Conversation with Adobe evangelist

Funny enough I sat next to Adobe Evangelist Mike Downey last night. He just attended the Microsoft Mix conference. Did he have his tail between his legs? No, but he did admit to me that Microsoft is very committed to beating Adobe. He said Adobe has a few tricks of its own. Of course I captured part of our conversation, while sitting in the plane. Watch for more videos coming from SXSW later today (I’m supposed to meet up with Kyte in a little while where the CEO will show me its streaming video service). Qik just updated its Website, too. I love competition!

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Robert Scoble

As Startup Liaison for Rackspace, the Open Cloud Computing Company, Scoble travels the world looking for what's happening on the bleeding edge of technology for Rackspace's startup program. He's interviewed thousands of executives and technology innovators and reports what he learns in books ("The Age of Context," a book coauthored with Forbes author Shel Israel, has been released at http://amzn.to/AgeOfContext ), YouTube, and many social media sites where he's followed by millions of people. Best place to watch me is on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble

Comments

  1. Adobe is a strong player and the competition between them and MS is great.

    The thing I notice is that Adobe just isn’t a developer tools firm yet… and MS is. Flash is a mess and flex is better but still not great. when you have to work in either you just miss visual studio all the more.

    However Adobe like MS is a group of very smart folks with a lot of resources. This type of battle is great for everyone.

  2. Adobe is a strong player and the competition between them and MS is great.

    The thing I notice is that Adobe just isn’t a developer tools firm yet… and MS is. Flash is a mess and flex is better but still not great. when you have to work in either you just miss visual studio all the more.

    However Adobe like MS is a group of very smart folks with a lot of resources. This type of battle is great for everyone.

  3. I totally agree with soulhuntre. I was just thinking about this on a long drive this morning: Silverlight looks very promising but I hope that Flash, AIR, etc can will make it a good game. I don’t want no mo’ lock-in.

    I wonder where Google is in all this (youtube, video.goog)?

  4. I totally agree with soulhuntre. I was just thinking about this on a long drive this morning: Silverlight looks very promising but I hope that Flash, AIR, etc can will make it a good game. I don’t want no mo’ lock-in.

    I wonder where Google is in all this (youtube, video.goog)?

  5. Vineire, I wonder what Google’s up to also. From my uninformed viewpoint, it seems that Google is pretty sophisticated about using DHTML and Ajax-like stuff, and you can go pretty far with that. With SVG in the mix the open-standards solutions should be as capable as Silver/Flash.

    All you’d need is an IDE.

    Apple and the independent LAMP-loving community are probably wanting to go in this direction. I have no idea what Sun wants or how Java fits into this.

    Does anyone know who’s working on that IDE. And when will SVG start seeing some action?

  6. Vineire, I wonder what Google’s up to also. From my uninformed viewpoint, it seems that Google is pretty sophisticated about using DHTML and Ajax-like stuff, and you can go pretty far with that. With SVG in the mix the open-standards solutions should be as capable as Silver/Flash.

    All you’d need is an IDE.

    Apple and the independent LAMP-loving community are probably wanting to go in this direction. I have no idea what Sun wants or how Java fits into this.

    Does anyone know who’s working on that IDE. And when will SVG start seeing some action?

  7. I have worked on SVG and i think it is capable of making a mark in the market. But as Neal rightly said, it is lacking an IDE. If any of the giants like MS or Google work on developing it then it can be a good competition to Adobe Flex.

  8. I have worked on SVG and i think it is capable of making a mark in the market. But as Neal rightly said, it is lacking an IDE. If any of the giants like MS or Google work on developing it then it can be a good competition to Adobe Flex.