can be a whole other alternative application platform. If it was on the iPhone OS, developers could deploy games and other apps onto the iPhone without going through the App Store, which would end Apple’s control as gatekeeper on non-web apps on the iPhone and the profits that go along with that.
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