Hello developers,

I have come to some unfortunate conclusions about how Adobe operates. I
would be interested to get your opinions on the matter.

Some years ago I helped build out a desktop application using Macromedia
Director. It ran on both Mac and Windows, and was heavily backed by web
services. In principle it was much like an Adobe AIR app might be today.
After a few years Adobe bought Macromedia Director, with promises to the
developer community that they would continue to support it. They came out
with a few maintenance releases that were extremely buggy, enough so that
we tried to roll back to the previous version. However, Adobe made sure
there were some gotchas that made it painful to either stay on the current
version or roll back. Shortly thereafter they killed Director altogether.

An Adobe evangelist came to our office and sold us hard on moving to Adobe
AIR, which we did. We completely re-wrote our application on that platform.
Now, several years later, Adobe is very obviously moving away from AIR and
towards HTML5, again with promises to their loyal developers to continue
supporting it.

Based on their history what I expect Adobe to do is kill AIR before too
long. And you should have no doubts that they can make it very painful to
remain on that platform. For example, AIR apps use whatever version of
Adobe Reader is installed on the client machine. Adobe Reader updates
happen independently of updates to the AIR run time. The latest update to
Adobe Reader broke certain aspects of our client application, something
that might directly hurt our business. What can you do when the HTMLLoader
object no longer correctly displays a PDF? What I expected Adobe to do -
and what the evangelist led me to believe - was that Adobe would evolve AIR
and Flash Builder towards HTML5 over time, bringing all of us along with
them. But they don't do that. They scorch the earth and start over.

So, what's next? I suppose we will hear from Adobe before too long that we
should run out, buy PhoneGap Builder 1.0, and once again chase their
code-once-deploy-everywhere carrot.

We are not the customer. We are the product. We are the means by which
Adobe makes money for their shareholders, nothing more.  I suppose in true
jaded developer fashion this should come as no shock to me. But the truth
is, it never feels nice to be a pawn in someone else's game.

Kevin

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